why marxism is on the rise agai

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4 July 2012

Why Marxism is on the rise again

Capitalism is in crisis across the globe but what on earth is the alternative? Well, what about the musings of a certain 19th-century German philosopher? Yes, Karl Marx is going mainstream and goodness knows where it will end

Stuart Jeffries

Class conflict once seemed so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the second best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisietherefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." (The best-selling book of all time, incidentally, is the Bible it only feels like it's 50 Shades of Grey.)

Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support. Overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by the largest socialist revolution in history (China's) are driven to the brink of suicide to keep those in the west playing with their iPads. Chinese money bankrolls an otherwise bankrupt America.

The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. "The domination of capitalism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party that gives de-localised capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and deprive workers of the rights of self-organisation," says Jacques Rancire, the French marxist thinker and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. "Happily, it is possible to hope for a world less absurd and more just than today's."

That hope, perhaps, explains another improbable truth of our economically catastrophic times the revival in interest in Marx and Marxist thought. Sales of Das Kapital, Marx's masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, ashave those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, to give it its English title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). Their sales rose as

British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and thesnouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse. There's even a Chinese theatre director called He Nian who capitalised on Das Kapital's renaissance to create an all-singing, all-dancing musical.

And in perhaps the most lovely reversal of the luxuriantly bearded revolutionarytheorist's fortunes, Karl Marx was recently chosen from a list of 10 contendersto appear on a new issue of MasterCard by customers of German bank Sparkasse inChemnitz. In communist East Germany from 1953 to 1990, Chemnitz was known as Karl Marx Stadt. Clearly, more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall,the former East Germany hasn't airbrushed its Marxist past. In 2008, Reuters s,a survey of east Germans found 52% believed the free-market economy was "unsuit

able" and 43% said they wanted socialism back. Karl Marx may be dead and buriedin Highgate cemetery, but he's alive and well among credit-hungry Germans. WouldMarx have appreciated the irony of his image being deployed on a card to get Germans deeper in debt? You'd think.

Later this week in London, several thousand people will attend Marxism 2012, a five-day festival organised by the Socialist Workers' Party. It's an annual event, but what strikes organiser Joseph Choonara is how, in recent years, many moreof its attendees are young. "The revival of interest in Marxism, especially foryoung people comes because it provides tools for analysing capitalism, and espec


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ially capitalist crises such as the one we're in now," Choonara says.

There has been a glut of books trumpeting Marxism's relevance. English literature professor Terry Eagleton last year published a book called Why Marx Was Right.French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou published a little red book called The Communist Hypothesis with a red star on the cover (very Mao, very now) in which he rallied the faithful to usher in the third era of the communist idea (the previous two having gone from the establishment of the French Republic in 1792 to the massacre of the Paris communards in 1871, and from 1917 to the collapse of Mao's Cultural Revolution in 1976). Isn't this all a delusion?

Aren't Marx's venerable ideas as useful to us as the hand loom would be to shoring up Apple's reputation for innovation? Isn't the dream of socialist revolutionand communist society an irrelevance in 2012? After all, I suggest to Rancire, the bourgeoisie has failed to produce its own gravediggers. Rancire refuses to bedownbeat: "The bourgeoisie has learned to make the exploited pay for its crisisand to use them to disarm its adversaries. But we must not reverse the idea of historical necessity and conclude that the current situation is eternal. The gravediggers are still here, in the form of workers in precarious conditions like the over-exploited workers of factories in the far east. And today's popular movements Greece or elsewhere also indicate that there's a new will not to let our governments and our bankers inflict their crisis on the people."

Protestors at the Conservative conference last year. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZU

MA / Rex Features That, at least, is the perspective of a seventysomething Marxist professor. What about younger people of a Marxist temper? I ask Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal, a 22 year-old English and drama student at Goldsmiths College, London, who has just finished her BA course in English and Drama, why she considers Marxist thought still relevant. "The point is that younger people weren't aroundwhen Thatcher was in power or when Marxism was associated with the Soviet Union," she says. "We tend to see it more as a way of understanding what we're going through now. Think of what's happening in Egypt. When Mubarak fell it was so inspiring. It broke so many stereotypes democracy wasn't supposed to be something that people would fight for in the Muslim world. It vindicates revolution as a process, not as an event. So there was a revolution in Egypt, and a counter-revolution and a counter-counter revolution. What we learned from it was the importanceof organisation."

This, surely is the key to understanding Marxism's renaissance in the west: foryounger people, it is untainted by association with Stalinist gulags. For younger people too, Francis Fukuyama's triumphalism in his 1992 book The End of History in which capitalism seemed incontrovertible, its overthrow impossible to imagine exercises less of a choke-hold on their imaginations than it does on those oftheir elders.

Blackwell-Pal will be speaking Thursday on Che Guevara and the Cuban revolutionat the Marxism festival. "It's going to be the first time I'll have spoken on Marxism," she says nervously. But what's the point thinking about Guevara and Castro in this day and age? Surely violent socialist revolution is irrelevant to workers' struggles today? "Not at all!" she replies. "What's happening in Britain i

s quite interesting. We have a very, very weak government mired in in-fighting.I think if we can really organise we can oust them." Could Britain have its Tahrir Square, its equivalent to Castro's 26th of July Movement? Let a young woman dream. After last year's riots and today with most of Britain alienated from therich men in its government's cabinet, only a fool would rule it out.

For a different perspective I catch up with Owen Jones, 27-year-old poster boy of the new left and author of the bestselling politics book of 2011, Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Class. He's on the train to Brighton to address the Unite conference. "There isn't going to be a bloody revolution in Britain, but th


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ere is hope for a society by working people and for working people," he counsels.

Indeed, he says, in the 1860s the later Marx imagined such a post-capitalist society as being won by means other than violent revolution. "He did look at expanding the suffrage and other peaceful means of achieving socialist society. Todaynot even the Trotskyist left call for armed revolution. The radical left would say that the break with capitalism could only be achieved by democracy and organisation of working people to establish and hold on to that just society against forces that would destroy it."

Jones recalls that his father, a Militant supporter in the 1970s, held to the entryist idea of ensuring the election of a Labour government and then organisingworking people to make sure that government delivered. "I think that's the model," he says. How very un-New Labour. That said, after we talk, Jones texts me tomake it clear he's not a Militant supporter or Trotskyist. Rather, he wants a Labour government in power that will pursue a radical political programme. He hasin mind the words of Labour's February 1974 election manifesto which expressed the intention to "Bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balanceof power and wealth in favour of working people and their families". Let a young man dream.

What's striking about Jones's literary success is that it's premised on the revival of interest in class politics, that foundation stone of Marx and Engels's an

alysis of industrial society. "If I had written it four years earlier it would have been dismissed as a 1960s concept of class," says Jones. "But class is backin our reality because the economic crisis affects people in different ways andbecause the Coalition mantra that 'We're all in this together' is offensive andludicrous. It's impossible to argue now as was argued in the 1990s that we're all middle class. This government's reforms are class-based. VAT rises affect working people disproportionately, for instance.

"It's an open class war," he says. "Working-class people are going to be worse off in 2016 than they were at the start of the century. But you're accused of being a class warrior if you stand up for 30% of the population who suffers this way."

This chimes with something Rancire told me. The professor argued that "one thingabout Marxist thought that remains solid is class struggle. The disappearance ofour factories, that's to say de-industrialisation of our countries and the outsourcing of industrial work to the countries where labour is less expensive and more docile, what else is this other than an act in the class struggle by the ruling bourgeoisie?"

There's another reason why Marxism has something to teach us as we struggle through economic depression, other than its analysis of class struggle. It is in itsanalysis of economic crisis. In his formidable new tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj iek tries to apply Marxist thought on economic crises to what we're enduring right now. iek considers the fundamental class antagonism to be between "use value" and "exchange value".

What's the difference between the two? Each commodity has a use value, he explains, measured by its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants. The exchange valueof a commodity, by contrast, is traditionally measured by the amount of labourthat goes into making it. Under current capitalism, iek argues, exchange value becomes autonomous. "It is transformed into a spectre of self-propelling capital which uses the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its temporary disposable embodiment. Marx derived his notion of economic crisis from thisvery gap: a crisis occurs when reality catches up with the illusory self-generating mirage of money begetting more money this speculative madness cannot go on i


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ndefinitely, it has to explode in even more serious crises. The ultimate root ofthe crisis for Marx is the gap between use and exchange value: the logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own made dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people."

In such uneasy times, who better to read than the greatest catastrophist theoriser of human history, Karl Marx? And yet the renaissance of interest in Marxism has been pigeonholed as an apologia for Stalinist totalitarianism. In a recent blog on "the new communism" for the journal World Affairs, Alan Johnson, professorof democratic theory and practice at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, wrote:"A worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsible for more deaths than fascism and Nazism, is mounting a comeback; a new form of leftwing totalitarianism that enjoys intellectual celebrity but aspires to political power.

"The New Communism matters not because of its intellectual merits but because itmay yet influence layers of young Europeans in the context of an exhausted social democracy, austerity and a self-loathing intellectual culture," wrote Johnson. "Tempting as it is, we can't afford to just shake our heads and pass on by."

That's the fear: that these nasty old left farts such as iek, Badiou, Rancire and Eagleton will corrupt the minds of innocent youth. But does reading Marx and Engels's critique of capitalism mean that you thereby take on a worldview responsible for more deaths than the Nazis? Surely there is no straight line from The Comm

unist Manifesto to the gulags, and no reason why young lefties need uncriticallyto adopt Badiou at his most chilling. In his introduction to a new edition of The Communist Manifesto, Professor Eric Hobsbawm suggests that Marx was right toargue that the "contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment', a system ofexploitation and of 'endless accumulation' can never be overcome: that at somepoint in a series of transformations and restructurings the development of thisessentially destabilising system will lead to a state of affairs that can no longer be described as capitalism".

That is post-capitalist society as dreamed of by Marxists. But what would it belike? "It is extremely unlikely that such a 'post-capitalist society' would respond to the traditional models of socialism and still less to the 'really existin

g' socialisms of the Soviet era," argues Hobsbawm, adding that it will, however,necessarily involve a shift from private appropriation to social management ona global scale. "What forms it might take and how far it would embody the humanist values of Marx's and Engels's communism, would depend on the political actionthrough which this change came about."

This is surely Marxism at its most liberating, suggesting that our futures depend on us and our readiness for struggle. Or as Marx and Engels put it at the endof The Communist Manifesto: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a worldto win."

Marxism 2012, University College and Friends Meeting House, London, 5-9 July. Further information: marxismfestival.org.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/04/the-return-of-marxism

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4 July 2012 9:12PM

I don't think it was a failure of capitalism it was a failure of liberalism. Aninnately conservative capitalism probably wouldn't have had this problem. Neither would it be particularly fair either.

Foucault was right. There are no grand theories that can describe the world. Marxism would just lurch back to an overly structuralist view of society. Most social theorists have dispensed with Marxism.

I think a priori theories have their allure. I suspect that humans have a religious cognition, which enjoys the notion of a theory, which promises much but moreoften than not delivers very little. The future is really about understanding the complexity of social life. Marx made his contribution and we have moved on.

Liberalism is dead that's for sure. I don't think anyone believes that you can horse trade with capital to deliver social justice.

Liberals seemed to think that individuals have a unique relationship with Argosbut I suspect the future lies in individuals understanding that they have a unique relationship with their own language, culture and social circumstances. And the only way they can thrive is to invest in their in their communities instead of Northern Rock.

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StephenStewart4 July 2012 9:15PM

"Things are seldom what they seemSkim milk masquerades as cream"-W. S. Gilbert

Stuart Jeffries has brilliantly captured the absurdity of our time. What he hasn't said is that China can annihilate capitalism any time it chooses. Wouldn't it

be preferable if we found an alternative beforehand, rather than afterwards? It's too bad new Labour, a party that abandoned social democracy, still dominatesthe politics of the left.

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ThisOldMan4 July 2012 9:56PM

Guardianpick

This comment has been chosen by a member of Guardian staff because it's interesting and adds to the debate Marx & Engels were revolutionary in their time, butpolitical economy has come a long way since, and if anything that progress is accelerating not stagnating. This article would've been a lot more interesting ifit had mentioned some of this. Read, for example, Gar Alperovitz's book "AmericaBeyond Capitalism", or visit any of these sites: http://neweconomicsinstitute.org, http://www.neweconomyworkinggroup.org/, or steadystate.org/.

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S2Quattro4 July 2012 10:08PM

Response to ThisOldMan, 4 July 2012 9:56PMMarx & Engels were revolutionary in their time, but political economy has come along way since, and if anything that progress is accelerating not stagnating.

Completely agree. Unfortunately, much of the left refuses to move with the times, clinging exclusively to the verbatim word of Marx.

For one thing, technology has opened up many new avenues for economic managementsince the time of Marx. We've also seen changes in Capitalism, some terrible, some we can learn from.

We need to move forward.

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rachaelln4 July 2012 10:24PM

In thinking about the differences between use value and exchange value, Zizek says that use value is the value of something according to how it satisfies our needs and wants, and exchange value is the amount of labour that has gone into making it. But what about value in relation to its rarity. For example, diamonds have no use value, and arguably no exchange value, unless you count the mining andpolishing of the diamond as exchange value. Which, of course, you probably can.Anyway, I would be interested to here your thoughts on value as measured by itsrarity or scarcity.

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groose4 July 2012 10:30PM

To have a profound effect there needs to be true leadership figures, free from the hypocrisy of pseudo-socialist celebrities and the ignorant populism of working class heroes. The intelligentsia are so often rejected on the grounds of not being able to relate to the people at the heart of socialist movements but I truly believe there are knowledgeable, competent and honourable people that can makecommunism work where it has failed so many times before due to aforementioned populists.

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ALittleLebowski4 July 2012 10:50PM

Response to rachaelln, 4 July 2012 10:24PMPeople have always liked shiny stuff...

But I agree generally.


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RhysGethin4 July 2012 10:59PM

Personally I always thought that Marx was much better at diagnosing the problemswith capitalism than he was at coming up with realistic alternatives.

But come on, seriously, it's the bloody 21st century, surely we can do better than the pitiful and corrupt economic shambles we have at the moment?

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Barrmy4 July 2012 11:03PM

As someone who isn't well read politically, this article has at least given me somewhere to start investigating! It seems from what is being commented that things have moved on, but for someone like me, it's always good to begin at the begi

nning!

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JamesBloodworth4 July 2012 11:07PM

As Orwell put it in The Road to Wigan Pier, socialism would be more appealing ifit wasn't for socialists. The Socialist Workers' Party are a depraved Leninistsect who refused to condemn the attacks of 9/11 and have recently given their support to the Muslim Brotherhood in the Egyptian elections. Alain Badiou is nosta

lgic for the Chinese Cultural Revolution in which millions of innocent people were killed, and Zizek's remedy to today's problems is terror and dictatorship - he is quite open about that.

I would quite like socialism. But not the socialism of these people.

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mikeshaw4 July 2012 11:09PM

Let's not overlook the growing popularity of anarchist thought amongst the young.

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mikeshaw4 July 2012 11:22PM


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rted over free individuals. And it will continue to exist.

"For where there is power there is resistance" - Foucault

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Baccalieri5 July 2012 12:57AM

It provides a watertight critique of capitalism, class and imperialism.

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GlennAlb5 July 2012 12:59AM

This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn't abide by our communitystandards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.nocausetoaddopt5 July 2012 12:59AM

Response to JamesBloodworth, 4 July 2012 11:07PM"I would quite like socialism. But not the socialism of these people."

We had PR socialism last time.

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moralreef5 July 2012 1:06AM

iek's the coolest he's ever been, no good calling him an old fart if he's the poster dad for hipster socialists

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bugbeer5 July 2012 1:07AM

Right, because this all worked out so well last time...

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ExclamationMarx5 July 2012 1:12AM

GuardianpickThis comment has been chosen by a member of Guardian staff because it's interesting and adds to the debate We don't need any extreme forms of capitalism or soc


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ialism. The extremes always fuck everything up, and even if they do work, they're never a good way to live for the majority of people.

What we need is for people to realise that we have a democracy - not the best democracy we could have, certainly, but still a democracy. We need people to stopacting like they can only vote for the main parties, or we'll just end up ricocheting between Labour and the Conservatives constantly, deciding to get rid of one every time the other makes another mess. We'll get nowhere.

We don't need communists and anarchists shouting from the sidelines, nor the mainstream masses resigned to strategic voting. We need to actually exercise the political power we have, because that's the only way to get more of that power.

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that said, give me iek over dreary pre-radicalized People&Planet bloggers any day.there's a nice quote that sort of sums up my pessimism for the proposals of a New Communism as described in this article

What one should always bear in mind is that any debate here and now necessarilyremains a debate on enemys turf; time is needed to deploy the new content. All wesay now can be taken from us everything except our silence. This silence, thisrejection of dialogue, of all forms of clinching, is our terror, ominous and threatening as it should be.

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PanderingToMoanium5 July 2012 1:13AM

Response to rachaelln, 4 July 2012 10:24PMCartels, such as DeBeers. Diamonds are not actually rare.

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infinitejest895 July 2012 1:13AM

These people need to read Road to Serfdom.

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Kynismos5 July 2012 1:14AM

Response to solocontrotutti, 4 July 2012 9:12PMI suspect that humans have a religious cognition, which enjoys the notion of a theory, which promises much but more often than not delivers very little.


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Human beings do have a religious cognition - or more accurately natural cognitive biases that lend themselves to religious thought. This has been measured and quantified. The research is plentiful. Human beings are not terribly rational creatures in the main, and will indeed tend towards a grand theory, while eschewingor manipulating any facts that are contrary to it. They will also tend to drawconclusions first on a principally emotional basis, and intellectualise it afterthe fact. Whether or not this helps to explain an upsurge in young people claiming to be Marxists, I'll leave to your discretion.

Robofish5 July 2012 1:17AMResponse to Baccalieri, 5 July 2012It provides a watertight critique of capitalism, class and imperialism. There are no 'watertight critiques'. There's plenty wrong with Marx and Marxism. I for one find it disappointing when, considering how Marx himself criticised religion,his modern followers treat him as essentially a perfect secular saint. But thatsaid, I also can't avoid feeling he got the basics right. Marxism is a political philosophy of the 19th century, but the old duffer was looking in the right direction.

Eisenhorn5 July 2012

Capitalism is in crisis across the globe but what on earth is the alternative? Well, what about the musings of a certain 19th-century German philosopher? Yes, Karl Marx is going mainstream and goodness knows where it will end I thought we were living in the year 2012, not 1912...? "goodness knows where it will end"...for god's sake. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeatedly talk bollocks about it.

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NietzscheanChe5 July 2012 1:19AM

This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn't abide by our communitystandards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.DalekeyeFree5 July 2012 1:20AM

Response to ThisOldMan, 4 July 2012 9:56PMSo what has changed?

Nothing fundamental.

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myfellowprisoners5 July 2012 1:20AM

Sales of Das Kapital, Marx's masterpiece of political economy, have soared eversince 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, togive it its English title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy).

And if the revolution fails to occur, the Grundrisse makes a bloody good doorsto


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p. I doubt whether many of even the most committed Marxist scholars have ever read it from end to end.

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Lordhighcliffe5 July 2012 1:22AM

Of course Marxism is on the rise - in failing societies that can no longer support titanic entitlements

This matters not - as these societies (eg France and southern Europe) will failand become irrelevant

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Response to infinitejest89, 5 July 2012 1:13AM

You first, I think.

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Llabradwr5 July 2012 1:23AM

Capitalism itself is not in crisis, just its lassez-faire variety, with all itssuperstitious worship of Infinite Growth and the Invisible Hand of the market. Lassez-faire capitalism has wrought untold misery on the world's downtrodden, butmaterial economic growth, regardless of whether it's driven by consumer capital

ist greed or a narrow-minded Marxist push for evermore production and expansion,will threaten our civilisations and ecosystems.

The core of modern marxism hasn't and doesn't, as far as I'm aware, put much thought into how to organise society in a potentially resource-scarce, environmentally sensitive future world. Marxism was formulated way back when we humans and our civilisations had a minimal impact on the planet itself - whereas today we are fundamentally altering the planet, and many of the ways in which we are doingthis are self-defeating to any long-term intentions of prosperity.

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Response to Lordhighcliffe, 5 July 2012 1:22AMYes, unlike China these societies are 'decadent'.

How very Maoist of you.


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Phatcher5 July 2012 1:24AM

Yeah, I'm sick of capitalism.

I'm looking for some kind of alternative system that kept its citizens in relative poverty and collapsed in debt and popular protest, oh, some time around 1989or so.

That's Marxism you say?

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OneOfBillions5 July 2012 1:25AM

The Socialist Worker Party have been in it for the power all along. A new genuinely motivated party - for their own and everyone else's futures - needs to be established. All of Socialism's failures need to be deeply analyzed and guarded ag

ainst. It may not be perfect when installed, but it would be a damn sight betterthan what we have now - I think everyone is clear about that. The current dominant parties are, and have been, coupled with the Finance Sector and it's priorities, and have opened up gaping appetites on both sides that need regular satisfaction much to all of our discontent.

All this said, it shouldn't be ignored that the financial services are the UK's2nd largest export after miscellaneous manufacturing. However, there's no reasonto assume the UK can't resort back to more manufacturing once the banks bolt -here in China where I've been living, decent quality goods are practically impossible to find, let alone get a decent warranty on. The UK still has a good quality control ethic which apparently goes down to the level of the workers who takepride in the goods they produce. This is a potential source of global trade tha

t is not to be sniffed at. There will always be demand for products which work as they should and last as they should.

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JaneSmiley5 July 2012 1:25AM

Well, go ahead, choose your poison, church or party, corporation or collective.Because whichever one you take, it will get all the more toxic as the climate sharpens, disasters multiply, and natural resources diminish. Marx had some good a

nalytical ideas, but it didn't turn out that human beings could put them into practice without torture and mass murder. Where is that government I am looking for that accepts its responsibility to maintain the infrastructure, including healthcare and education, that accepts environmental limits, and is not corrupted bycorporations, bankers, and religious frauds? Not in the US. Costa Rica? France?Marx maybe be that government's crazy uncle, but he's not going to be the one in charge.

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vu1gar5 July 2012 1:28AM

goodness knows where it will end

Three little words:

KimJongUn

Victory to the Workers and Peasants of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea!Long Live Juche Songun! The Democratic Korean Path is Our Path!

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Response to infinitejest89, 5 July 2012 1:13AMmore austrian-school cabal dross for the people only a little bit smarter than Ayn Rand but still not smart enough to follow the maths...

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SohCahToa5 July 2012 1:30AM

Alan Johnson, professor of democratic theory and practice at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, wrote: "A worldview recently the source of immense suffering an

d misery...

..."recently the source of..."

This person is a professor? As in the top guy in the department?

I'm not passing judgement on Alan's theories. But if he wants to shit on the English language as heavily as that, I don't give a fuck what he thinks.

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intentsandpurposes5 July 2012 1:30AM

GuardianpickThis comment has been chosen by a member of Guardian staff because it's interesting and adds to the debate Marxism is on the rise again simply owing to the fact that capitalism has transmogrified into something unqualifiedly sinister, frightening and odious, threatening to undo much of the social progress made in the20th century.


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Capitalism was allowed to run wild and the so-called 'capitalists', 'wealth-creators' and 'job creators' were allowed to do whatever they like by politicians who'd been bought wholesale. Private loses got socialised and the tax payer was left holding the baby, and said politicians started blaming the very public they're elected to serve for the private sector's misdeeds and blunders, what with 'living beyond our means', being one of the most commonly trotted out lies. Inequality has risen to such horrific levels it beggars description, and while the majority struggle to keep their heads above water, for the capitalists, it's business as usual.

Marxism is on the rise because capitalism as it is being practised today has visited untold misery on millions. Many of the older, more jaded folk tend to viewthis resurrection of what they see as a moribund alternative with scepticism, asevidenced by their view of the Occupiers as misguided, clueless layabouts, or the French as simplistic fools for having elected Hollande, but if the status quodoesn't change soon enough, it's going to birth a large class of unemployed, depressed, disenchanted underclass, who'll have nothing to lose. And we do know what happens when a large section of the society have neither any stake in the society nor anything to lose...

vu1gar5 July 2012The Socialist Worker Party have been in it for the power all along. And what "po

wer" does the SWP have? The power that comes from standing on a street corner selling a newspaper like a sad Dickensian orphan?

BlackLightWetPaint5 July 2012"Freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice... Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality."Mikhail Bakunin

antiloak5 July 2012Response to JamesBloodworth, 4 July 2012I would quite like socialism. But not the socialism of these people' Well, that'

s the kind you get, matey; try not to learn the hard way. Did the young woman from Goldsmiths not read any books at uni to be able to say: 'The point is that younger people weren't around when Thatcher was in power or when Marxism was associated with the Soviet Union,".If the past is such a foreign country, what's the nature of her expertise to hold forth on Cuba? Presumably she won't be explaining the nature of the place, which is the Castro family plantation?Baccalieri5 July 2012Response to Robofish, 5 July 2012I didn't say Marx provided an adequate alternative, he didn't. This is because much of his economic writing was incorrect. In the end this is what did for commu

nism, it was inadequate economically.

NorthMiner5 July 2012The radical left would say that the break with capitalism could only be achievedby democracy and organisation of working people to establish and hold on to that just society against forces that would destroy it." Not very 'radical' are they.This Fabian tripe is almost a precise description of the progress of socialism in 20th century Britain. We don't have to guess how it will end, we just have to


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look around us. A hundred years after the formation of the Labour Party, a ruling class relieved of their fear of the Spectre in the East, are busy undoing allthe social and economic gains of a century of struggle. As I type, the terminally ill, including cancer patients, can be forced to do Workfare if they have over6 months to live, and are routinely declared 'fit for work' by a sham non-medical assessment imported by the US (where it was banned after a class action lawsuit) insurance industry looking to expand here, with the connivance of the Tories.

This process was begun by the Labour Party. Who also laid the groundwork for Workfare. People working for 70 JSA a week in 2012 and the Labour Party can't bringitself to object, nor to Cameron's latest plans for time limited benefits and noHousing Benefits for the under 25s, whose only means to a plot of their own will be to die for their country and be buried in one. That's progress for you.

Meanwhile, zero hours, day labouring and the rest have reappeared. Eastern Europeans are selecting again, this time in good old Blighty, as foreign gangmasterschoose those for labour and those for the road home each dawn in the Fens.

Where I live, there is a meat packing plant that has provided many with stable employment over the decades. Of course, with the large influx of Eastern Europeans they have steadily displaced the locals from this factory and there is a surplus of labour in the area. Employment agencies have descended on the area like vultures and almost completely causalised the workforce around West Lothian to the e

xtent that the job centres are littered with zero hour contract jobs.

A friend of mine who has worked in said plant for over thirty years sees young men coming in on the Monday work for three hours, then sent home to sit by the phone in case they are needed during the week.

This was exactly the type of thing the Labour Party was set up to tackle. Theseconditions, nauseatingly described as modernisation show up the failings of the NLproject. Whilst they were swaning about getting middle class men in public sectorjobs paternity leave, ordinary working class people watched as their terms andconditions were slashed to Victorian levels. These people (rightly or wrongly) immigration undercuts their living standards. Is it right that in this Country that we have reduced people to that of day labourers?

http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/05/15/the-unfairness-of-ed-miliband/#comment-133052

Stuart Jeffriesguardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 July 2012A public sector worker striking in east London last year. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/Rex FeaturesClass conflict once seemed so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the second best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisietherefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." (The best-selling book of all time, incidentally, is the Bible it only feels like it's 50 Shades of Grey.)

Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support. Overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by the largest socialist revolution in history (China's) are driven to the brink of suicide to keep those in the west playing with their iPads. Chinese money bankrolls an otherwise bankrupt America.

The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. "The domination of capitalism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party tha


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t gives de-localised capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and deprive workers of the rights of self-organisation," says Jacques Rancire, the French marxist thinker and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. "Happily, it is possible to hope for a world less absurd and more just than today's."

That hope, perhaps, explains another improbable truth of our economically catastrophic times the revival in interest in Marx and Marxist thought. Sales of Das Kapital, Marx's masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, ashave those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, to give it its English title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). Their sales rose asBritish workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and thesnouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse. There's even a Chinese theatre director called He Nian who capitalised on Das Kapital's renaissance to create an all-singing, all-dancing musical.

And in perhaps the most lovely reversal of the luxuriantly bearded revolutionarytheorist's fortunes, Karl Marx was recently chosen from a list of 10 contendersto appear on a new issue of MasterCard by customers of German bank Sparkasse inChemnitz. In communist East Germany from 1953 to 1990, Chemnitz was known as Karl Marx Stadt. Clearly, more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall,the former East Germany hasn't airbrushed its Marxist past. In 2008, Reuters s,a survey of east Germans found 52% believed the free-market economy was "unsuit

able" and 43% said they wanted socialism back. Karl Marx may be dead and buriedin Highgate cemetery, but he's alive and well among credit-hungry Germans. WouldMarx have appreciated the irony of his image being deployed on a card to get Germans deeper in debt? You'd think.

Later this week in London, several thousand people will attend Marxism 2012, a five-day festival organised by the Socialist Workers' Party. It's an annual event, but what strikes organiser Joseph Choonara is how, in recent years, many moreof its attendees are young. "The revival of interest in Marxism, especially foryoung people comes because it provides tools for analysing capitalism, and especially capitalist crises such as the one we're in now," Choonara says.

There has been a glut of books trumpeting Marxism's relevance. English literatur

e professor Terry Eagleton last year published a book called Why Marx Was Right.French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou published a little red book called The Communist Hypothesis with a red star on the cover (very Mao, very now) in which he rallied the faithful to usher in the third era of the communist idea (the previous two having gone from the establishment of the French Republic in 1792 to the massacre of the Paris communards in 1871, and from 1917 to the collapse of Mao's Cultural Revolution in 1976). Isn't this all a delusion?

Aren't Marx's venerable ideas as useful to us as the hand loom would be to shoring up Apple's reputation for innovation? Isn't the dream of socialist revolutionand communist society an irrelevance in 2012? After all, I suggest to Rancire, the bourgeoisie has failed to produce its own gravediggers. Rancire refuses to bedownbeat: "The bourgeoisie has learned to make the exploited pay for its crisis

and to use them to disarm its adversaries. But we must not reverse the idea of historical necessity and conclude that the current situation is eternal. The gravediggers are still here, in the form of workers in precarious conditions like the over-exploited workers of factories in the far east. And today's popular movements Greece or elsewhere also indicate that there's a new will not to let our governments and our bankers inflict their crisis on the people."

Protestors at the Conservative conference last year. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA / Rex Features That, at least, is the perspective of a seventysomething Marxist professor. What about younger people of a Marxist temper? I ask Jaswinder Bla


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ckwell-Pal, a 22 year-old English and drama student at Goldsmiths College, London, who has just finished her BA course in English and Drama, why she considers Marxist thought still relevant. "The point is that younger people weren't aroundwhen Thatcher was in power or when Marxism was associated with the Soviet Union," she says. "We tend to see it more as a way of understanding what we're going through now. Think of what's happening in Egypt. When Mubarak fell it was so inspiring. It broke so many stereotypes democracy wasn't supposed to be something that people would fight for in the Muslim world. It vindicates revolution as a process, not as an event. So there was a revolution in Egypt, and a counter-revolution and a counter-counter revolution. What we learned from it was the importanceof organisation."

This, surely is the key to understanding Marxism's renaissance in the west: foryounger people, it is untainted by association with Stalinist gulags. For younger people too, Francis Fukuyama's triumphalism in his 1992 book The End of History in which capitalism seemed incontrovertible, its overthrow impossible to imagine exercises less of a choke-hold on their imaginations than it does on those oftheir elders.

Blackwell-Pal will be speaking Thursday on Che Guevara and the Cuban revolutionat the Marxism festival. "It's going to be the first time I'll have spoken on Marxism," she says nervously. But what's the point thinking about Guevara and Castro in this day and age? Surely violent socialist revolution is irrelevant to workers' struggles today? "Not at all!" she replies. "What's happening in Britain i

s quite interesting. We have a very, very weak government mired in in-fighting.I think if we can really organise we can oust them." Could Britain have its Tahrir Square, its equivalent to Castro's 26th of July Movement? Let a young woman dream. After last year's riots and today with most of Britain alienated from therich men in its government's cabinet, only a fool would rule it out.

For a different perspective I catch up with Owen Jones, 27-year-old poster boy of the new left and author of the bestselling politics book of 2011, Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Class. He's on the train to Brighton to address the Unite conference. "There isn't going to be a bloody revolution in Britain, but there is hope for a society by working people and for working people," he counsels.

Indeed, he says, in the 1860s the later Marx imagined such a post-capitalist society as being won by means other than violent revolution. "He did look at expanding the suffrage and other peaceful means of achieving socialist society. Todaynot even the Trotskyist left call for armed revolution. The radical left would say that the break with capitalism could only be achieved by democracy and organisation of working people to establish and hold on to that just society against forces that would destroy it."

Jones recalls that his father, a Militant supporter in the 1970s, held to the entryist idea of ensuring the election of a Labour government and then organisingworking people to make sure that government delivered. "I think that's the model," he says. How very un-New Labour. That said, after we talk, Jones texts me tomake it clear he's not a Militant supporter or Trotskyist. Rather, he wants a La

bour government in power that will pursue a radical political programme. He hasin mind the words of Labour's February 1974 election manifesto which expressed the intention to "Bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balanceof power and wealth in favour of working people and their families". Let a young man dream.

What's striking about Jones's literary success is that it's premised on the revival of interest in class politics, that foundation stone of Marx and Engels's analysis of industrial society. "If I had written it four years earlier it would have been dismissed as a 1960s concept of class," says Jones. "But class is back


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in our reality because the economic crisis affects people in different ways andbecause the Coalition mantra that 'We're all in this together' is offensive andludicrous. It's impossible to argue now as was argued in the 1990s that we're all middle class. This government's reforms are class-based. VAT rises affect working people disproportionately, for instance.

"It's an open class war," he says. "Working-class people are going to be worse off in 2016 than they were at the start of the century. But you're accused of being a class warrior if you stand up for 30% of the population who suffers this way."

This chimes with something Rancire told me. The professor argued that "one thingabout Marxist thought that remains solid is class struggle. The disappearance ofour factories, that's to say de-industrialisation of our countries and the outsourcing of industrial work to the countries where labour is less expensive and more docile, what else is this other than an act in the class struggle by the ruling bourgeoisie?"

There's another reason why Marxism has something to teach us as we struggle through economic depression, other than its analysis of class struggle. It is in itsanalysis of economic crisis. In his formidable new tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj iek tries to apply Marxist thought on economic crises to what we're enduring right now. iek considers the fundamental class antagonism to be between "use value" and "exchange value".

What's the difference between the two? Each commodity has a use value, he explains, measured by its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants. The exchange valueof a commodity, by contrast, is traditionally measured by the amount of labourthat goes into making it. Under current capitalism, iek argues, exchange value becomes autonomous. "It is transformed into a spectre of self-propelling capital which uses the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its temporary disposable embodiment. Marx derived his notion of economic crisis from thisvery gap: a crisis occurs when reality catches up with the illusory self-generating mirage of money begetting more money this speculative madness cannot go on indefinitely, it has to explode in even more serious crises. The ultimate root ofthe crisis for Marx is the gap between use and exchange value: the logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own made dance, irrespective of the real n

eeds of real people."

In such uneasy times, who better to read than the greatest catastrophist theoriser of human history, Karl Marx? And yet the renaissance of interest in Marxism has been pigeonholed as an apologia for Stalinist totalitarianism. In a recent blog on "the new communism" for the journal World Affairs, Alan Johnson, professorof democratic theory and practice at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, wrote:"A worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsible for more deaths than fascism and Nazism, is mounting a comeback; a new form of leftwing totalitarianism that enjoys intellectual celebrity but aspires to political power.

"The New Communism matters not because of its intellectual merits but because it

may yet influence layers of young Europeans in the context of an exhausted social democracy, austerity and a self-loathing intellectual culture," wrote Johnson. "Tempting as it is, we can't afford to just shake our heads and pass on by."

That's the fear: that these nasty old left farts such as iek, Badiou, Rancire and Eagleton will corrupt the minds of innocent youth. But does reading Marx and Engels's critique of capitalism mean that you thereby take on a worldview responsible for more deaths than the Nazis? Surely there is no straight line from The Communist Manifesto to the gulags, and no reason why young lefties need uncriticallyto adopt Badiou at his most chilling. In his introduction to a new edition of T


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he Communist Manifesto, Professor Eric Hobsbawm suggests that Marx was right toargue that the "contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment', a system ofexploitation and of 'endless accumulation' can never be overcome: that at somepoint in a series of transformations and restructurings the development of thisessentially destabilising system will lead to a state of affairs that can no longer be described as capitalism".

That is post-capitalist society as dreamed of by Marxists. But what would it belike? "It is extremely unlikely that such a 'post-capitalist society' would respond to the traditional models of socialism and still less to the 'really existing' socialisms of the Soviet era," argues Hobsbawm, adding that it will, however,necessarily involve a shift from private appropriation to social management ona global scale. "What forms it might take and how far it would embody the humanist values of Marx's and Engels's communism, would depend on the political actionthrough which this change came about."

This is surely Marxism at its most liberating, suggesting that our futures depend on us and our readiness for struggle. Or as Marx and Engels put it at the endof The Communist Manifesto: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a worldto win."

Marxism 2012, University College and Friends Meeting House, London, 5-9 July. Fu

rther information: marxismfestival.org.uk

202122Next vu1gar5 July 2012 1:35AM

Response to moralreef, 5 July 2012 1:06AMiek's the coolest he's ever been,

Zizek? What is this? 1999? Have you been in a coma?

Zizek's about as cool as Kular Shakar.

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SidsKitchen5 July 2012 1:35AM

Surely there is no straight line from The Communist Manifesto to the gulags,

Perhap's theoretically not. But the track record isn't very good.

Self defining communist states =

People's Republic of ChinaRepublic of CubaLao People's Democratic RepublicSocialist Republic of Vietnam

FormerDemocratic Republic of AfghanistanPeople's Socialist Republic of Albania


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People's Republic of AngolaPeople's Republic of BeninPeople's Republic of BulgariaPeople's Republic of the CongoCzechoslovak RepublicCzechoslovak Socialist RepublicProvisional Military Government of Socialist EthiopiaPeople's Democratic Republic of EthiopiaGerman Democratic RepublicPeople's Revolutionary Government of GrenadaPeople's Republic of HungaryDemocratic KampucheaPeople's Republic of KampucheaDemocratic People's Republic of KoreaMongolian People's RepublicPeople's Republic of MozambiquePeople's Republic of PolandSocialist Republic of RomaniaSomali Democratic RepublicSoviet UnionDemocratic Republic of VietnamPeople's Democratic Republic of YemenSocialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

That's a pretty long list of autocracy, state-terror, occupation, and interment.Also indicative is how few of them there are left.

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Baccalieri5 July 2012 1:38AM

It will end with the state beefing up capitalism in various ways, banks, businesses, farmers. I'd say industry and manufacturing but god forbid.

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ONLYGODCANSTOPME5 July 2012 1:39AM

The foretold time is coming. Secure your home, protect your family. Remember that communists have no respect for true human values. There will be no exceptionswhen the time comes. We cannot let them win this battle.

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AbacusFinch5 July 2012 1:39AM

Response to bugbeer, 5 July 2012 1:07AMHey! Capitalism has enough problems without your cynicism!

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moralreef

5 July 2012 1:39AM

Response to vu1gar, 5 July 2012 1:35AMhis newest book was debuted a few weeks ago with a Q&A and all-night book reading and discussion at Cafe Oto in fucking Dalston.

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antiloak5 July 2012 1:40AM

'Professor Eric Hobsbawm' - the apologist for Stalin, so he must be pretty clued-up - ' suggests that Marx was right to argue that the "contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest,than callous 'cash payment'...

I'm sure Adam Smith would agree, and he was a century ahead; does that make hima Marxist too? Or just one of His prophets?

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darrenOBUenv5 July 2012 1:41AM

Further inequality through economies and unemployment alongside lesser incomescertainly show socialism as a desirable option. Certainly amongst the younger people, where we at times see the pointless worship of money, and begin to question it. You live, you die. What a shitty system we have, making us be worked justto make money. Jobs are important sure, i have 2 just to cover myself. But why is life based around a social construction? It doesn't even exist....

So some of the ideas do seem certainly quite attractive to those wanting a moreequal society. But i say get more socialist in government positions instead of revolution.

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richard105 July 2012 1:41AM

Response to solocontrotutti, 4 July 2012 9:12PM'Foucault was right'? That's a bit of a metanarrative, isn't it? The post-modern

miasma would have us believe that there can be perception without categorization. So much for Piaget.

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Response to SidsKitchen, 5 July 2012 1:35AMDemocratic Kampuchea

Typical cold warrior ignorance. Everyone knows that the victories of the Democratic Kampuchean revolution were turned on their head when Pot Pol came under theflightest tutelage of the arch capitalist roader Deng.

Democratic Kampuchea died in '77.

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JosephADD5 July 2012 1:42AM

I'm only 15, so my political knowledge is a mere pittance to compared to yours;but, from my perspective, it seems as if corporations are the main problem.Governments just seem to be avoiding doing anything bold, that may, or may not help the country; they're just helping corporations, and covering their own backs.

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Killertomato5 July 2012 1:46AM

It's the political version of herpes or a cockroach infestation, I guess. Everytime things go wrong, we start looking to the fringes.

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Phatcher

5 July 2012 1:46AM

Response to darrenOBUenv, 5 July 2012 1:41AMDo you have the slightest shred of evidence that young people in Britain are increasingly attracted to socialism? I was rather under the impression that they'requite a materialist lot. Will a workers republic deliver them larger screen tvsand nicer trainers? Actually, all those things are probably made in countries like China and Vietnam with plenty of socialists in government.

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Response to vu1gar, 5 July 2012 1:41AMoi, careful, some of us still call it year 2!

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agghTea5 July 2012 1:46AM

Give me Harvey anytime of the day ... at least he's got some bloody solutions.

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ZellHolland5 July 2012 1:46AM

In my heart, Im kind of Communist I always go back to the simple analogy that everyone should share out the pizza equally instead of one person getting most of it. But in todays world this cannot be possible. How is this system overthrown without chaos? And once chaos reigns, how can anyone really hope to implement a system that satisfies everyone, if it exists? Thats why I believe that although governments may be overthrown and great ideas thought up, nothing will really changefor the better.

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ammypam5 July 2012 1:47AM

Response to rachaelln, 4 July 2012 10:24PMBut what about value in relation to its rarity. For example, diamonds have no use value, and arguably no exchange value, unless you count the mining and polishing of the diamond as exchange value. Which, of course, you probably can. Anyway,I would be interested to here your thoughts on value as measured by its rarityor scarcity.

Diamonds are not particularly rare. De Beers dominates the diamond market and controls the price by a) huge stockpiling and b) marketing ruses like 'Diamonds Are Forever' to convince people never to sell them. If everybody did tomorrow, dia

monds would be worth nothing. And if you buy a diamond, you'll probably never get your money back on it.

anarchyandpeace5 July 2012 1:48AMBakunin's critique of Marxism - written when Lenin was still a toddler - rings as true today as when it was written.http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/04/bakunin-notes.htm


Response to moralreef, 5 July 2012 1:46AMFuck yeah! The spirit of '77 lives!



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Response to JosephADD, 5 July 2012 1:42AMYou are obviously deluded. The government always acts in the best interests of the people...

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TomandNana5 July 2012 1:56AM

...a 22 year-old English and drama student at Goldsmiths College, London...

An instant "no sale" moment there

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Response to moralreef, 5 July 2012 1:53AM

Yeah. Well. Kula Shaker still suck.

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Response to vu1gar, 5 July 2012 1:50AMactually, all this implies to me is that you're old enough to remember when Slavoj was first popular AND openly watch a show intended for 9 year olds!

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Oggmorgan5 July 2012 1:57AM

Good article; a pity it did not explain that China and Stalinism are instances of State Capitalism. There's a few more old and up and coming in the South Americas.

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matthewchrlyrobinson5 July 2012 1:58AM

Response to solocontrotutti, 4 July 2012 9:12PMAre all humans capable of such an understanding of themselves? I agree that we should learn from are past mistakes but then history would say perhaps this may never happen.


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I sometimes feel that parties who brand themselves left or right are somehow missing the point, the point being and totally agree with you that they and we should strive to invest in are communities and treat everyone with the same humanity.

I tried to join the socialist party and the socialist workers party but it did seem a little one dimensional and they seem to serve mainly as a group who standsup to far right groups so they can shout at each other. Plus both these sosialist parties wanted money of me, sorry I didn't have any! But did raise a few questions in my mind that its funny how these groups have to work within a capitalistic framework to exist, much like a business.

No i really believe in a party that can bring humanity fairness and equality tothe UK without having anything to do with grand theories, we can theories all welike but the basic needs of people are very self evident its the bureaucracy and theology that creates pomposity greed and book writers.

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tricky19920005 July 2012 1:59AM

This is just reactionism to the plutocracy that now exists. What is needed is pure democracy.

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pottys995 July 2012 1:59AM

This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn't abide by our communitystandards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.ONLYGODCANSTOPME

5 July 2012 1:59AM

Response to NorthMiner, 5 July 2012 1:52AMRealise that each individual needs to take steps to defend themselves. The clock-breakers won't save you from a new red terror.

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ZellHolland5 July 2012 2:01AM

Response to ammypam, 5 July 2012 1:51AMOkay, fair point I admit. But I was referring to a solution which satisfies an incredibly larger and more disparate group than the Aborigines i.e. a sizeable chunk of the global population

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matthewchrlyrobinson


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5 July 2012 2:02AM

Response to Oggmorgan, 5 July 2012 1:57AMChina is a very horrific place its an extreme capitalistic country with a huge and vast gap between rich and poor. There is no romance of social equality therejust corruption and state brain washing, I lived in Shanghia and had to leave after 4 months

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DavidInBrooklyn5 July 2012 2:02AM

Strange non-Marxist idea, the "contradiction" between exchange and use value. The enduring contradiction continues to be the gap between the value of what workers produce and the exchange value of their labour. In other words, the greedy bastards just don't pay the 99% enough to buy what is produced. Yes, yes, this isthe old boring, tiresome "over production crisis". And sure, some smart young whippersnapper (or old bourgeois economist hack) will tell me that that idea is sooooooo 19th century. But it still underlies the problems today, it's just a bitobscured by the admittedly clever ways the bosses have found to alleviate or minimize it.

For example, the US housing bubble represents one technique: if the working class can't buy the national product with what you pay, just lend them the money. That of course leads to, well, events like Lehman and Fall 2008, but that's OK. The system survives, the major players survive and thrive, and the little guys getshafted as usual. Only now you can come up with a phony morality play about borrowing and debt and blame the 99% for the shell game set up by the 1%.

All that and more just means that Marx's critique was and remains relevant. Thequestion though is, what to do. Lenin took a wrong turn and god, look what happened. I have no idea what the solution is. But I'm just a soldier. I'll show up to the demos, make my contributions, thank my lucky stars that I'm in the "laboraristocracy" and hope for the best.

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Response to TomandNana, 5 July 2012 1:56AMYeah, but she'll be re-enacting the glorious public execution of Havana's petitebourgeois troublemakers in an interpretive dance piece inspired by the great Aarhus School of post-minimalism. Surely that's worth a gold coin donation?

They may throw in a copy of The Pocket Guide to Enver Hoxha.

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BlackLightWetPaint5 July 2012 2:02AM

State Socialism.Communism will not get rid of privilege and elitism, it will jus


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t be in a different form. History has taught us this.

The only theory so far to come up with a decent model of an economic system is Anarchist Communism. It realises that most - if not all - problems in the world lie with Governments and Capitalists. How can anyone argue with that?

From this basis, it seeks to find a system that can run society without these two things, and some good stuff has come out of it. But what I like about it, is that it is contemporary. It doesn't hark back to Marxist models of Government which not only do not work, they actually suppress the people it claims to liberate.

The anarchist Bakunin told Marx before the Bolsheviks took charge that you can'tlead people to Socialism through a vanguard party. People will not know what todo, it won't work, people revolt, then the Government - in order to push through it's ideals - get's more and more violent. And looked what happened, again, and again, and again.

Marx's critique of Capitalism (volume one, Das Kapital) was spot-on. His ideas for a better world were not.

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comingup4air5 July 2012 2:03AM

Marxism is only ever a good idea to people who have never lived through one of its regimes. Only affluent, Western middle class intellectuals think Marxism is agood idea. Marxism leads ultimately to Stalinism. Stalin wasn't an anomaly as Marxists like to think - he was the inevitable conclusion of a closed system of thought riddled with holes. Marxism is fundamentally a political religion of theprivileged classes and is ultimately used, just like Fascism to enslave the ordinary man and women. Marxists should be treated with the same contempt as neo-Nazi's, both in essence are schools of thought built on hate and violence - whom once in power use hate and violence to enslave the populace and maintain brutal hi

erarchies.

The same people who profited the most out of capitalism i.e. world bankers and industrialists were often secret supporters of communism. Wall street bankers helped fund the Soviet Union and Western corporations sent machinery and experts tothe country to helped build up this brutal totalitarian regime - this trade with Stalinist Russia proved extremely beneficial to corporations in the West bogged down in the Great Depression of the 1930's.

People need to grow up and read some Bakunin who predicted the prison state thatbecame the Soviet Union when Stalin was but a glint in his granddad's eye.

Marxism is the evil twin of capitalism, a partner in crime designed to offer a false hope. Communism really is the highest stage of capitalism, the ultimate corporation - a corporation that no longer has to pretend not to have influence over government because the corporation IS the government.

Power corrupts and always will corrupt. Marxism is the pure worship of power andwill always lead to the most appalling abuses of human life, human dignity and


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human freedom.

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prwiley5 July 2012 2:03AM

Thesis: My daughter reads MarxAntithesis: My daughter reads VogueSynthesis: I'm waiting to see what she comes up with.

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Response to vu1gar, 5 July 2012 1:57AMand the kaiser chiefs

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Response to moralreef, 5 July 2012 1:57AM*sob* will there be a place for the Bronies in the revolutionary world of tomorrow?

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Response to SidsKitchen, 5 July 2012 1:35AMThat's a pretty long list of autocracy, state-terror, occupation, and interment.Also indicative is how few of them there are left.

Where is your evidence for state terror and occupation by Cuba?

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Adderpistake5 July 2012 2:06AM

Second best seller of all time? A pity most of their new adherents can't read.

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DyslexicAunt5 July 2012 2:07AM

Quite a lot of solipsistic, self serving shite here, e.g. Marx was wrong economically, without any attempt to explain what this means or why it's true. Socialism has been around for a long time - Robert Owen used the term first in 1822 in private correspondence - and takes on many forms, so please spare me the cack about socialism leading to the gulag, or that American style capitalism representsthe best of what human society can aspire to. IMO socialism never went away andno doubt is becoming increasingly attractive to a number of disenfranchised groups esp in the UK where Lord Snooty and chums are using State power to attack working people while tut tutting at Bankers. Socialism is arguably only corrupted when people abrogate or delegate their political responsibilities. Economic democracy - freedom from not just freedom to - or socialism remains a viable and urgent political discourse, if only the scabs would fall from the majority's eyes and they take responsibility for their political lives and futures.

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Response to Adderpistake, 5 July 2012 2:06AMGrow up.

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Response to comingup4air, 5 July 2012 2:03AMSuperficially cogent but really just superficial.

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beth235 July 2012 2:10AM

Really good article. It has really made my day and perked me up. I woke up withthe feeling that maybe the whole world is against me because at present I am still applying for jobs. The patronising 1% at the top, supported by rich politicians and the daily mail who want to convince us that it is all our fault while they get clean away after having conned everyone into making them rich. Vive la revolution! Hopefully a memory of the Russian or French royal family getting their

comeuppance will make the daily mail and the tories less complacent.

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we could all move to North Korea for a year after which we return and see if we


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complain then, we are a nation of complainers, we should really forget about sovereignty and national pride start looking at the whole world as a whole and yesthe Universe for answers science is the future should not the Higgs boson discovery be HEADLINE NEWS we talk of begotten forgotten used abused unworkable socialsystems that have failed throughout history, the only way to move forward is tolearn from the past and listen to the future

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Response to ZellHolland, 5 July 2012 2:01AMBut I was referring to a solution which satisfies an incredibly larger and moredisparate group than the Aborigines i.e. a sizeable chunk of the global population

Sure, but the answer cannot be to continue with the same system that really onlybenefits 0.1% of the population.

why marxism is on the rise agai

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