According to Michael Hudson, what has failed in the 20th century is not Marxism, but Stalinism. He argues that the failure of Stalinism has allowed Marxism to be decoupled from its association with Russia. While interest in Marx’s ideas are on the rise, thanks to the financialism of capitalism, it is capitalism that is failing everywhere. Financialism embraces the view that the only purpose of business is to create shareholder value, measured primarily by short-term results. We’re seeing the ugly results.
Read at Michael Hudson’s Blog
Image from In Defense of Marxism
Before basking too much in the article, I should point out a few things:
1) That Michael Hudson’s economic views are more Classical than Marxist, and especially that his views on socialism are more Ricardian than Marxist: socialize the utilities (who doesn’t?), the land, the broadcast spectrum, the banks, etc. but leave everything else to private industrial capital, to “enterprise” (the other supposed half of “labour and enterprise”). Implement, more or less, the first six planks of the Communist Manifesto, but not much more.
2) That Michael Hudson’s economic views – the original Bourgeois Socialism that was lauded but criticized in the Communist Manifesto – are nonetheless welcome proof of the political bankruptcy of social democracy. It took Hitler to get rid of the Junkers, while post-WWII social-democrats never bothered to implement even Bourgeois Socialism. It’s nice to read what actually constituted a “free market” in the minds of classical thinkers (overcoming economic rent), not the intellectual junk of today.
3) In a way, early Marx should have the “last laugh”: he wrote of “Modern monopoly, which is the negation of feudal monopoly, in so far as it implies the system of competition, and the negation of competition in so far as it is monopoly.”