Marx's Revenge -- Summer Reading List

Desai’s book explores the history of Marxism, in thought and in practice. The real benefit of this book is that it seeks to punctuate the end of Leninism with the fall of the Berlin wall.

Main Point: Marx suggested that Communism would come after Capitalism. Lenin and friends eventually fell into the trap of assuming capitalism could be skipped. Nothing in Marx supports this.

            The book presents the main arguments of Marx and his followers, as pertaining to the popular aspects political economy. All of the popular movements are included, with special attention paid to those in Germany and Russia. The movements in China, India, and Italy are mentioned where appropriate and where they add to the thesis of the proximate chapter.

            In the book is when Desai states that the world was approaching a total Western Capitalism before World War I and the return to this is only now occurring. To prevent this from being dismissed as the obvious, he suggests the historical pattern could be seen as an upward spiral.

            Desai is a feminist (apologizing for Marx’s choice of pronouns) and an author sympathetic to the idea that the world is progressing toward some higher state of being. The book is meant to vindicate, more subtlety than the title, the competence and relevance of Marx as an economic theorist. Several references are made to the resilience of Marx to empirical tests.

            The best part of the book is where Desai contrasts the “astronomy” of social order presented by Adam Smith with the “astronomy” of Hegel. The distinctions are drawn effectively so as one can think more about the different premises and their results on the eventual logical conclusion. The rest of the book defends Marx with the attitude that the jury is still out on weather his conclusions will hold. The idea is that the stages of growth as presented by Marx, were millennial.

            I was impressed with this book: the structure, the flow, and the presentation of ideas.

 

Also Read: “The Worldly Philosophers” which discusses the same union of topics with more background and at an entry-level.