Full Marx for the glorious rehabilitation of socialism from the dustbin of history!

A tip for savvy capitalists from The Australian Financial Review, Elmer Funke Kupper, February 19:

Recently the AFR published a list of popular business books. One important book was missing from the list. It is The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (which) sets out the struggle between the “bourgeoisie” — the owners of capital — and the “proletariat” — the workers who were being exploited in the industrial revolution of the 1800s. The Manifesto is well researched. Its arguments are supported by data and case studies. (But wait, there’s more.)

T-shirt Trots, The Economist, February 14:

For the American generation which has grown up since the downfall of the USSR, socialism is no longer the boo word it once was. On the Left, a lot of Americans are more sceptical than they used to be about capitalism. Indeed, what might be called “millennial socialism” is having something of a cultural moment. Publications like Jacobin and Tribune bedeck the coffee tables of the hip, young and socially conscious. When Piers Morgan, a British television presenter, found it impossible to believe that a young interviewee might come from a Left beyond Barack Obama, her response quickly turned up on T-shirts: “I’m literally a communist, you idiot”.

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, 1999:

The total approaches 100 million people killed. Mass violence against the population was a deliberate policy of the new revolutionary order. Communism’s recourse to “permanent civil war” rested on the “scientific” Marxist belief in class struggle as the “violent midwife of history”, in Marx’s famous metaphor.

Could the decline of economics help explain the return of clueless socialists? The Australian, February 19:

In its submission to the NSW Curriculum Review, the Reserve Bank recommends that economics — a ­social science dealing with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services — have “a more prominent place in a refreshed curriculum”. According to the bank, there are public and private benefits to increasing enrolments among school students, including boosting “economic literacy”.

Marx knew all about blood-sucking capitalism; he was a leech himself. James Ledbetter, Jacobin magazine, May 5, 2018:

(American editor Charles Dana) asked Marx to contribute some articles to The New York Tribune. The payments from the Tribune articles were the steadiest form of income Marx ever earned.

Marx the speculator, The Independent, September 9, 1992:

In 1864, share deals in London netted the father of communism about £400. The money for his venture into capitalism was borrowed from his factory-owning comrade, Engels.

More from Funke Kupper in the AFR:

(The Communist Manifesto) is also wrong. Marx believed that the struggle would end in the overthrow of capitalism. So why bother reading it? The “struggle” is becoming more relevant today. Several of the drivers of discontent in the 1800s echo in 2019. These include a lack of real wage growth, concerns about trade and globalisation, and a growing sense of inequality. Capitalism has to contribute real solutions to society’s problems. It starts with recognising what is really going on in people’s minds and people’s lives. In times of growing stress, this drives the policy agenda. Reading The Communist Manifesto would be a good start.