Philosophers Zone – 17 October 2009 – What would Karl Marx think?.
Commodities, capitalism and computers. At a time when the Berlin Wall has fallen but Wall Street is decidedly shaky, a self-described lapsed Marxist takes us through some of the key philosophical and practical ideas of Karl Marx and argues for what is still useful today. What is worth keeping in Marx? He had his limitations but later thinkers have built on his core concepts and used his methods to produce results that still speak to the changing nature of work in contemporary Australia.
October 21, 2009 at 11:35 pm
I would mention something that Adorno did in his three studies on Hegel. He avoided the question of whether or not Hegel has something to teach us today, he rather asked what would our epoch look like to Hegel?
The same goes for Marx. It isn’t that we need to ask what Marx can teach us today, rather we should ask: what do the events of the first decade of the twenty-first century look in Marx’s eyes? What would he do/say?
October 23, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Daimon:
Zizek uses this very question in the introduction to “First As Tragedy, Then As Farce.”
To steal the words of Paul Craig Roberts(!), if either Marx or Lenin were alive today, they would be Nobel laureates in economics.