Why Marxism?
Published on 01-09-2019
Because, for me, it has better explanatory power about the world around us than any other theory. It has been repressed in the west for the last 60-70 years, including Canada. I don’t know if there are any Marxist profs in universities across Canada, but generally, no economics student today is required to read one line from Marx.
Hearing the words Marxism and Marx are scare words today. It is being outright rejected, mocked upon and avoided at all levels. The public perception is that it is something that has failed. It is believed to be primarily a political current. Marxism is the critique of capitalism. It is first and foremost a body of knowledge about the inner workings of capitalism. Marx has very valuable insights about it and has shown that it is not the end of history. The contradictions that carries in itself will eventually bring it to its knees. Just like any other economic systems before it, it was born, has evolved and will die. Marx did not predict the future, but he has made clues about what needs to happen to have a better economic system. And there were born Marxist political currents building, adding to it, twisting it. People were and are inferring from Marx clues as how to build a future society. And there were spectacular failures. Whole societies collapsed and returned to capitalism. This is what one sees at first. The failures.
But this does not invalidate at all Marx’s teaching about capitalism. We don’t blame the chemical process that separates the water molecule to Hydrogen and Oxygen just because some people use the Hydrogen for Hydrogen bombs.
We see around us our system’s (capitalism’s) failures every day. You can feel it on your skin too. There is an excellent source of information about this in Richard Wolff’s Economic Update video podcast and others from the Democracy at Work website. I too try to bring you news and facts about these failures in the Canadian context.
If I stirred up in you the interest of knowing more about Marxism, the first I would like to recommend is for you to read Understanding Marxism. It is a short book, you can finish it in 1-2 hours, big letters, easy read. There is an eBook version of it too now. From it you will learn, besides the empirical, why not to like capitalism. And to know more about how it actually works, I’d suggest watching Prof. Wolff’s condensed course about Marxist economics here.