Everyone’s Talking About Karl Marx!

In response to this dispute between Chris Bertram and Brad DeLong I think I agree that a professor who doesn’t mention Stalin or Pol Pot in his introduction to Marx is only drawing more attention to the issue. I think the correct reply is to observe that a lot of 20th century political movements had roots in Marxist or Marx-influenced 19th century parties. Not just Stalin but also many of Stalin’s opponents in the USSR, to say nothing of the Social Democratic parties in Germany and Scandinavia and the Netherlands and Spain and the “Eurocommunists” of France and Italy as well as to some extent the Anglophone Labor parties and the French socialists. From this you see that (a) Marx was an influential thinker who’s worth studying, and (b) there aren’t obvious and unequivocal connections between things written in the 1860s and actual political outcomes decades later.

Meanwhile, both The Atlantic and Foreign Policy have new articles out on Marx, suggesting a resurgence of middlebrow American interest in the man. Both pieces, however, seem to me to be merely playing at transgressiveness. The big point both make is that Marx wrote a long time ago about how financial crises were endemic to capitalism. It’s both true that Marx wrote this and true that financial crises are endemic to capitalism. But while this was pretty far-sighted at the time Marx wrote it, the passage of time has rendered, I think, a bit banal. At any rate, this is hardly high up on the list of Marx’s distinctive ideas.

After all, Marx believed a lot of stuff that’s not incredibly controversial today, like that children should be guaranteed free education and the government should control the national transportation infrastructure. He also believed in some other ideas like heavy taxation of estates that are controversial but hardly shocking.

Meanwhile, both pieces are illustrated with sort of weird pop art portraits of Marx. While nominally the articles are supposed to reflect our present-day worries about the viability of capitalism, all the atmospherics and the rhetoric (look at me! talking about Marx!) seem almost as if they’re exhuming the corpse in order to demonstrate to the village that it’s still dead. Not to explore our doubts about capitalism, in other words, but to quiet them by making it seem as if Marx doesn’t have anything to say that we don’t already know.

At any rate, the part of Marx that recent events have reminded me of is the stuff about ideology—how the wealth and power of the banking class caused us to forget all kinds of things that we once knew, and start rewriting not only the laws and policies but also our understanding of economics and even social understandings about ethics.