Well here's an interesting article from the Financial Times.
Please use the sharing tools found via the email icon at the top of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of
FT.com T&Cs and
Copyright Policy. Email
[email protected] to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be
found here.
https://www.ft.com/content/603b3498-2155-11e8-a895-1ba1f72c2c11
What would Karl Marx write today?
Two hundred years after the philosopher’s birth, two staunch believers in capitalism rewrite ‘The Communist Manifesto’
Rupert Younger and Frank Partnoy MARCH 9, 2018
What would Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels write today? Perhaps something like this:
“A spectre is haunting the world — the spectre of activism. All the powers of the old world order have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre . . . It is high time that Activists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views.”
These sentences faithfully echo the opening words of The Communist Manifesto. The original famously declared: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” For Marx and Engels, in a capitalist system a sequence of widening splits between the classes was inevitable. The bourgeoisie would become more powerful as markets expanded, until the disenfranchised labourers in the proletarian class booted them out. Ultimately a revolution would end capitalism’s reign.
As a partner in a corporate advisory firm and a professor of law and finance, we are true believers in free-market capitalism — hardly natural latter-day communists, let alone successors to Marx and Engels. But we do believe the time is ripe for a rewrite of their Manifesto. Like the inhabitants of mid-19th century Europe, we live, according to Oxford University’s Professor Alan Morrison, “in the wake of a calamitous financial crisis and in the midst of whirlwind social change, a popular distaste of financial capitalists, and widespread revolutionary activity”.
We have imagined what Marx and Engels would have written in 2018, naming the new, updated version “The Activist Manifesto”. After all, as Morrison writes in the introduction to our work, “we could use a coherent explanation of the forces that buffet us, and a hint as to their likely resolution”.
The original had a long gestation. Marx first met his friend and collaborator briefly in 1842, and then again in a café in Paris in 1844. Marx, a journalist for a radical leftist newspaper, had just read Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, and was taken with his argument that the working class could become agents of radical change. The two became friends and began writing together, critiquing various philosophies circulating at the time. The first edition of The Manifesto of the Communist Party, a 23-page pamphlet, was published in February 1848. For more than two decades it languished in obscurity, but in the early 1870s it resurfaced and, from that point on, Marx and Engels updated it repeatedly, in various editions and languages. ...
Two centuries after Marx’s birth, and however much communism has rightly been discredited, a great deal of the argument is as relevant now as it was then. The Manifesto’s theories about the problems of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production continue to be cited in critiques of unfettered markets, and the document’s historical analysis is cited by modern scholars and taught in universities today. Some historians have cited it as the most influential text of the 19th century. Its reverberations are still felt today. ...
https://www.ft.com/content/603b3498-2155-11e8-a895-1ba1f72c2c11
