Believe it or not: Karl Marx is making a comeback

[deutsey]

6. I agree with Marxian economist Richard Wolff:

I use a metaphor to get it across. If you wanted to understand the family down the street that had mommy and poppy and two children, and you wanted to really understand that family, and you knew that one child thought it was the greatest family the world had ever seen and the other child thought it was a psychologically dysfunctional group of people, what would you do? Would you talk to only one child, or would you talk to two? Clearly, you’d make up your own mind. You’d draw your own conclusions. But why in the world wouldn’t you speak to both of them, if you wanted to understand the family? Capitalism, our system, is the same. It has the people who celebrate and love it—and I, by all means, think you ought to read what they have to say. But you also have a large group of people who are very critical, and it is self-destructive of your own understanding not to expose yourself to what they have to say.

I would even go so far as to say one of the reasons this crisis we’re in now is as bad as it is and is lasting as long as it does, despite everyone’s prediction we wouldn’t have this again, is precisely because the people in charge of doing something about it, Republicans and Democrats alike, have no clue about the long, critical literature. Had they studied it, they would have been aware of the flaws and the faults in the system, would have been thinking about how to fix and improve upon them. We’d be in better shape to manage the crisis of capitalism if we hadn’t blinded ourself to the whole critical tradition, the chief of which is Marxian theory.

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/3/25/watch_extended_interview_with_economist_richard_wolff_on_how_marxism_influences_his_work