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Djavad Salehi-Isfahani's avatar

Excellent piece with lots of important insights. I would add to the lasting impact of Marx "if capitalism persists", his recognition that labor markets generally failed as efficient allocators of resources because they were subject to imperfect or asymmetric information. This is now a standard part of the economics of information, but its origin in Marx's distinction between "labor" and "labor power" is often ignored. This important insight into how capitalism worked led him to note that the market economy stopped at the door of the factory. Inside was a less democratic and more complex world than what neoclassicals envisioned, and we now teach to our undergraduates. Unless technology somehow removes the asymmetry of information in the exchange of labor, Marx's critique of capitalism will remain relevant.

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Peter Dorman's avatar

This is a nice overview; thanks for writing it. I think it's important to take the next step and be as precise as possible about *why* governments claiming fealty to Marx have tended toward extreme authoritarianism. In my view, it's primarily because Marx's system assigns "objective" interests to workers, interests given by his analysis of their place in the capitalist mode of production. If there is a clash between what workers subjectively believe and what the analysis says they should believe, the latter takes precedence. This is dangerous!

Also, like most other classic socialist thinkers (and before this the charismatic leaders of medieval messianic movements), Marx simply assumed a unity of interests within society once the force of class was removed: from class to universal interest. But this denies the need for a genuine politics within socialism; there can only be conflict between the universal interest promulgated by the revolution and all the partial or false interests outside it. Even after all these decades, we still await a conception of socialism that embraces disunity of interests and true political pluralism.

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