This year is the bicentenary of the birth of Karl Marx, and on the whole the commentary that it has evoked has obeyed the injunction not to speak ill of the dead, as if the passage of time and the deaths of millions in the name of the birthday boy did not somewhat attenuate the social imperative to mute one’s words. There are reasons for this.
The fact is that we sense the approach of yet another economic crisis, as my late dog sensed the approach of a thunderstorm. Perhaps the crisis to come will be even greater and more devastating than the last, being the consequence of our almost universal imprudence and improvidence, and our determination to learn nothing from experience. Marx, of course, would not have been surprised at this, since he believed that such crises were inevitable until the advent of his utopia, in which such phenomena as private property, banks, and the bourgeoisie would cease to exist. In Marx’s vision, the ant would lie down with the anteater, and all would be well forever and ever, amen.
The combination of scathing criticism of the present and adolescent daydreaming is irresistible to quite a lot of people, and of course in predicting crises Marx seems to have been prescient. In fact, he was no more prescient than I would be if I predicted that there would be rain in England at some time within the next year; but in the kingdom of the foolish, a man with one cliché may appear wise.
The Anti-Capitalistic …
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Marx, of course, was one of those people who love humanity and hate men (an increasingly common type, it seems to me). He was in most respects an unattractive figure, cocksure, domineering, intolerant, and…