Believe it or not: Karl Marx is making a comeback

[struggle4progress]

59. I don't know how relevant Marx himself is nowadays, but if one can avoid

the ideologues, there is interesting and useful material from the Marxian tradition

The Communist Manifesto is political rhetoric from a century and a half ago. Das Kapital is abstract economic theory that the majority of people won't find helpful

Marx himself is out-of-date because he writes in the early industrial revolution and the mechanisms of industrial capitalism have evolved somewhat since the time he wrote. It would have been much harder in Marx's era, with slower and less reliable international communication and transport, for example, to imagine that the sectors of the industrial proletariat might be concentrated in Asian garment factories or Mexican maquiladoras or Chinese electronic sweatshops -- and so the issue of international working class solidarity has a different character today than it could have had in Marx's era; similarly, such innovations as movies, radios, television, and the internet have somewhat changed the dynamics of mass-manipulation of consciousness from Marx's time

But Marx's method for political and social analysis is still quite usable, though all his own texts concern a long-vanished world

His really excellent idea is class-analysis: he wants to discover the different economic interest groups in a society and to try to understand where the actual interests lie, as well as the rhetoric that arises as they pursue their interests -- or fail to understand their actual interests. The method includes examining in detail not only the actual economic status of various groups but the various false explanations social groups and their representatives give for their stances, deliberately obscurantist or as a result of naive thinking, and the effects of local culture and history on the rhetoric. The objective is to unmask the mechanisms of oppression and to empower the oppressed by providing analytical understandings of actual circumstances

What remains of great interest is the possibility of fusing such detailed analysis to concrete organizing work