4 July 2012 Why Marxism is on the rise again Capitalism is in crisis across the globe but what on earth

is the alternative? W ell, what about the musings of a certain 19th-century German philosopher? Yes, K arl Marx is going mainstream and goodness knows where it will end Stuart Jeffries Class conflict once seemed so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the seco nd best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the vict ory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." (The best-selling book of all ti me, incidentally, is the Bible it only feels like it's 50 Shades of Grey.) Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is a lmost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keep ing it on life support. Overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by th e largest socialist revolution in history (China's) are driven to the brink of s uicide to keep those in the west playing with their iPads. Chinese money bankrol ls an otherwise bankrupt America. The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. "The domination of cap italism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party tha t gives de-localised capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and dep rive workers of the rights of self-organisation," says Jacques Rancire, the Frenc h marxist thinker and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. " Happily, it is possible to hope for a world less absurd and more just than today 's." That hope, perhaps, explains another improbable truth of our economically catast rophic times the revival in interest in Marx and Marxist thought. Sales of Das K apital, Marx's masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, to give it its En glish title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). Their sales rose as British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt , job insecurity or worse. There's even a Chinese theatre director called He Nia n who capitalised on Das Kapital's renaissance to create an all-singing, all-dan cing musical. And in perhaps the most lovely reversal of the luxuriantly bearded revolutionary theorist's fortunes, Karl Marx was recently chosen from a list of 10 contenders to appear on a new issue of MasterCard by customers of German bank Sparkasse in Chemnitz. In communist East Germany from 1953 to 1990, Chemnitz was known as Ka rl Marx Stadt. Clearly, more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former East Germany hasn't airbrushed its Marxist past. In 2008, Reuters s, a survey of east Germans found 52% believed the free-market economy was "unsuit able" and 43% said they wanted socialism back. Karl Marx may be dead and buried in Highgate cemetery, but he's alive and well among credit-hungry Germans. Would Marx have appreciated the irony of his image being deployed on a card to get Ge rmans deeper in debt? You'd think. Later this week in London, several thousand people will attend Marxism 2012, a f ive-day festival organised by the Socialist Workers' Party. It's an annual event , but what strikes organiser Joseph Choonara is how, in recent years, many more of its attendees are young. "The revival of interest in Marxism, especially for young people comes because it provides tools for analysing capitalism, and espec

ially capitalist crises such as the one we're in now," Choonara says. There has been a glut of books trumpeting Marxism's relevance. English literatur e professor Terry Eagleton last year published a book called Why Marx Was Right. French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou published a little red book called The C ommunist Hypothesis with a red star on the cover (very Mao, very now) in which h e rallied the faithful to usher in the third era of the communist idea (the prev ious two having gone from the establishment of the French Republic in 1792 to th e massacre of the Paris communards in 1871, and from 1917 to the collapse of Mao 's Cultural Revolution in 1976). Isn't this all a delusion? Aren't Marx's venerable ideas as useful to us as the hand loom would be to shori ng up Apple's reputation for innovation? Isn't the dream of socialist revolution and communist society an irrelevance in 2012? After all, I suggest to Rancire, t he bourgeoisie has failed to produce its own gravediggers. Rancire refuses to be downbeat: "The bourgeoisie has learned to make the exploited pay for its crisis and to use them to disarm its adversaries. But we must not reverse the idea of h istorical necessity and conclude that the current situation is eternal. The grav ediggers are still here, in the form of workers in precarious conditions like th e over-exploited workers of factories in the far east. And today's popular movem ents Greece or elsewhere also indicate that there's a new will not to let our go vernments and our bankers inflict their crisis on the people." Protestors at the Conservative conference last year. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZU MA / Rex Features That, at least, is the perspective of a seventysomething Marxi st professor. What about younger people of a Marxist temper? I ask Jaswinder Bla ckwell-Pal, a 22 year-old English and drama student at Goldsmiths College, Londo n, who has just finished her BA course in English and Drama, why she considers M arxist thought still relevant. "The point is that younger people weren't around when Thatcher was in power or when Marxism was associated with the Soviet Union, " she says. "We tend to see it more as a way of understanding what we're going t hrough now. Think of what's happening in Egypt. When Mubarak fell it was so insp iring. It broke so many stereotypes democracy wasn't supposed to be something th at people would fight for in the Muslim world. It vindicates revolution as a pro cess, not as an event. So there was a revolution in Egypt, and a counter-revolut ion and a counter-counter revolution. What we learned from it was the importance of organisation." This, surely is the key to understanding Marxism's renaissance in the west: for younger people, it is untainted by association with Stalinist gulags. For younge r people too, Francis Fukuyama's triumphalism in his 1992 book The End of Histor y in which capitalism seemed incontrovertible, its overthrow impossible to imagi ne exercises less of a choke-hold on their imaginations than it does on those of their elders. Blackwell-Pal will be speaking Thursday on Che Guevara and the Cuban revolution at the Marxism festival. "It's going to be the first time I'll have spoken on Ma rxism," she says nervously. But what's the point thinking about Guevara and Cast ro in this day and age? Surely violent socialist revolution is irrelevant to wor kers' struggles today? "Not at all!" she replies. "What's happening in Britain i s quite interesting. We have a very, very weak government mired in in-fighting. I think if we can really organise we can oust them." Could Britain have its Tahr ir Square, its equivalent to Castro's 26th of July Movement? Let a young woman d ream. After last year's riots and today with most of Britain alienated from the rich men in its government's cabinet, only a fool would rule it out. For a different perspective I catch up with Owen Jones, 27-year-old poster boy o f the new left and author of the bestselling politics book of 2011, Chavs: the D emonisation of the Working Class. He's on the train to Brighton to address the U nite conference. "There isn't going to be a bloody revolution in Britain, but th

ere is hope for a society by working people and for working people," he counsels . Indeed, he says, in the 1860s the later Marx imagined such a post-capitalist soc iety as being won by means other than violent revolution. "He did look at expand ing the suffrage and other peaceful means of achieving socialist society. Today not even the Trotskyist left call for armed revolution. The radical left would s ay that the break with capitalism could only be achieved by democracy and organi sation of working people to establish and hold on to that just society against f orces that would destroy it." Jones recalls that his father, a Militant supporter in the 1970s, held to the en tryist idea of ensuring the election of a Labour government and then organising working people to make sure that government delivered. "I think that's the model ," he says. How very un-New Labour. That said, after we talk, Jones texts me to make it clear he's not a Militant supporter or Trotskyist. Rather, he wants a La bour government in power that will pursue a radical political programme. He has in mind the words of Labour's February 1974 election manifesto which expressed t he intention to "Bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families". Let a youn g man dream. What's striking about Jones's literary success is that it's premised on the revi val of interest in class politics, that foundation stone of Marx and Engels's an alysis of industrial society. "If I had written it four years earlier it would h ave been dismissed as a 1960s concept of class," says Jones. "But class is back in our reality because the economic crisis affects people in different ways and because the Coalition mantra that 'We're all in this together' is offensive and ludicrous. It's impossible to argue now as was argued in the 1990s that we're al l middle class. This government's reforms are class-based. VAT rises affect work ing people disproportionately, for instance. "It's an open class war," he says. "Working-class people are going to be worse o ff in 2016 than they were at the start of the century. But you're accused of bei ng a class warrior if you stand up for 30% of the population who suffers this wa y." This chimes with something Rancire told me. The professor argued that "one thing about Marxist thought that remains solid is class struggle. The disappearance of our factories, that's to say de-industrialisation of our countries and the outs ourcing of industrial work to the countries where labour is less expensive and m ore docile, what else is this other than an act in the class struggle by the rul ing bourgeoisie?" There's another reason why Marxism has something to teach us as we struggle thro ugh economic depression, other than its analysis of class struggle. It is in its analysis of economic crisis. In his formidable new tome Less Than Nothing: Hege l and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj i ek tries to apply Marxist tho ught on economic crises to what we're enduring right now. i ek considers the fundam ental class antagonism to be between "use value" and "exchange value". What's the difference between the two? Each commodity has a use value, he explai ns, measured by its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants. The exchange value of a commodity, by contrast, is traditionally measured by the amount of labour that goes into making it. Under current capitalism, i ek argues, exchange value bec omes autonomous. "It is transformed into a spectre of self-propelling capital wh ich uses the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its tempor ary disposable embodiment. Marx derived his notion of economic crisis from this very gap: a crisis occurs when reality catches up with the illusory self-generat ing mirage of money begetting more money this speculative madness cannot go on i

ndefinitely, it has to explode in even more serious crises. The ultimate root of the crisis for Marx is the gap between use and exchange value: the logic of exc hange-value follows its own path, its own made dance, irrespective of the real n eeds of real people." In such uneasy times, who better to read than the greatest catastrophist theoris er of human history, Karl Marx? And yet the renaissance of interest in Marxism h as been pigeonholed as an apologia for Stalinist totalitarianism. In a recent bl og on "the new communism" for the journal World Affairs, Alan Johnson, professor of democratic theory and practice at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, wrote: "A worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsib le for more deaths than fascism and Nazism, is mounting a comeback; a new form o f leftwing totalitarianism that enjoys intellectual celebrity but aspires to pol itical power. "The New Communism matters not because of its intellectual merits but because it may yet influence layers of young Europeans in the context of an exhausted soci al democracy, austerity and a self-loathing intellectual culture," wrote Johnson . "Tempting as it is, we can't afford to just shake our heads and pass on by." That's the fear: that these nasty old left farts such as i ek, Badiou, Rancire and E agleton will corrupt the minds of innocent youth. But does reading Marx and Enge ls's critique of capitalism mean that you thereby take on a worldview responsibl e for more deaths than the Nazis? Surely there is no straight line from The Comm unist Manifesto to the gulags, and no reason why young lefties need uncritically to adopt Badiou at his most chilling. In his introduction to a new edition of T he Communist Manifesto, Professor Eric Hobsbawm suggests that Marx was right to argue that the "contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus betwee n man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment', a system of exploitation and of 'endless accumulation' can never be overcome: that at some point in a series of transformations and restructurings the development of this essentially destabilising system will lead to a state of affairs that can no lon ger be described as capitalism". That is post-capitalist society as dreamed of by Marxists. But what would it be like? "It is extremely unlikely that such a 'post-capitalist society' would resp ond to the traditional models of socialism and still less to the 'really existin g' socialisms of the Soviet era," argues Hobsbawm, adding that it will, however, necessarily involve a shift from private appropriation to social management on a global scale. "What forms it might take and how far it would embody the humani st values of Marx's and Engels's communism, would depend on the political action through which this change came about." This is surely Marxism at its most liberating, suggesting that our futures depen d on us and our readiness for struggle. Or as Marx and Engels put it at the end of The Communist Manifesto: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revol ution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." Marxism 2012, University College and Friends Meeting House, London, 5-9 July. Fu rther information: marxismfestival.org.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/04/the-return-of-marxism ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

4 July 2012 9:12PM I don't think it was a failure of capitalism it was a failure of liberalism. An innately conservative capitalism probably wouldn't have had this problem. Neithe r would it be particularly fair either. Foucault was right. There are no grand theories that can describe the world. Mar xism would just lurch back to an overly structuralist view of society. Most soci al theorists have dispensed with Marxism. I think a priori theories have their allure. I suspect that humans have a religi ous cognition, which enjoys the notion of a theory, which promises much but more often than not delivers very little. The future is really about understanding t he complexity of social life. Marx made his contribution and we have moved on. Liberalism is dead that's for sure. I don't think anyone believes that you can h orse trade with capital to deliver social justice. Liberals seemed to think that individuals have a unique relationship with Argos but I suspect the future lies in individuals understanding that they have a uniq ue relationship with their own language, culture and social circumstances. And t he only way they can thrive is to invest in their in their communities instead o f Northern Rock. (329) (7) StephenStewart 4 July 2012 9:15PM "Things are seldom what they seem Skim milk masquerades as cream" -W. S. Gilbert Stuart Jeffries has brilliantly captured the absurdity of our time. What he hasn 't said is that China can annihilate capitalism any time it chooses. Wouldn't it be preferable if we found an alternative beforehand, rather than afterwards? It 's too bad new Labour, a party that abandoned social democracy, still dominates the politics of the left. (396) (3) ThisOldMan 4 July 2012 9:56PM Guardian pick This comment has been chosen by a member of Guardian staff because it's interes ting and adds to the debate Marx & Engels were revolutionary in their time, but political economy has come a long way since, and if anything that progress is ac celerating not stagnating. This article would've been a lot more interesting if it had mentioned some of this. Read, for example, Gar Alperovitz's book "America Beyond Capitalism", or visit any of these sites: http://neweconomicsinstitute.o rg, http://www.neweconomyworkinggroup.org/, or steadystate.org/. (60)

(4) S2Quattro 4 July 2012 10:08PM Response to ThisOldMan, 4 July 2012 9:56PM Marx & Engels were revolutionary in their time, but political economy has come a long way since, and if anything that progress is accelerating not stagnating. Completely agree. Unfortunately, much of the left refuses to move with the times , clinging exclusively to the verbatim word of Marx. For one thing, technology has opened up many new avenues for economic management since the time of Marx. We've also seen changes in Capitalism, some terrible, s ome we can learn from. We need to move forward. (148) rachaelln 4 July 2012 10:24PM In thinking about the differences between use value and exchange value, Zizek sa ys that use value is the value of something according to how it satisfies our ne eds and wants, and exchange value is the amount of labour that has gone into mak ing it. But what about value in relation to its rarity. For example, diamonds ha ve no use value, and arguably no exchange value, unless you count the mining and polishing of the diamond as exchange value. Which, of course, you probably can. Anyway, I would be interested to here your thoughts on value as measured by its rarity or scarcity. (16) (11) groose 4 July 2012 10:30PM To have a profound effect there needs to be true leadership figures, free from t he hypocrisy of pseudo-socialist celebrities and the ignorant populism of workin g class heroes. The intelligentsia are so often rejected on the grounds of not b eing able to relate to the people at the heart of socialist movements but I trul y believe there are knowledgeable, competent and honourable people that can make communism work where it has failed so many times before due to aforementioned p opulists. (126) (1) ALittleLebowski 4 July 2012 10:50PM Response to rachaelln, 4 July 2012 10:24PM People have always liked shiny stuff... But I agree generally.

(15) RhysGethin 4 July 2012 10:59PM Personally I always thought that Marx was much better at diagnosing the problems with capitalism than he was at coming up with realistic alternatives. But come on, seriously, it's the bloody 21st century, surely we can do better th an the pitiful and corrupt economic shambles we have at the moment? (685) (1) Barrmy 4 July 2012 11:03PM As someone who isn't well read politically, this article has at least given me s omewhere to start investigating! It seems from what is being commented that thin gs have moved on, but for someone like me, it's always good to begin at the begi nning! (161) (1) JamesBloodworth 4 July 2012 11:07PM As Orwell put it in The Road to Wigan Pier, socialism would be more appealing if it wasn't for socialists. The Socialist Workers' Party are a depraved Leninist sect who refused to condemn the attacks of 9/11 and have recently given their su pport to the Muslim Brotherhood in the Egyptian elections. Alain Badiou is nosta lgic for the Chinese Cultural Revolution in which millions of innocent people we re killed, and Zizek's remedy to today's problems is terror and dictatorship - h e is quite open about that. I would quite like socialism. But not the socialism of these people. (492) (8) mikeshaw 4 July 2012 11:09PM Let's not overlook the growing popularity of anarchist thought amongst the young . (349) (2) mikeshaw 4 July 2012 11:22PM

Response to JamesBloodworth, 4 July 2012 11:07PM One solution! Form your own socialist group without any 'socialists'! (51) Szophee 4 July 2012 11:28PM Response to JamesBloodworth, 4 July 2012 11:07PM Well, many anarchists are basically libertarian communists. There are obvious al ternatives to the Leninists... (116) Anacreon 5 July 2012 12:38AM I fucking love you Karl Marx. (280) smallactsofdefiance 5 July 2012 12:41AM Sorry, but I couldn't let this pass: Blackwell-Pal will be speaking Thursday on Che Guevara and the Cuban revolution at the Marxism festival. Please edit out this dreadful Americanism. Surely it ought to read: "Blackwell-P al will be speaking on Thursday about Che Guevara ..." Anyway, back to the revolution ... (455) (3) wesg 5 July 2012 12:42AM Guardian pick This comment has been chosen by a member of Guardian staff because it's interes ting and adds to the debate Two things ring true imo after reading Marx et al 1 - Capitalism/State Power loves a far right over any type of left. Its a protec tionist thing, and it'll do anything and everything to keep what it has. hence t he violent history we so proudly cling to. 'warre of every one against every one' - Hobbes , Tells us why we need the State 2- "Turning the world upside down" ie changing the socio-economic paradigm seems to be an idea that has existed in the minds of humans since Power was first exe

rted over free individuals. And it will continue to exist. "For where there is power there is resistance" - Foucault (174) (2) Baccalieri 5 July 2012 12:57AM It provides a watertight critique of capitalism, class and imperialism. (188) (1) GlennAlb 5 July 2012 12:59AM This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn't abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs. nocausetoaddopt 5 July 2012 12:59AM Response to JamesBloodworth, 4 July 2012 11:07PM "I would quite like socialism. But not the socialism of these people." We had PR socialism last time. (36) moralreef 5 July 2012 1:06AM i ek's the coolest he's ever been, no good calling him an old fart if he's the post er dad for hipster socialists (25) (1) bugbeer 5 July 2012 1:07AM Right, because this all worked out so well last time... (94) (4) ExclamationMarx 5 July 2012 1:12AM Guardian pick This comment has been chosen by a member of Guardian staff because it's interes ting and adds to the debate We don't need any extreme forms of capitalism or soc

ialism. The extremes always fuck everything up, and even if they do work, they'r e never a good way to live for the majority of people. What we need is for people to realise that we have a democracy - not the best de mocracy we could have, certainly, but still a democracy. We need people to stop acting like they can only vote for the main parties, or we'll just end up ricoch eting between Labour and the Conservatives constantly, deciding to get rid of on e every time the other makes another mess. We'll get nowhere. We don't need communists and anarchists shouting from the sidelines, nor the mai nstream masses resigned to strategic voting. We need to actually exercise the po litical power we have, because that's the only way to get more of that power. (351) (5) moralreef 5 July 2012 1:13AM that said, give me i ek over dreary pre-radicalized People&Planet bloggers any day. there's a nice quote that sort of sums up my pessimism for the proposals of a N ew Communism as described in this article What one should always bear in mind is that any debate here and now necessarily remains a debate on enemy s turf; time is needed to deploy the new content. All we say now can be taken from us everything except our silence. This silence, this rejection of dialogue, of all forms of clinching, is our terror , ominous and threa tening as it should be. (52) PanderingToMoanium 5 July 2012 1:13AM Response to rachaelln, 4 July 2012 10:24PM Cartels, such as DeBeers. Diamonds are not actually rare. (43) (1) infinitejest89 5 July 2012 1:13AM These people need to read Road to Serfdom. (46) (4) Kynismos 5 July 2012 1:14AM Response to solocontrotutti, 4 July 2012 9:12PM I suspect that humans have a religious cognition, which enjoys the notion of a t heory, which promises much but more often than not delivers very little.

Human beings do have a religious cognition - or more accurately natural cognitiv e biases that lend themselves to religious thought. This has been measured and q uantified. The research is plentiful. Human beings are not terribly rational cre atures in the main, and will indeed tend towards a grand theory, while eschewing or manipulating any facts that are contrary to it. They will also tend to draw conclusions first on a principally emotional basis, and intellectualise it after the fact. Whether or not this helps to explain an upsurge in young people claim ing to be Marxists, I'll leave to your discretion.

Robofish 5 July 2012 1:17AM Response to Baccalieri, 5 July 2012 It provides a watertight critique of capitalism, class and imperialism. There ar e no 'watertight critiques'. There's plenty wrong with Marx and Marxism. I for o ne find it disappointing when, considering how Marx himself criticised religion, his modern followers treat him as essentially a perfect secular saint. But that said, I also can't avoid feeling he got the basics right. Marxism is a politica l philosophy of the 19th century, but the old duffer was looking in the right di rection. Eisenhorn 5 July 2012 Capitalism is in crisis across the globe but what on earth is the alternative? W ell, what about the musings of a certain 19th-century German philosopher? Yes, K arl Marx is going mainstream and goodness knows where it will end I thought we w ere living in the year 2012, not 1912...? "goodness knows where it will end"...f or god's sake. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeatedly tal k bollocks about it. (225) (1) NietzscheanChe 5 July 2012 1:19AM This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn't abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs. DalekeyeFree 5 July 2012 1:20AM Response to ThisOldMan, 4 July 2012 9:56PM So what has changed? Nothing fundamental. (14) myfellowprisoners 5 July 2012 1:20AM Sales of Das Kapital, Marx's masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, to give it its English title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). And if the revolution fails to occur, the Grundrisse makes a bloody good doorsto

p. I doubt whether many of even the most committed Marxist scholars have ever re ad it from end to end. (12) Lordhighcliffe 5 July 2012 1:22AM Of course Marxism is on the rise - in failing societies that can no longer suppo rt titanic entitlements This matters not - as these societies (eg France and southern Europe) will fail and become irrelevant (24) (2) myfellowprisoners 5 July 2012 1:23AM Response to infinitejest89, 5 July 2012 1:13AM You first, I think. (8) Llabradwr 5 July 2012 1:23AM Capitalism itself is not in crisis, just its lassez-faire variety, with all its superstitious worship of Infinite Growth and the Invisible Hand of the market. L assez-faire capitalism has wrought untold misery on the world's downtrodden, but material economic growth, regardless of whether it's driven by consumer capital ist greed or a narrow-minded Marxist push for evermore production and expansion, will threaten our civilisations and ecosystems. The core of modern marxism hasn't and doesn't, as far as I'm aware, put much tho ught into how to organise society in a potentially resource-scarce, environmenta lly sensitive future world. Marxism was formulated way back when we humans and o ur civilisations had a minimal impact on the planet itself - whereas today we ar e fundamentally altering the planet, and many of the ways in which we are doing this are self-defeating to any long-term intentions of prosperity. (180) (4) myfellowprisoners 5 July 2012 1:24AM Response to Lordhighcliffe, 5 July 2012 1:22AM Yes, unlike China these societies are 'decadent'. How very Maoist of you.

(34) Phatcher 5 July 2012 1:24AM Yeah, I'm sick of capitalism. I'm looking for some kind of alternative system that kept its citizens in relati ve poverty and collapsed in debt and popular protest, oh, some time around 1989 or so. That's Marxism you say? (93) (2) OneOfBillions 5 July 2012 1:25AM The Socialist Worker Party have been in it for the power all along. A new genuin ely motivated party - for their own and everyone else's futures - needs to be es tablished. All of Socialism's failures need to be deeply analyzed and guarded ag ainst. It may not be perfect when installed, but it would be a damn sight better than what we have now - I think everyone is clear about that. The current domin ant parties are, and have been, coupled with the Finance Sector and it's priorit ies, and have opened up gaping appetites on both sides that need regular satisfa ction much to all of our discontent. All this said, it shouldn't be ignored that the financial services are the UK's 2nd largest export after miscellaneous manufacturing. However, there's no reason to assume the UK can't resort back to more manufacturing once the banks bolt here in China where I've been living, decent quality goods are practically impos sible to find, let alone get a decent warranty on. The UK still has a good quali ty control ethic which apparently goes down to the level of the workers who take pride in the goods they produce. This is a potential source of global trade tha t is not to be sniffed at. There will always be demand for products which work a s they should and last as they should. (40) JaneSmiley 5 July 2012 1:25AM Well, go ahead, choose your poison, church or party, corporation or collective. Because whichever one you take, it will get all the more toxic as the climate sh arpens, disasters multiply, and natural resources diminish. Marx had some good a nalytical ideas, but it didn't turn out that human beings could put them into pr actice without torture and mass murder. Where is that government I am looking fo r that accepts its responsibility to maintain the infrastructure, including heal thcare and education, that accepts environmental limits, and is not corrupted by corporations, bankers, and religious frauds? Not in the US. Costa Rica? France? Marx maybe be that government's crazy uncle, but he's not going to be the one i n charge. (154)

vu1gar 5 July 2012 1:28AM goodness knows where it will end Three little words: Kim Jong Un Victory to the Workers and Peasants of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea! Long Live Juche Songun! The Democratic Korean Path is Our Path! (78) (1) moralreef 5 July 2012 1:28AM Response to infinitejest89, 5 July 2012 1:13AM more austrian-school cabal dross for the people only a little bit smarter than A yn Rand but still not smart enough to follow the maths... (78) SohCahToa 5 July 2012 1:30AM Alan Johnson, professor of democratic theory and practice at Edge Hill Universit y in Lancashire, wrote: "A worldview recently the source of immense suffering an d misery... ..."recently the source of..." This person is a professor? As in the top guy in the department? I'm not passing judgement on Alan's theories. But if he wants to shit on the Eng lish language as heavily as that, I don't give a fuck what he thinks. (105) intentsandpurposes 5 July 2012 1:30AM Guardian pick This comment has been chosen by a member of Guardian staff because it's interes ting and adds to the debate Marxism is on the rise again simply owing to the fac t that capitalism has transmogrified into something unqualifiedly sinister, frig htening and odious, threatening to undo much of the social progress made in the 20th century.

Capitalism was allowed to run wild and the so-called 'capitalists', 'wealth-crea tors' and 'job creators' were allowed to do whatever they like by politicians wh o'd been bought wholesale. Private loses got socialised and the tax payer was le ft holding the baby, and said politicians started blaming the very public they'r e elected to serve for the private sector's misdeeds and blunders, what with 'li ving beyond our means', being one of the most commonly trotted out lies. Inequal ity has risen to such horrific levels it beggars description, and while the majo rity struggle to keep their heads above water, for the capitalists, it's busines s as usual. Marxism is on the rise because capitalism as it is being practised today has vis ited untold misery on millions. Many of the older, more jaded folk tend to view this resurrection of what they see as a moribund alternative with scepticism, as evidenced by their view of the Occupiers as misguided, clueless layabouts, or t he French as simplistic fools for having elected Hollande, but if the status quo doesn't change soon enough, it's going to birth a large class of unemployed, de pressed, disenchanted underclass, who'll have nothing to lose. And we do know wh at happens when a large section of the society have neither any stake in the soc iety nor anything to lose... vu1gar 5 July 2012 The Socialist Worker Party have been in it for the power all along. And what "po wer" does the SWP have? The power that comes from standing on a street corner se lling a newspaper like a sad Dickensian orphan? BlackLightWetPaint 5 July 2012 "Freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice... Socialism without freed om is slavery and brutality." Mikhail Bakunin antiloak 5 July 2012 Response to JamesBloodworth, 4 July 2012 I would quite like socialism. But not the socialism of these people' Well, that' s the kind you get, matey; try not to learn the hard way. Did the young woman fr om Goldsmiths not read any books at uni to be able to say: 'The point is that yo unger people weren't around when Thatcher was in power or when Marxism was assoc iated with the Soviet Union,". If the past is such a foreign country, what's the nature of her expertise to hol d forth on Cuba? Presumably she won't be explaining the nature of the place, whi ch is the Castro family plantation? Baccalieri 5 July 2012 Response to Robofish, 5 July 2012 I didn't say Marx provided an adequate alternative, he didn't. This is because m uch of his economic writing was incorrect. In the end this is what did for commu nism, it was inadequate economically. NorthMiner 5 July 2012 The radical left would say that the break with capitalism could only be achieved by democracy and organisation of working people to establish and hold on to tha t just society against forces that would destroy it." Not very 'radical' are the y. This Fabian tripe is almost a precise description of the progress of socialism i n 20th century Britain. We don't have to guess how it will end, we just have to

look around us. A hundred years after the formation of the Labour Party, a rulin g class relieved of their fear of the Spectre in the East, are busy undoing all the social and economic gains of a century of struggle. As I type, the terminall y ill, including cancer patients, can be forced to do Workfare if they have over 6 months to live, and are routinely declared 'fit for work' by a sham non-medic al assessment imported by the US (where it was banned after a class action lawsu it) insurance industry looking to expand here, with the connivance of the Tories . This process was begun by the Labour Party. Who also laid the groundwork for Wor kfare. People working for 70 JSA a week in 2012 and the Labour Party can't bring itself to object, nor to Cameron's latest plans for time limited benefits and no Housing Benefits for the under 25s, whose only means to a plot of their own wil l be to die for their country and be buried in one. That's progress for you. Meanwhile, zero hours, day labouring and the rest have reappeared. Eastern Europ eans are selecting again, this time in good old Blighty, as foreign gangmasters choose those for labour and those for the road home each dawn in the Fens. Where I live, there is a meat packing plant that has provided many with stable e mployment over the decades. Of course, with the large influx of Eastern European s they have steadily displaced the locals from this factory and there is a surpl us of labour in the area. Employment agencies have descended on the area like vu ltures and almost completely causalised the workforce around West Lothian to the e xtent that the job centres are littered with zero hour contract jobs. A friend of mine who has worked in said plant for over thirty years sees young m en coming in on the Monday work for three hours, then sent home to sit by the ph one in case they are needed during the week. This was exactly the type of thing the Labour Party was set up to tackle. These conditions, nauseatingly described as modernisation show up the failings of the NL project . Whilst they were swaning about getting middle class men in public sector jobs paternity leave, ordinary working class people watched as their terms and conditions were slashed to Victorian levels. These people (rightly or wrongly) i mmigration undercuts their living standards. Is it right that in this Country th at we have reduced people to that of day labourers? http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/05/15/the-unfairness-of-ed-miliband/#comment-1 33052 Stuart Jeffries guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 July 2012 A public sector worker striking in east London last year. Photograph: KeystoneUS A-ZUMA/Rex Features Class conflict once seemed so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the seco nd best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the vict ory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." (The best-selling book of all ti me, incidentally, is the Bible it only feels like it's 50 Shades of Grey.) Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is a lmost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keep ing it on life support. Overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by th e largest socialist revolution in history (China's) are driven to the brink of s uicide to keep those in the west playing with their iPads. Chinese money bankrol ls an otherwise bankrupt America. The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. "The domination of cap italism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party tha

t gives de-localised capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and dep rive workers of the rights of self-organisation," says Jacques Rancire, the Frenc h marxist thinker and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. " Happily, it is possible to hope for a world less absurd and more just than today 's." That hope, perhaps, explains another improbable truth of our economically catast rophic times the revival in interest in Marx and Marxist thought. Sales of Das K apital, Marx's masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, to give it its En glish title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). Their sales rose as British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt , job insecurity or worse. There's even a Chinese theatre director called He Nia n who capitalised on Das Kapital's renaissance to create an all-singing, all-dan cing musical. And in perhaps the most lovely reversal of the luxuriantly bearded revolutionary theorist's fortunes, Karl Marx was recently chosen from a list of 10 contenders to appear on a new issue of MasterCard by customers of German bank Sparkasse in Chemnitz. In communist East Germany from 1953 to 1990, Chemnitz was known as Ka rl Marx Stadt. Clearly, more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former East Germany hasn't airbrushed its Marxist past. In 2008, Reuters s, a survey of east Germans found 52% believed the free-market economy was "unsuit able" and 43% said they wanted socialism back. Karl Marx may be dead and buried in Highgate cemetery, but he's alive and well among credit-hungry Germans. Would Marx have appreciated the irony of his image being deployed on a card to get Ge rmans deeper in debt? You'd think. Later this week in London, several thousand people will attend Marxism 2012, a f ive-day festival organised by the Socialist Workers' Party. It's an annual event , but what strikes organiser Joseph Choonara is how, in recent years, many more of its attendees are young. "The revival of interest in Marxism, especially for young people comes because it provides tools for analysing capitalism, and espec ially capitalist crises such as the one we're in now," Choonara says. There has been a glut of books trumpeting Marxism's relevance. English literatur e professor Terry Eagleton last year published a book called Why Marx Was Right. French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou published a little red book called The C ommunist Hypothesis with a red star on the cover (very Mao, very now) in which h e rallied the faithful to usher in the third era of the communist idea (the prev ious two having gone from the establishment of the French Republic in 1792 to th e massacre of the Paris communards in 1871, and from 1917 to the collapse of Mao 's Cultural Revolution in 1976). Isn't this all a delusion? Aren't Marx's venerable ideas as useful to us as the hand loom would be to shori ng up Apple's reputation for innovation? Isn't the dream of socialist revolution and communist society an irrelevance in 2012? After all, I suggest to Rancire, t he bourgeoisie has failed to produce its own gravediggers. Rancire refuses to be downbeat: "The bourgeoisie has learned to make the exploited pay for its crisis and to use them to disarm its adversaries. But we must not reverse the idea of h istorical necessity and conclude that the current situation is eternal. The grav ediggers are still here, in the form of workers in precarious conditions like th e over-exploited workers of factories in the far east. And today's popular movem ents Greece or elsewhere also indicate that there's a new will not to let our go vernments and our bankers inflict their crisis on the people." Protestors at the Conservative conference last year. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZU MA / Rex Features That, at least, is the perspective of a seventysomething Marxi st professor. What about younger people of a Marxist temper? I ask Jaswinder Bla

ckwell-Pal, a 22 year-old English and drama student at Goldsmiths College, Londo n, who has just finished her BA course in English and Drama, why she considers M arxist thought still relevant. "The point is that younger people weren't around when Thatcher was in power or when Marxism was associated with the Soviet Union, " she says. "We tend to see it more as a way of understanding what we're going t hrough now. Think of what's happening in Egypt. When Mubarak fell it was so insp iring. It broke so many stereotypes democracy wasn't supposed to be something th at people would fight for in the Muslim world. It vindicates revolution as a pro cess, not as an event. So there was a revolution in Egypt, and a counter-revolut ion and a counter-counter revolution. What we learned from it was the importance of organisation." This, surely is the key to understanding Marxism's renaissance in the west: for younger people, it is untainted by association with Stalinist gulags. For younge r people too, Francis Fukuyama's triumphalism in his 1992 book The End of Histor y in which capitalism seemed incontrovertible, its overthrow impossible to imagi ne exercises less of a choke-hold on their imaginations than it does on those of their elders. Blackwell-Pal will be speaking Thursday on Che Guevara and the Cuban revolution at the Marxism festival. "It's going to be the first time I'll have spoken on Ma rxism," she says nervously. But what's the point thinking about Guevara and Cast ro in this day and age? Surely violent socialist revolution is irrelevant to wor kers' struggles today? "Not at all!" she replies. "What's happening in Britain i s quite interesting. We have a very, very weak government mired in in-fighting. I think if we can really organise we can oust them." Could Britain have its Tahr ir Square, its equivalent to Castro's 26th of July Movement? Let a young woman d ream. After last year's riots and today with most of Britain alienated from the rich men in its government's cabinet, only a fool would rule it out. For a different perspective I catch up with Owen Jones, 27-year-old poster boy o f the new left and author of the bestselling politics book of 2011, Chavs: the D emonisation of the Working Class. He's on the train to Brighton to address the U nite conference. "There isn't going to be a bloody revolution in Britain, but th ere is hope for a society by working people and for working people," he counsels . Indeed, he says, in the 1860s the later Marx imagined such a post-capitalist soc iety as being won by means other than violent revolution. "He did look at expand ing the suffrage and other peaceful means of achieving socialist society. Today not even the Trotskyist left call for armed revolution. The radical left would s ay that the break with capitalism could only be achieved by democracy and organi sation of working people to establish and hold on to that just society against f orces that would destroy it." Jones recalls that his father, a Militant supporter in the 1970s, held to the en tryist idea of ensuring the election of a Labour government and then organising working people to make sure that government delivered. "I think that's the model ," he says. How very un-New Labour. That said, after we talk, Jones texts me to make it clear he's not a Militant supporter or Trotskyist. Rather, he wants a La bour government in power that will pursue a radical political programme. He has in mind the words of Labour's February 1974 election manifesto which expressed t he intention to "Bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families". Let a youn g man dream. What's striking about Jones's literary success is that it's premised on the revi val of interest in class politics, that foundation stone of Marx and Engels's an alysis of industrial society. "If I had written it four years earlier it would h ave been dismissed as a 1960s concept of class," says Jones. "But class is back

in our reality because the economic crisis affects people in different ways and because the Coalition mantra that 'We're all in this together' is offensive and ludicrous. It's impossible to argue now as was argued in the 1990s that we're al l middle class. This government's reforms are class-based. VAT rises affect work ing people disproportionately, for instance. "It's an open class war," he says. "Working-class people are going to be worse o ff in 2016 than they were at the start of the century. But you're accused of bei ng a class warrior if you stand up for 30% of the population who suffers this wa y." This chimes with something Rancire told me. The professor argued that "one thing about Marxist thought that remains solid is class struggle. The disappearance of our factories, that's to say de-industrialisation of our countries and the outs ourcing of industrial work to the countries where labour is less expensive and m ore docile, what else is this other than an act in the class struggle by the rul ing bourgeoisie?" There's another reason why Marxism has something to teach us as we struggle thro ugh economic depression, other than its analysis of class struggle. It is in its analysis of economic crisis. In his formidable new tome Less Than Nothing: Hege l and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj i ek tries to apply Marxist tho ught on economic crises to what we're enduring right now. i ek considers the fundam ental class antagonism to be between "use value" and "exchange value". What's the difference between the two? Each commodity has a use value, he explai ns, measured by its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants. The exchange value of a commodity, by contrast, is traditionally measured by the amount of labour that goes into making it. Under current capitalism, i ek argues, exchange value bec omes autonomous. "It is transformed into a spectre of self-propelling capital wh ich uses the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its tempor ary disposable embodiment. Marx derived his notion of economic crisis from this very gap: a crisis occurs when reality catches up with the illusory self-generat ing mirage of money begetting more money this speculative madness cannot go on i ndefinitely, it has to explode in even more serious crises. The ultimate root of the crisis for Marx is the gap between use and exchange value: the logic of exc hange-value follows its own path, its own made dance, irrespective of the real n eeds of real people." In such uneasy times, who better to read than the greatest catastrophist theoris er of human history, Karl Marx? And yet the renaissance of interest in Marxism h as been pigeonholed as an apologia for Stalinist totalitarianism. In a recent bl og on "the new communism" for the journal World Affairs, Alan Johnson, professor of democratic theory and practice at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, wrote: "A worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsib le for more deaths than fascism and Nazism, is mounting a comeback; a new form o f leftwing totalitarianism that enjoys intellectual celebrity but aspires to pol itical power. "The New Communism matters not because of its intellectual merits but because it may yet influence layers of young Europeans in the context of an exhausted soci al democracy, austerity and a self-loathing intellectual culture," wrote Johnson . "Tempting as it is, we can't afford to just shake our heads and pass on by." That's the fear: that these nasty old left farts such as i ek, Badiou, Rancire and E agleton will corrupt the minds of innocent youth. But does reading Marx and Enge ls's critique of capitalism mean that you thereby take on a worldview responsibl e for more deaths than the Nazis? Surely there is no straight line from The Comm unist Manifesto to the gulags, and no reason why young lefties need uncritically to adopt Badiou at his most chilling. In his introduction to a new edition of T

he Communist Manifesto, Professor Eric Hobsbawm suggests that Marx was right to argue that the "contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus betwee n man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment', a system of exploitation and of 'endless accumulation' can never be overcome: that at some point in a series of transformations and restructurings the development of this essentially destabilising system will lead to a state of affairs that can no lon ger be described as capitalism". That is post-capitalist society as dreamed of by Marxists. But what would it be like? "It is extremely unlikely that such a 'post-capitalist society' would resp ond to the traditional models of socialism and still less to the 'really existin g' socialisms of the Soviet era," argues Hobsbawm, adding that it will, however, necessarily involve a shift from private appropriation to social management on a global scale. "What forms it might take and how far it would embody the humani st values of Marx's and Engels's communism, would depend on the political action through which this change came about." This is surely Marxism at its most liberating, suggesting that our futures depen d on us and our readiness for struggle. Or as Marx and Engels put it at the end of The Communist Manifesto: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revol ution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." Marxism 2012, University College and Friends Meeting House, London, 5-9 July. Fu rther information: marxismfestival.org.uk

202122Next vu1gar 5 July 2012 1:35AM Response to moralreef, 5 July 2012 1:06AM i ek's the coolest he's ever been, Zizek? What is this? 1999? Have you been in a coma? Zizek's about as cool as Kular Shakar. (11) (1) SidsKitchen 5 July 2012 1:35AM Surely there is no straight line from The Communist Manifesto to the gulags, Perhap's theoretically not. But the track record isn't very good. Self defining communist states = People's Republic of China Republic of Cuba Lao People's Democratic Republic Socialist Republic of Vietnam Former Democratic Republic of Afghanistan People's Socialist Republic of Albania

People's Republic of Angola People's Republic of Benin People's Republic of Bulgaria People's Republic of the Congo Czechoslovak Republic Czechoslovak Socialist Republic Provisional Military Government of Socialist Ethiopia People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia German Democratic Republic People's Revolutionary Government of Grenada People's Republic of Hungary Democratic Kampuchea People's Republic of Kampuchea Democratic People's Republic of Korea Mongolian People's Republic People's Republic of Mozambique People's Republic of Poland Socialist Republic of Romania Somali Democratic Republic Soviet Union Democratic Republic of Vietnam People's Democratic Republic of Yemen Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia That's a pretty long list of autocracy, state-terror, occupation, and interment. Also indicative is how few of them there are left. (37) (3) Baccalieri 5 July 2012 1:38AM It will end with the state beefing up capitalism in various ways, banks, busines ses, farmers. I'd say industry and manufacturing but god forbid. (2) ONLYGODCANSTOPME 5 July 2012 1:39AM The foretold time is coming. Secure your home, protect your family. Remember tha t communists have no respect for true human values. There will be no exceptions when the time comes. We cannot let them win this battle. (15) (4) AbacusFinch 5 July 2012 1:39AM Response to bugbeer, 5 July 2012 1:07AM Hey! Capitalism has enough problems without your cynicism! (2)

moralreef 5 July 2012 1:39AM Response to vu1gar, 5 July 2012 1:35AM his newest book was debuted a few weeks ago with a Q&A and all-night book readin g and discussion at Cafe Oto in fucking Dalston. (5) (1) antiloak 5 July 2012 1:40AM 'Professor Eric Hobsbawm' - the apologist for Stalin, so he must be pretty clued -up - ' suggests that Marx was right to argue that the "contradictions of a mark et system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'... I'm sure Adam Smith would agree, and he was a century ahead; does that make him a Marxist too? Or just one of His prophets? (10) darrenOBUenv 5 July 2012 1:41AM Further inequality through economies and unemployment alongside lesser incomes certainly show socialism as a desirable option. Certainly amongst the younger pe ople, where we at times see the pointless worship of money, and begin to questio n it. You live, you die. What a shitty system we have, making us be worked just to make money. Jobs are important sure, i have 2 just to cover myself. But why i s life based around a social construction? It doesn't even exist.... So some of the ideas do seem certainly quite attractive to those wanting a more equal society. But i say get more socialist in government positions instead of r evolution. (25) (1) richard10 5 July 2012 1:41AM Response to solocontrotutti, 4 July 2012 9:12PM 'Foucault was right'? That's a bit of a metanarrative, isn't it? The post-modern miasma would have us believe that there can be perception without categorizatio n. So much for Piaget. (8) vu1gar 5 July 2012 1:41AM

Response to SidsKitchen, 5 July 2012 1:35AM Democratic Kampuchea Typical cold warrior ignorance. Everyone knows that the victories of the Democra tic Kampuchean revolution were turned on their head when Pot Pol came under the flightest tutelage of the arch capitalist roader Deng. Democratic Kampuchea died in '77. (21) (1) JosephADD 5 July 2012 1:42AM I'm only 15, so my political knowledge is a mere pittance to compared to yours; but, from my perspective, it seems as if corporations are the main problem. Governments just seem to be avoiding doing anything bold, that may, or may not h elp the country; they're just helping corporations, and covering their own backs . (73) (2) Killertomato 5 July 2012 1:46AM It's the political version of herpes or a cockroach infestation, I guess. Every time things go wrong, we start looking to the fringes. (10) Phatcher 5 July 2012 1:46AM Response to darrenOBUenv, 5 July 2012 1:41AM Do you have the slightest shred of evidence that young people in Britain are inc reasingly attracted to socialism? I was rather under the impression that they're quite a materialist lot. Will a workers republic deliver them larger screen tvs and nicer trainers? Actually, all those things are probably made in countries l ike China and Vietnam with plenty of socialists in government. (28) (1) moralreef 5 July 2012 1:46AM Response to vu1gar, 5 July 2012 1:41AM oi, careful, some of us still call it year 2! (12) (1)

agghTea 5 July 2012 1:46AM Give me Harvey anytime of the day ... at least he's got some bloody solutions. (4) ZellHolland 5 July 2012 1:46AM In my heart, I m kind of Communist I always go back to the simple analogy that eve ryone should share out the pizza equally instead of one person getting most of i t. But in today s world this cannot be possible. How is this system overthrown wit hout chaos? And once chaos reigns, how can anyone really hope to implement a sys tem that satisfies everyone, if it exists? That s why I believe that although gove rnment s may be overthrown and great ideas thought up, nothing will really change for the better. (54) (2) ammypam 5 July 2012 1:47AM Response to rachaelln, 4 July 2012 10:24PM But what about value in relation to its rarity. For example, diamonds have no us e value, and arguably no exchange value, unless you count the mining and polishi ng of the diamond as exchange value. Which, of course, you probably can. Anyway, I would be interested to here your thoughts on value as measured by its rarity or scarcity. Diamonds are not particularly rare. De Beers dominates the diamond market and co ntrols the price by a) huge stockpiling and b) marketing ruses like 'Diamonds Ar e Forever' to convince people never to sell them. If everybody did tomorrow, dia monds would be worth nothing. And if you buy a diamond, you'll probably never ge t your money back on it. anarchyandpeace 5 July 2012 1:48AM Bakunin's critique of Marxism - written when Lenin was still a toddler - rings a s true today as when it was written. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/04/bakunin-notes.htm vu1gar 5 July 2012 1:48AM Response to moralreef, 5 July 2012 1:46AM Fuck yeah! The spirit of '77 lives!

vu1gar 5 July 2012 1:50AM

Response to moralreef, 5 July 2012 1:39AM Look, just admit that you missed the Lacanian hipster boat by a decade or so. Stop trying so hard. You're like a 30 year old hanging outside a school offering to buy the kids fags so he can hang out with them. (6) (2) tricky1992000 5 July 2012 1:51AM If it does rise again, watch out for any psychopaths hijacking the movement, and trying to lead it. (12) ammypam 5 July 2012 1:51AM Response to ZellHolland, 5 July 2012 1:46AM How is this system overthrown without chaos? Maybe ask other societies, like the Australian Aborigines for one, how they can live in their chaos. (10) (1) NorthMiner 5 July 2012 1:52AM Response to ONLYGODCANSTOPME, 5 July 2012 1:39AM The foretold time is coming. Secure your home, protect your family. Remember tha t communists have no respect for true human values. There will be no exceptions when the time comes. We cannot let them win this battle. Terrific. My out-to-lunch date has arrived. (67) (1) moralreef 5 July 2012 1:53AM Response to vu1gar, 5 July 2012 1:50AM im 19! (4) (1) AdamJW 5 July 2012 1:56AM

Response to JosephADD, 5 July 2012 1:42AM You are obviously deluded. The government always acts in the best interests of t he people... (2) TomandNana 5 July 2012 1:56AM ...a 22 year-old English and drama student at Goldsmiths College, London... An instant "no sale" moment there (23) (1) vu1gar 5 July 2012 1:57AM Response to moralreef, 5 July 2012 1:53AM Yeah. Well. Kula Shaker still suck. (8) (1) moralreef 5 July 2012 1:57AM Response to vu1gar, 5 July 2012 1:50AM actually, all this implies to me is that you're old enough to remember when Slav oj was first popular AND openly watch a show intended for 9 year olds! (8) (1) Oggmorgan 5 July 2012 1:57AM Good article; a pity it did not explain that China and Stalinism are instances o f State Capitalism. There's a few more old and up and coming in the South Americ as. (27) (1) matthewchrlyrobinson 5 July 2012 1:58AM Response to solocontrotutti, 4 July 2012 9:12PM Are all humans capable of such an understanding of themselves? I agree that we s hould learn from are past mistakes but then history would say perhaps this may n ever happen.

I sometimes feel that parties who brand themselves left or right are somehow mis sing the point, the point being and totally agree with you that they and we shou ld strive to invest in are communities and treat everyone with the same humanity . I tried to join the socialist party and the socialist workers party but it did s eem a little one dimensional and they seem to serve mainly as a group who stands up to far right groups so they can shout at each other. Plus both these sosiali st parties wanted money of me, sorry I didn't have any! But did raise a few ques tions in my mind that its funny how these groups have to work within a capitalis tic framework to exist, much like a business. No i really believe in a party that can bring humanity fairness and equality to the UK without having anything to do with grand theories, we can theories all we like but the basic needs of people are very self evident its the bureaucracy an d theology that creates pomposity greed and book writers. (13) tricky1992000 5 July 2012 1:59AM This is just reactionism to the plutocracy that now exists. What is needed is pu re democracy. (5) (1) pottys99 5 July 2012 1:59AM This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn't abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs. ONLYGODCANSTOPME 5 July 2012 1:59AM Response to NorthMiner, 5 July 2012 1:52AM Realise that each individual needs to take steps to defend themselves. The clock -breakers won't save you from a new red terror. (5) (2) ZellHolland 5 July 2012 2:01AM Response to ammypam, 5 July 2012 1:51AM Okay, fair point I admit. But I was referring to a solution which satisfies an i ncredibly larger and more disparate group than the Aborigines i.e. a sizeable ch unk of the global population (1) (1) matthewchrlyrobinson

5 July 2012 2:02AM Response to Oggmorgan, 5 July 2012 1:57AM China is a very horrific place its an extreme capitalistic country with a huge a nd vast gap between rich and poor. There is no romance of social equality there just corruption and state brain washing, I lived in Shanghia and had to leave af ter 4 months (111) (1) DavidInBrooklyn 5 July 2012 2:02AM Strange non-Marxist idea, the "contradiction" between exchange and use value. Th e enduring contradiction continues to be the gap between the value of what worke rs produce and the exchange value of their labour. In other words, the greedy ba stards just don't pay the 99% enough to buy what is produced. Yes, yes, this is the old boring, tiresome "over production crisis". And sure, some smart young wh ippersnapper (or old bourgeois economist hack) will tell me that that idea is so oooooo 19th century. But it still underlies the problems today, it's just a bit obscured by the admittedly clever ways the bosses have found to alleviate or min imize it. For example, the US housing bubble represents one technique: if the working clas s can't buy the national product with what you pay, just lend them the money. Th at of course leads to, well, events like Lehman and Fall 2008, but that's OK. Th e system survives, the major players survive and thrive, and the little guys get shafted as usual. Only now you can come up with a phony morality play about bor rowing and debt and blame the 99% for the shell game set up by the 1%. All that and more just means that Marx's critique was and remains relevant. The question though is, what to do. Lenin took a wrong turn and god, look what happe ned. I have no idea what the solution is. But I'm just a soldier. I'll show up t o the demos, make my contributions, thank my lucky stars that I'm in the "labor aristocracy" and hope for the best. (177) vu1gar 5 July 2012 2:02AM Response to TomandNana, 5 July 2012 1:56AM Yeah, but she'll be re-enacting the glorious public execution of Havana's petite bourgeois troublemakers in an interpretive dance piece inspired by the great Aa rhus School of post-minimalism. Surely that's worth a gold coin donation? They may throw in a copy of The Pocket Guide to Enver Hoxha. (9) BlackLightWetPaint 5 July 2012 2:02AM State Socialism.Communism will not get rid of privilege and elitism, it will jus

t be in a different form. History has taught us this. The only theory so far to come up with a decent model of an economic system is A narchist Communism. It realises that most - if not all - problems in the world l ie with Governments and Capitalists. How can anyone argue with that? From this basis, it seeks to find a system that can run society without these tw o things, and some good stuff has come out of it. But what I like about it, is t hat it is contemporary. It doesn't hark back to Marxist models of Government whi ch not only do not work, they actually suppress the people it claims to liberate . The anarchist Bakunin told Marx before the Bolsheviks took charge that you can't lead people to Socialism through a vanguard party. People will not know what to do, it won't work, people revolt, then the Government - in order to push throug h it's ideals - get's more and more violent. And looked what happened, again, an d again, and again. Marx's critique of Capitalism (volume one, Das Kapital) was spot-on. His ideas f or a better world were not. (171) comingup4air 5 July 2012 2:03AM Marxism is only ever a good idea to people who have never lived through one of i ts regimes. Only affluent, Western middle class intellectuals think Marxism is a good idea. Marxism leads ultimately to Stalinism. Stalin wasn't an anomaly as M arxists like to think - he was the inevitable conclusion of a closed system of t hought riddled with holes. Marxism is fundamentally a political religion of the privileged classes and is ultimately used, just like Fascism to enslave the ordi nary man and women. Marxists should be treated with the same contempt as neo-Naz i's, both in essence are schools of thought built on hate and violence - whom on ce in power use hate and violence to enslave the populace and maintain brutal hi erarchies. The same people who profited the most out of capitalism i.e. world bankers and i ndustrialists were often secret supporters of communism. Wall street bankers hel ped fund the Soviet Union and Western corporations sent machinery and experts to the country to helped build up this brutal totalitarian regime - this trade wit h Stalinist Russia proved extremely beneficial to corporations in the West bogge d down in the Great Depression of the 1930's. People need to grow up and read some Bakunin who predicted the prison state that became the Soviet Union when Stalin was but a glint in his granddad's eye. Marxism is the evil twin of capitalism, a partner in crime designed to offer a f alse hope. Communism really is the highest stage of capitalism, the ultimate cor poration - a corporation that no longer has to pretend not to have influence ove r government because the corporation IS the government. Power corrupts and always will corrupt. Marxism is the pure worship of power and will always lead to the most appalling abuses of human life, human dignity and

human freedom. (21) (5) prwiley 5 July 2012 2:03AM Thesis: My daughter reads Marx Antithesis: My daughter reads Vogue Synthesis: I'm waiting to see what she comes up with. (22) matthewchrlyrobinson 5 July 2012 2:04AM Response to vu1gar, 5 July 2012 1:57AM and the kaiser chiefs (3) vu1gar 5 July 2012 2:04AM Response to moralreef, 5 July 2012 1:57AM *sob* will there be a place for the Bronies in the revolutionary world of tomorr ow? (1) ammypam 5 July 2012 2:06AM Response to SidsKitchen, 5 July 2012 1:35AM That's a pretty long list of autocracy, state-terror, occupation, and interment. Also indicative is how few of them there are left. Where is your evidence for state terror and occupation by Cuba? (8) Adderpistake 5 July 2012 2:06AM Second best seller of all time? A pity most of their new adherents can't read. (2) (1)

DyslexicAunt 5 July 2012 2:07AM Quite a lot of solipsistic, self serving shite here, e.g. Marx was wrong economi cally, without any attempt to explain what this means or why it's true. Socialis m has been around for a long time - Robert Owen used the term first in 1822 in p rivate correspondence - and takes on many forms, so please spare me the cack abo ut socialism leading to the gulag, or that American style capitalism represents the best of what human society can aspire to. IMO socialism never went away and no doubt is becoming increasingly attractive to a number of disenfranchised grou ps esp in the UK where Lord Snooty and chums are using State power to attack wor king people while tut tutting at Bankers. Socialism is arguably only corrupted w hen people abrogate or delegate their political responsibilities. Economic democ racy - freedom from not just freedom to - or socialism remains a viable and urge nt political discourse, if only the scabs would fall from the majority's eyes an d they take responsibility for their political lives and futures. (39) (1) DyslexicAunt 5 July 2012 2:08AM Response to Adderpistake, 5 July 2012 2:06AM Grow up. (20) DyslexicAunt 5 July 2012 2:10AM Response to comingup4air, 5 July 2012 2:03AM Superficially cogent but really just superficial. (14) beth23 5 July 2012 2:10AM Really good article. It has really made my day and perked me up. I woke up with the feeling that maybe the whole world is against me because at present I am sti ll applying for jobs. The patronising 1% at the top, supported by rich politicia ns and the daily mail who want to convince us that it is all our fault while the y get clean away after having conned everyone into making them rich. Vive la rev olution! Hopefully a memory of the Russian or French royal family getting their comeuppance will make the daily mail and the tories less complacent. (26) matthewchrlyrobinson 5 July 2012 2:10AM we could all move to North Korea for a year after which we return and see if we

complain then, we are a nation of complainers, we should really forget about sov ereignty and national pride start looking at the whole world as a whole and yes the Universe for answers science is the future should not the Higgs boson discov ery be HEADLINE NEWS we talk of begotten forgotten used abused unworkable social systems that have failed throughout history, the only way to move forward is to learn from the past and listen to the future (5) (3) ammypam 5 July 2012 2:11AM Response to ZellHolland, 5 July 2012 2:01AM But I was referring to a solution which satisfies an incredibly larger and more disparate group than the Aborigines i.e. a sizeable chunk of the global populati on Sure, but the answer cannot be to continue with the same system that really only benefits 0.1% of the population.