The worst mistake of capitalism in the last two decades, or perhaps ever, was to presume that with the demise of the USSR, the alleged standard bearer of Marxism, Karl Marx would be dead too.
A very big mistake of logic and general comprehension! Karl Marx the person may be dead (actually he has been officially dead since 1883!), but so what? He was not the gravedigger of capitalism; he just wrote about the gravedigger of capitalism, whom he had called “the proletariat,” but whom we can easily identify by the more familiar and ageless name: “the poor.”
Karl Marx is dead, in body only, and the USSR is dead, in name only. Meanwhile, the poor of the world are a great many, and Karl Marx’s Gespenst is very much alive among them. The “greed-is-good” crowd has the same lot to worry about, and, perhaps, with a “fiercer urgency” than ever before.
A very big mistake of logic and general comprehension! Karl Marx the person may be dead (actually he has been officially dead since 1883!), but so what? He was not the gravedigger of capitalism; he just wrote about the gravedigger of capitalism, whom he had called “the proletariat,” but whom we can easily identify by the more familiar and ageless name: “the poor.”
Karl Marx is dead, in body only, and the USSR is dead, in name only. Meanwhile, the poor of the world are a great many, and Karl Marx’s Gespenst is very much alive among them. The “greed-is-good” crowd has the same lot to worry about, and, perhaps, with a “fiercer urgency” than ever before.
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