Re: [Marxism] Tony Judt: Marxism Resurgent?

["Sayan Bhattacharyya" <ok.president+marxmail@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 9/2/06, Louis Godena <louis.godena@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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

The entire article was very interesting. But what do you think of the
last two paragraphs:

"In the early years of this new century we thus find ourselves facing
two opposite and yet curiously similar fantasies. The first fantasy,
most familiar to Americans but on offer in every advanced country, is
the smug, irenic insistence by commentators, politicians, and experts
that today's policy consensus—lacking any clear alternative—is the
condition of every well-managed modern democracy and will last
indefinitely; that those who oppose it are either misinformed or else
malevolent and in either case doomed to irrelevance. The second
fantasy is the belief that Marxism has an intellectual and political
future: not merely in spite of communism's collapse but because of it.
Hitherto found only at the international "periphery" and in the
margins of academia, this renewed faith in Marxism—at least as an
analytical tool if not a political prognostication—is now once again,
largely for want of competition, the common currency of international
protest movements.

"The similarity, of course, consists in a common failure to learn from
the past—and a symbiotic interdependence, since it is the myopia of
the first that lends spurious credibility to the arguments of the
second. Those who cheer the triumph of the market and the retreat of
the state, who would have us celebrate the unregulated scope for
economic initiative in today's "flat" world, have forgotten what
happened the last time we passed this way. They are in for a rude
shock (though, if the past is a reliable guide, probably at someone
else's expense). As for those who dream of rerunning the Marxist tape,
digitally remastered and free of irritating Communist scratches, they
would be well-advised to ask sooner rather than later just what it is
about all-embracing "systems" of thought that leads inexorably to
all-embracing "systems" of rule."

How should we respond to this criticism, namely that Marxism is a
totalising philosophy and hence inevitably will lead to
totalitarianism in practice? We need to be prepared to counter this
criticism.

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