Karl Marx in the New Yorker
Julio Huato
Yorker, October 20, 1997, p. 248
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ABSTRACT: THE NEXT THINKER about Karl Marx's influence as an
economist... Writer was talking with a college friend who now worked
at a big Wall Street investment bank... To my surprise, he brought up
Karl Marx. "The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am
that Marx was right," he said. I assumed he was joking. "There is a
Nobel Prize waiting for the economist who resurrects Marx and puts it
all together in a coherent model," he continued, quite seriously. "I
am absolutely convinced that Marx's approach is the best way to look
at capitalism." I didn't hide my astonishment. We had both studied
economics during the early eighties at Oxford, where most of our
teachers agreed with Keynes that Marx's economic theories were
"complicated hocus-pocus" and Communism was "an insult to our
intelligence." The prevailing attitude among bright students of our
generation was that Marx's arguments were fit only for polytechnic
lecturers and aspiring Labour Party politicians... More than fifty
years ago, Edmund Wilson noted that much of Marx's prose "hypnotizes
the reader with its paradoxes and eventually puts him to sleep." The
passing decades have not made the going any easier. Marx was
ludicrously prolix... The writer gradually began to understand what
his friend meant. In many ways, Marx's legacy has been obscured by the
failure of Communism, which wasn't his primary interest. In fact, he
had little to say about how a socialist society should operate, and
what he did write, about the withering away of the state and so on,
wasn't very helpful--something Lenin and his comrades quickly
discovered after seizing power... When Marx wasn't driving the reader
to distraction, he wrote riveting passages about globalization,
inequality, political corruption, monopolization, technical progress,
the decline of high culture, and the enervating nature of modern
existence--issues that economists are now confronting anew... Marx was
born in 1818, and died in 1883... Marx wasn't a crude reductionist,
but he did believe that the way in which society organized production
ultimately shaped people's attitudes and beliefs. Capitalism, for
example, made human beings subjugate themselves to base avarice...
"Globalization" is the buzzword of the late twentieth century, on the
lips of everybody from Jiang Zemin to Tony Blair, but Marx predicted
most of its ramifications a hundred and fifty years ago...
Globalization is set to become the biggest political issue of the next
century... In one way, Marx's efforts were a failure. His mathematical
model of the economy, which depended on the idea that labor is the
source of all value, was riven with internal inconsistencies and is
rarely studied these days.... One important lesson Marx taught is that
capitalism tends toward monopoly--an observation that was far from
obvious in his day--giving rise to a need for strong regulation....
Likewise endogenous-growth theory models are undoubtedly Marxist in
spirit, since their main aim is to demonstrate how technical progress
emerges from the competitive process, and not from Heaven, as in the
neoclassical model. Describes Marx's "theory of immiseration" which
says that profits would increase faster than wages, so that workers
would become poorer relative to capitalists over time, and this is
what happened during the last two decades. Inflation-adjusted wages
are still below their 1973 levels, but profits have soared. ... A key
question for the future, the answer to which will determine the fate
of the soaring slock market and much else, is whether capital can hold
on to its recent gains. Writer visits Highgate Cemetery, where he
visited Marx's grave... Perhaps me most enduring element of Marx's
work is his discussion of where power lies in a capitalist society.
This is a subject that economists, with their fixation on consumer
choice, have neglected for decades, but recently a few of them have
returned to Marx's idea that the circumstances in which people are
forced to make choices are often just as important as the choices...
Marx, of course, delighted in declaring that politicians merely carry
water for their corporate paymasters... The sight of a President
granting shady businessmen access to the White House in return for
campaign contributions would have shocked him not at all. Despite his
errors, he was a man for whom our economic system held few surprises.
His books will be worth reading as long as capitalism endures.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1997/10/20/1997_10_20_248_TNY_CARDS_000379653#ixzz0X1K3GUIa