[Marxism] Tony Judt: Marxism Resurgent?

["Louis Godena" <louis.godena@xxxxxxxxx>]

[...]Today, however, things are changing once again. What Marx's
nineteenth-century contemporaries called the "Social Question"—how to
address and overcome huge disparities of wealth and poverty, and shameful
inequalities of health, education, and opportunity—may have been answered in
the West (though the gulf between poor and rich, which seemed once to be
steadily closing, has for some years been opening again, in Britain and
above all in the US). But the Social Question is back on the international
agenda with a vengeance. What appears to its prosperous beneficiaries as
worldwide economic growth and the opening of national and international
markets to investment and trade is increasingly perceived and resented by
millions of others as the redistribution of global wealth for the benefit of
a handful of corporations and holders of capital.

In recent years respectable critics have been dusting off nineteenth-century
radical language and applying it with disturbing success to
twenty-first-century social relations. One hardly needs to be a Marxist to
recognize that what Marx and others called a "reserve army of labor" is now
resurfacing, not in the back streets of European industrial towns but
worldwide. By holding down the cost of labor—thanks to the threat of
outsourcing, factory relocation, or
disinvestment[18]<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19302#fn18>—this
global pool of cheap workers helps maintain profits and promote
growth: just as it did in nineteenth-century industrial Europe, at least
until organized trade unions and mass labor parties were powerful enough to
bring about improved wages, redistributive taxation, and a decisive
twentieth-century shift in the balance of political power—thereby
confounding the revolutionary predictions of their own leaders.

In short, the world appears to be entering upon a new cycle, one with which
our nineteenth-century forebears were familiar but of which we in the West
have no recent experience. In the coming years, as visible disparities of
wealth increase and struggles over the terms of trade, the location of
employment, and the control of scarce natural resources all become more
acute, we are likely to hear more, not less, about inequality, injustice,
unfairness, and exploitation—at home but especially abroad. And thus, as we
lose sight of communism (already in Eastern Europe you have to be
thirty-five years old to have any adult memory of a Communist regime), the
moral appeal of some refurbished version of Marxism is likely to grow.
Full:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19302
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