Well, there seems to be a fair amount of griping on these boards and elsewhere about the death of the american middle class, and the by some definitions there was a bank run in the UK only a couple of weeks ago, but in general I agree with you. However, at the time Marx was writing, these three points at least were pretty accurate diagnoses, as far as I am aware. One could make the argument that Marxist analysis provided the impetus to build todays modern social democracies, by establishing a consensus that the conditions of the poorer classes in society would have to be mitigated by social welfare programs in order to prevent violent revolution. Marx’s prescriptions turned out to be crap, but that’s pretty much par for the course.
But, being capitalists, they’re so much more efficient! It only took them six years or so to be proven spectacularly wrong.
Marxism still has footholds in American academia. My alma mater, Oberlin College, still offers courses on Marxism and Communist theory; I presume some (many?) other liberal arts colleges do too.
It depends on which one of the many possible definitions of “Marxism” you are applying.
If you are thinking, as it appears from the OP that you are, of the political/economic ideology of “Marxism-Leninism” (which is plausibly related to, but by no means the only logical extension of, Marx’s thought), which calls for dictatorial single-party government as a necessary precondition for the acheivement of socialism, that is pretty much intellectually bankrupt.
If you are thinking of Marxism as a scientific belief system which includes a set of economic theories which explain the behavior of capitalist economies, and holds that economic interests ultimately drive political decision-making, it is very much alive and well. I recommend Monthly Review magazine as a source for intellectually sound Marxist economic analysis. These theories, although obviously controversial, are widely adhered to among academic sociologists and economists in the West, and are used to a greater or lesser extent to guide policy by many of the recent democratically elected Left governments of Latin America. In this sense, I think the analogy of Marx to Freud is a good one; few of his arguments would be taken as unequivocally true today, but those arguments served as the starting point for future generations to develop more refined scientific theories which have held the test of time.
And if you are thinking in the most abstract sense of Marxism as that humanistic philosophy that holds that all human beings have inherent worth, and that society should strive to enable each person to recognize his or her fullest potential, I certainly hope that that endures and will continue to do so!
Well…not sure if this counts toward the OP, but coberst just used a Marx quote in his wonderful thread on liking to understand things to make the point of…er, well, actually I’m unsure what point he was making. However, he DID use a Marx quote (though I don’t think he really understood what he was quoting so maybe it doesn’t count at that).
-XT
Further thoughts…
With regard to the failure of the Soviet experiment… it is true that Marx expected the revolution to come initially to the most developed capitalist countries (and expressed hope that at least in the USA and Britain, democratic forms of government might allow this revolution to be peaceful and constitutional in character). He predicted that less advanced countries such as Russia would not have a sufficiently large number of educated people to successfully build socialism on their own, so the Soviet/Chinese experiment’s failure could actually be seen as a vindication of Marx. However, it is also true that many Marxists (though by no means all) in the West were so captivated by the success of the Russian Revolution that they became, and remained for several generations, ardent supporters of the Leninist model of revolution. So, whether the USSR represented a failure of Marxism or not, it certainly represented a failure of the Marxists.
To oversimplify greatly, Marxist economic theory holds that the logical endpoint of a capitalist economy is prolonged stagnation and depression; too much of the wealth ends up getting concentrated in the hands of capitalists, who can’t find productive places to invest their wealth, since the masses have inadequate buying power. Most of history since Marx can be seen as the capitalist system coming up with a series of short-term fixes (mainly wars, technological innovation, imperialist exploitation of Third World countries (which makes possible the “rise of the middle class” in developed nations) and Keynesian government intervention) to delay the reaching of this endpoint, but the dynamic of the system itself has not changed.
That is true. Solely based on the number of people murdered by his followers, Marx is one of the most influential philosophers ever. Of course, I don’t view this as a positive thing.
That’s the problem with people these days. Always focusing on the negative…
-XT
Naxalite rebels in eastern India. I believe peaceful communists have a serious majority in Calcutta (or had in the recent past).
“Marxist” and “communist” and “socialist” are epithets used by people these days to smear their political opponents. I don’t remember them being used as often during the Reagan years, even though there were presumably still some members of the far-left leftover from the previous decade.
So how many Americans could fairly, rather than name-callingly, be described with these terms?
Got it in post No. 6. By the way, just to be clear, the Naxalites are the non-peaceful faction of Bengali Marxists.
Those who are self-described as such. E.g., Senator Bernie Sanders. However, as an independent Sanders is not a capital-S Socialist – that designation should be limited to members of such organizations as the Socialist Party USA and the Democratic Socialists of America; just as capital-C Communist should be limited to members of the Communist Party USA (and, arguably but controversially, some other American parties claiming a Leninist heritage). Gus Hall was a Communist; Noam Chomsky is a communist.
The above, BTW, has a lot in common with the controversy over whether schismatic LDS sects still practicing polygamy can legitimately call themselves “Mormons.”