ISR: In defense of Marxism

[marmar]

from the International Socialist Review:


by Phil Gasper

In defense of Marxism
Marx's ideas are back--and beginning to be attacked in the mainstream media


LAST FALL, when the depth of the economic crisis in the U.S. and around the world started to become abundantly clear, articles began to appear in mainstream media sources around the world talking about the return of Karl Marx. Time magazine even put the author of Das Kapital on the cover of its European (though notably not its U.S.) edition in February, with the headline “What would Marx think?” While rejecting what it called “the prophetic, prescriptive parts of Marx’s writings,” the inside article drew attention to Marx’s “trenchant diagnosis of the underlying problems of a market economy that is surprisingly relevant even today,” and which “is almost uncannily prescient about globalization’s costs and benefits.”

It was to be expected, however, that Marx would not continue to get the kid glove treatment forever. In May, the Financial Times published a lengthy review of three books—about, respectively, the history of self-identified communist regimes, Marx’s comrade and collaborator Frederick Engels, and Marx himself—by its Brussels bureau chief, Tony Barber, which takes a much more dismissive attitude to Marx’s ideas. If there are arguments against Marxism that deserve to be taken seriously, then one might expect to find them in such a prestigious publication. But in the end, Barber’s case is not very impressive.

Barber acknowledges early on that “capitalism is in its worst shape since the Great Depression of the 1930s” and concedes that “some of the criticisms that Marx and Engels leveled at mid-19th century capitalist economic systems do not appear out of place 150 years later.” But he also argues that it would be rash to conclude that “Marx and Engels about to be proved right after all.”

Barber’s argument against Marxism echoes two lines of criticism that he notes were used during the Cold War to “hit back at the Marxist foe.” The first response was that “Whatever the theory, the practice stank. The second riposte was to point out that the theory stank too. As a prophecy of mankind’s future, supposedly based on scientifically discovered laws of historical development, Marxism-Leninism was pure twaddle.” ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.isreview.org/issues/66/critthink-marxism.shtml