Recent articles that I have been reading have been confirming a trend that has become apparent to me, the left is coming back. It is interesting that the great swings from left to right last about 30 years, and about 30 years after the implementation of neoliberalism, the tensions and contradictions that neoliberalism have created world-over are starting to bite back.
Three articles that I read have confirmed this for me, and from the most unlikely of sources. Two are from The Economist magazine, of which I have great respect. The first article, "The post-communist Karl Marx", discusses the increasing popularity of Marxist thought, making the explicit case that it is more read than Adam Smith's work. Since it is from The Economist, he derides Marxism as irrelevant: "It is the breadth of Marx's continuing influence, especially as contrasted with his strange irrelevance to modern economics, that is so arresting." Of course Marxism is not irrelevant to "modern economics" because it was the Marxist critique of classical economics that pushed economists to create neoclassical economics. The article makes BOLD assertions like, "Class war is the sine qua non of Marx. But the class war, if it ever existed, is over." Anyone with ANY sense of history KNOWS that not only has class struggle been the defining characteristic of the 20th century, it is still with us today.
This brings me to the second article that proves the existence of class struggle in the world's future superpower, China. Titled, "Conditions of the Working Class in China" by Robert Weil. The work shows that with the reforms of Deng Xiaoping and the increasing inequality and dispossession that it wrought, old cultural revolutionaries and the "new left" are making connections to raise awareness of an alternative. As stated in the article, "Class conflict and social turmoil have
surged to levels not seen for decades. The workers, peasants, and migrants in China today are mounting some of the largest demonstrations anywhere in
the world, at times involvingclashes with the authorities."
With hundreds of millions of peasants, the reforms of Deng, which started in the 1970s, enabled China to have the manpower to become a major world power. Problematically, like all industrializing states, there are increasing social tensions. What the article is pointing to is the awareness of the old generation of the rights and proto-democratic rule they enjoyed under Mao-although the author does not discuss the negatives of Mao's era-and the new generation's organic ties to the old generation through the mass diffusion of university education to all members of society. What makes China so different is that indeed it has had the experience of socialism, and workers activism. Is this what The Economist was talking about when it stated, no more class war? Nonsense!
The last article actually contradictions the bold assertion of the initial article. The article in question is named, "Communist survival and revival". The article is informative because it dispels the notion that communism is dead, quite the opposite it is in a stage of revival. The new communist movement, it notes, has gotten over much of the bitter divisiveness that has characterized communism in the 20th century: "Eurocommunists can rub shoulders with Stalinists who would once have called them traitors; even different brands of Maoists turn up, ranging from the Chinese party to former admirers of Albania's Enver Hoxha."The revival of the Italian communist party is indicative of a strong connection that the communist party has in continental Europe. This is not to say that communism is a good thing unto itself, as Marxism like neoclassical analysis is riddled with unsuportable assumptions, principally the transformation problem. However, what it does show is that in the myth from the 1980s, of a "property-owning democracy" of Thatcher, people are still capable of thinking beyond themselves.
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