Bankruptcy of Western Academic “Marxism”
The below list of economists are few Western Marxist economists who identify themselves as Marxists
1. Yanis varoufakis
2. David Harvey
3. Slavoj Žižek
4. Richard D. Wolff
Certainly they are well-read and many have provided insights into working of capitalism and some of them have provided
their own solutions to the problems that capitalism poses. Their lectures and talks are certainly enlighting and
they were able to attract a considerable portion of the crowd. They were also instrumental in educating the working class on the
contradictions in capitalism and marxist theory of political economy.
David Harvey has given some lectures acting as study guide for reading Marx Capital.
Yanis varoufakis too became a Marxist quite late in his career, and he identifies himself as an “erratic-Marxist”.
https://www.theguardian.com/.../yanis-varoufakis-how-i...
Zizek on the other end has always provided his own explanations for the events happening around the world.
Richard Wolf has written many books and provides daily and weekly updates on Capitalism. He was once called to give speech at Google
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynbgMKclWWc, he has given many talks on worker cooperatives and his book “Democracy At Work”
conceives of the idea of democracy at workplace. I use to regularly follow their talks on and off for past 10 years, below are my conclutions
about them.
One could easily see that their talks are reflecting the materical conditions of the western world, a world which embraces capitalism to its core
where you have to beg the audience to have a look at the other side, the marxist view of capitalism.
They often demonize stalinism and USSR, not because they really feel bad about it, but because the western world was planted with deep negative sense about USSR through decades of propaganda by the capitalist machinery, so your appeal to the audience can’t be direct, you have to put things in a polite manner otherwise audience will accuse you as someone against democracy itself which is being valued(really) so much in the western world.
None of them will talk about class struggle, the dictatorship of proletariate, the revolutionary view of Marxism.
Marxism is revolutionary in it’s work, failing to understand this is simply irrational. They often distort the solutions prescribed by Marx and Engels, talking about Lenin and Stalin is a taboo for them. Certainly they have elevated the conciousness of thousands if not millions, but none of their teaching actually calls for a revolution by the working class. Without a revolution, without talking about class struggle these talks might help novoice audience to understand better the world they live in, neverthless we can’t call their works revolutionary.
David harvey in one of his talks was against revolution, quite suprising isn’t it (https://mronline.org/.../david-harvey-against-revolution.../).
Zizek writes lots of articles which will eventually push the working class into more confusion than clarity.
All these academic professors certainly are enlighting the masses on the political economy from a Marxist standpoint but the solution they offer are pretty much something which shouldn’t replace capitalism but how to reform it, to do something better within capitalism.
In my view I still watch their talks to understand the economic situation of the western world, neverthless the Western Academic Marxists are simply bankrupt when it comes to the question of revolution and class struggle. As Marxists, we should expose the deficiencies of Western Marxists for failing to recognize the revolutionary nature of Marxism.
