Alex Callinicos

Marx: Hit and Myth

(February 1999)

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From Socialist Review, No.227, February 1999.
Copyright © 1999 Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from REDS – Die Roten.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).

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Having been treated like a dead dog for most of the 1990s, Karl Marx is back in fashion. Over the past year or so commentators in establishment organs such as the Financial Times and the New Yorker have carried pieces affirming the relevance of Marx’s thought to the contemporary world. It is rare that a week passes without the economic pages of the Guardian making at least one reference to Marx’s critique of capitalism.

Indeed, as Bill Clinton famously put it, “it’s the economy, stupid” that explains the revival in Marx’s reputation. While world capitalism appeared to have triumphed in the first half of the 1990s, Marx was ignored. Now that the world economy is in increasingly deep trouble, his works are being dusted off again.

Yet there is in many ways less to this return to Marx than meets the eye. Despite the greater respect and attention with which he is now treated, the substance of his thought is still largely discounted. Thus the Guardian’s Victor Keegan wrote at the start of January that he’d like to have one of those One-2-One talks with Marx, but then went on to argue, “What would really have astonished Marx is the resilience of the market system, which seems to have survived yet another crisis.”