Still, they're still around, keeping on keeping on, and why shouldn't they? It does seem a bit odd to be basing the fundamentals of your Weltanschauung on a German intellectual who died more than a century ago who was critiquing a specific moment in capitalism's development. Surely times have changed now, and it all feels a bit theological to me. But capitalism remains horrible in many ways for many people, and Marx's analysis of it was probably the most important ever made, if flawed (It is a little embarrassing watching modern Marxists trying to fit everything into a class-struggle frame at a time when class solidarity is on its way out for many reasons). So it makes sense that people searching for the alternative still plump for the one that critiques the current system in the most lasting and fundamental way.
But having looked through a few blogs and websites of functioning modern Marxists, I can't find much of an alternative system being proposed. Apart from the obvious stuff, seizure of the means of production, nationalisation of everything, the abolition of the stock exchange and all that - but there doesn't seem to be any idea of what to do about allocation of resources.This was always the big problem (apart from totalitarian systems required to prop up the revolutionary state, as I have said before) with times when Marxism has been tried practically - planned economies just don't really work. Humans just are insufficiently capable of organising the complexities of something as massive as an economy. Because we're a bit shit in general.
This is the reason I'm still a capitalist - for all its faults, it does a fairly good job of getting resources to the right place. A well made tractor sells well, a bad one sells badly, and the profit motive ensures companies making bad tractors have to catch up, raising overall standards. The invisible hand of the market. In a planned economy, there is no equivalent mechanism foolproof enough to ensure standards are kept high across the board.
After the massive failures of the twentieth century socialist experiments (and I am not wholly scornful of the excuse that they mainly derived from what seems to me a bizarre, unfortunate historical fluke and suffered accordingly), shouldn't Marxists be focussed not on their critique of capitalism, which, after all, we basically get by now, but on fixing that one massive hole in their argument? I am happy to hear about the plan to make the socialist market responsive without the profit motive. But nothing presents itself to me right now.
And this suggests to me another problem with Marxism as it has stood all along. It still treats capitalism as an ideology. But it isn't. Capitalism is what happens when you have an absence of ideology, which usually ends up meaning the powerful aggregate power and use it to cement their advantage. But it also suggests that the unplanned method of exchange inherent in capitalism is just what humans do anyway. Marxism still hasn't accepted that there is no grand conspiracy to keep humans motivated by profit, commodity, surplus value and the rest. It's just what they do, and until they provide an alternative system that fits human behaviour as naturally as does capitalism, I'm going to retain my belief that the best we pretty shit humans can do is ameliorate the awfulness of it all. It's hardly the Internationale, but it'll have to do as a rallying cry.
Arise, the wretched of the earth! No, genuinely, you're all crap.
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