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MARXIST_REVIVAL

                                        November 15, 2011

  I gather that post-financial crash there's
  a revivalette of sorts for Marxism.

         Heigh-ho.

There's this Benjamin Kunkel article from
"London Review of Books" (February 3, 2011)   ref
on the subject (and check the impressive
sneer he's got going here... he was a
Marxist back before it was *cool*, unlike
these damn newbies):

   "The deepest economic crisis in eighty years prompted
   a shallow revival of Marxism. During the panicky
   period between the failure of Lehman Brothers in
   September 2008 and the official end of the American
   recession in the summer of 2009, several mainstream
   journals, displaying a less than sincere mixture of
   broadmindedness and chagrin, hailed Marx as a
   neglected seer of capitalist crisis. The trendspotting
   Foreign Policy led the way, with a cover story on Marx
   for its Next Big Thing issue, enticing readers with a
   promise of star treatment:
   `Lights. Camera. Action. Das Kapital. Now.'"

   "Though written by a socialist, Leo Panitch, the piece
   was typical of the general approach to Marx and
   Marxism. It bowed at a distance to the prophet of
   capitalism's ever `more extensive and exhaustive
   crises', and restated several basic articles of his
   thought: capitalism is inherently unstable; political
   activism is indispensable; and revolution offers the
   ultimate prize. This can't have done much more than
   jog memories of the Communist Manifesto, the only one
   of Marx's works cited by Panitch. The Manifesto
   remains an incandescent pamphlet, but the elements of
   a Marxian crisis theory, one never fully articulated
   by Marx himself, lie elsewhere [...] "

                                            (You've got to love
                                            the old "never
                                            fully articulated"
                                            dodge, eh?)


I picked up on that one from a Yves Smith
post, "Marx Versus Capitalism Versus You"      ref
Saturday, October 22, 2011"

   "It is a measure of how un-self critical modern
   economics has been, that the Marxists are starting
   to appear to be making the most sense of the
   current crises."


But then, she makes what's not all that unusual
a distinction between Marx and Marxism:               I guess this is why
                                                      some people invented
   "[...] I regard Marxism as wicked,                 the term 'marxian',
   directly responsible for some of the               which I've always
   worst horrors of the twentieth                     found as annoying
   century. [...]  There is, however, a               as trekkies calling
   difference between Marxism and what                themselves "trekkers".
   Marx wrote. And there is a difference
   between Marx's critique of capitalism,
   which has some prescience and                        POLAR_SARTRE
   relevance, and Marx's political
   prescriptions and revolutionary
   impulses, which were riddled with
   contradictions and, in practice,                  ATOMS_AND_YVES
   wholly pernicious."


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