...as Karl Marx is named by tens of thousands of Radio 4 listeners as the Greatest Philosopher. Francis Wheen on Marx' affect on billionaires, business correspondents, presidential campaign chairman, and financial journalists, here. I'll not ask the free-market fundamentalists among us to critique Marx; I don't believe for one single moment they've ever read him. I also challenge the notion that Marx, with whom I disagree substantively, was a philosopher, but that's another discussion. I will ask them, ask everyone, to champion, among the top ten offered by Radio 4 here, the longer "shortlist," here, who they would have voted for, and why. Me? Well, off of Radio 4's lists, I'd be stuck between Hume and Kierkegaard, b/c the former lays the ground for interrogation of everything, while the latter places that interrogation in the context of becoming (a religious becoming, but that process acknowledged nonetheless). But outside the list I'd actually champion Anton Chekov, another non-philosopher, as shaping my early considerations of work and of love (an idea, love, almost totally missing from the "protests" in Edinburgh, by the way...) more than most others, in that I find myself applying it to any exploration of the analytical, the continental, the Eastern or any hybrid of ideational/existential analysis that I come across. I just found the selection of Marx, in today's climate, to be an almost revolutionary act, and, more than that, funny.
I think many free-market fundies have read Marx very closely. They just decided to be on the side of capital rather than labor.
That may be true. I don't think many free-market fundies here have read him; I doubt any have. I've been wrong before.
You can listen to the episode of "In our time" in which this result is discussed by downloading the MP3 (12.7mb). I did on Friday and it's very interesting, it's not about the political malfeasance that was built upon is theories some 100 years later, it's about his philosopher side. The programme argues, at least in part, that Marx' writings prove he would have been opposed to Stalinism and all other totalitarian experiments that misused his name in the manner that they did.
Wasn't it Schumpeter who said "Marx asked all the right questions. He just got all the wrong answers."?
I've argued in the past that he misunderstood a couple of things which ruined his "predictive results;" he failed to realize that national boundaries and loyalties mean nothing to corporations, and he didn't envision a world where the rich mostly live on one continent, protected by oceans from most of the poor... the dynamic between owners and workers can frequently be interrupted or avoided by corporate entities, and the stress between rich and poor fails to find expression much of the time...
Wow, get this: =============== In October 1997 the business correspondent of the New Yorker, John Cassidy, reported a conversation with an investment banker. 'The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right,' the financier said. 'I am absolutely convinced that Marx's approach is the best way to look at capitalism.' His curiosity aroused, Cassidy read Marx for the first time. He found 'riveting passages about globalisation, inequality, political corruption, monopolisation, technical progress, the decline of high culture, and the enervating nature of modern existence - issues that economists are now confronting anew, sometimes without realising that they are walking in Marx's footsteps'.