DeLong:

 

I’d say a few minimally-informed things:

1. Marxism, in the twentieth century sense, is no longer a going concern.  A few countries and groups still cling to the label: China, which is Marxist in the Wal*mart sense; the FARC - Marxist in the Al Capone sense; North Korea - Marxist in the Sauron sense; Cuba; others more or less notable; the list ends here.  I can’t speak for anyone’s particular social circle, but today, 2 decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the idea of a mass movement anywhere which even pretends to read Marx and/or Lenin as catechism is a little far fetched - about as far fetched as it was during his lifetime, in fact.  Now, as then, he’s less a boogeyman than this one dude who wrote some books two centuries ago.

2. He wrote some books ~150 years ago, so it’s not surprising that the intervening years will have made him seem foolish in some ways.  His racism, like the racism of 99% of his contemporaries, is vulgar and embarrassing.  I stand second to none in my inability to understand basic concepts of economics, but the idea of defining value as “input labor” seems perverse (those who disagree are welcome to purchase my high score at Pac-Man - we’ll start the bidding at a cool million.)  The Alienation of Labor is the sort of thing that probably makes sense to people who’ve never had jobs, the rest of us just call it Work.  Etc., etc.  All these are true specifically of Marx; many of these and many other things could be said of any of his contemporaries and many of his predecessors.  Judged as a man, rather than a World Historical Figure, he’s perhaps not as great as some, but he’s as good or better than many.

3. It’s somewhat fair to accuse Marx of advocating a “world-religion” - people have certainly viewed it that way, and one gets the sense that Marx’s own atheism might have been motivated by a desire to get rid of the competition.  But it’s not entirely fair.  Marx was very pompous, as are many people, especially intelligent people who can’t see their own limits.  Choosing to read him, or any mortal, like Holy Writ is entirely the fault of the reader, and leads to predictable and unfortunate results.  That said, when placed next to his contemporaries, he stands out as a critical thinker.  Nineteenth century laissez-faire- the water he was swimming in -was not a particularly hard-headed ponyology, any more than its nearest modern relatives are, and the majority of his comrades in the zoo of left-wing utopianism tend to accept the ‘withering away of the State’ deux ex machina with considerably less critical concern for how such an unprecedented thing might be practically brought about (and why it would actually be desireable this time).  Of course, he was no more ’scientific’ than any other political thinker before or since, but he did have that most under-appreciated virtue of concreteness.  Concreteness, unlike wishful thinking, can be criticized.  One can read Marx (or, as I and most people do, send someone else to do it while we eat cookies), draw up lists of ideas Marx expressed, take their measure, decide where they stand up and where they fall down, and pick out the good bits knowing with some specificity what one is agreeing or disagreeing with.  Progress can be made.  Compared with wishful-thinking utopianism, or the whatever-it-is that is trying to fill his shoes in our century, to say nothing of the empty PR-talk which defines our own political discourse, it is something to be thankful for.  (His prose and the prose he inspired is, admittedly, another story.)

4. If we’re going to blame Marx for the evils of Communism - an ideology and system which owes and expresses considerable debt to his works - what do we do with modern Social Democracy, and its very close cousin, American Liberalism?  We don’t generally read much Marx, as it’s very boring and somewhat disreputable, and our inheritance is certainly not direct, but it’s hard to imagine our contemporary understanding of class (and race, and so on) without reading, reacting to, reacting against, and to some degree assimilating major criticisms and lessons of Marx.  A concrete example: American communists were decades ahead of mainstream liberalism on questions of racial and sexual equality.  True, it could easily be argued that this has nothing to do with, and is even contrary to, what Marx himself actually said.  But one could just as easily say the same about the idea of Communist revolution in Tsarist Russia or the benighted Third World.  The inspiration was, nonetheless, there.  Viewed less as a prophet and Cold War icon, and more as this one dude who said all this stuff 150 years ago, this might be easier to appreciate.

5. Aphorisms.

My $0.02.