On Your Marx. Get Set. Go Read Capital.

Claiming that those who haven't read this or that particular work are ill-qualified to refute your pet belief is generally seen as academically elitist (shock horror!), indeed in the case of religious fundies or pseudo-science types it is downright annoying - "oh, but you haven't read my holy book cover to cover. Isn't rejecting it just closed-minded?". But, in some cases I believe this demand that one must read the base text before downright rejecting a set of ideas is fair; a case in point being Marx's work. 

There is a reason why so many serious political economists and theorists are Marxists - his ideas have merit, they are a powerful theoretical framework for understanding the world. Now, making a statement such as this will usually illicit from conservatives a rant that blames Marx for everything and everyone from Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot to North Korea, gulags, labour camps, the Berlin Wall, economic stagnation and so on - when one patiently points out that no serious modern Marxist defends these things and in fact see them, rightly, as a perversion of Marxism this is shouted down as special pleading and an attempt to escape blame. Even most  lefties will tell you that communism was the "god that failed" and that this kind of socialism has no place in the modern world - liberalism is triumphant at last!

Michael Gove making a fool of himself again
(and this time not with his education policy!)

The fact is, however, that Marx needs to be read and studied as a critic of capitalism and an economist; not as a proxy for every despot who stood beneath a red flag. As our lecturer on Marxism last term pointed out - most people who write off Marx as a totalitarian (e.g. our learned friend Mr Gove*) haven't engaged with his work in any sense. 

Next time someone uses the USSR to dismiss Marx, ask them how the fall of the Berlin Wall disprove's the labour theory of value, or the idea of exploitation that is derived from it, or the dialectic, or historical materialism.

My recommendation to my readers is to get a copy of Marx's 'Das Kapital' and read it along with David Harvey's excellent lecture series, I'm halfway through Volume 1 and it is proving very eye-opening.

*This misguided minister deserves his own post - suffice it to say I don't think the best education policy in a globalized world is one which focuses on learning dates, promoting a somewhat fictionalised national narrative/myth and, of course, bringing a dying and globally obsolete system of measurement back into maths lessons