A spectre is haunting the internet

Phil Orchard
February 26, 2011
Issue 
870
World

If you have consulted Karl Marx for an answer to the recent global economic crisis, you are not alone. Google has confirmed the popularity of Marx’s writings is booming as people around the world try to make sense of increasingly harsh economic conditions.

The phenomenon was reported in an article posted at Time.com by Rana Foroohar, who said: “I consulted Google to see if the term ‘Marxism’ was trending upward. It was and has been ever since the end of December.”

Foroohar said: “Just as Marx predicted, technology-driven productivity is increasing not just in manufacturing but also in services … forget about driving a hard bargain with a new boss. Most of us feel lucky just to have a boss.”

It is 163 years ago this week since Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party was first published in German. Widely considered on of the most influential books of all time, the Manifesto continues to be a source of inspiration and fear around the world.

Foroohar claimed difficult long-term solutions would be “a lot better than the Marxist alternative”. The growing interest in Marx’s analysis of and alternative to capitalism suggests more and more are starting to disagree.

Socialism
Karl Marx

Comments

Anonymous replied on

Yes, "long-term solutions" instead of Marx, since his wildly complex comprehensive critique of the historical development of the entire world economic system was so superficial and short-sighted.

Anonymous replied on

It's amazing how so many people -- including many if not even most self-described marxists -- do not grasp even the most basic facts about reality as first explained by this father of scientific socialism. The most basic premise and result of Karl Marx' critique of the capitalist system made it very clear that capitalism is utterly unreformable: and yet how many so-called socialists continue to attempt to do exactly that; not to mention spectacularly fail to comprehend the objective basis of all subsequent class praxis as developed by the likes of Lenin and Trotsky... In fact AFAIC, most "marxists" I know are completely in thrall to the petit-bourgeois thought processes of the mass of non-marxist activists around them -- demonstrating the objective concrete existence indeed of a "bourgeois hegemony" working away inside the working class itself: and thus making IMO most of even the supposed advanced sectors of the working class still more of itself as a class than FOR itself... Present company NOT excepted.

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