Anyone who thinks Marxism is no longer relevant...

... should read this.

(Found at Martin M)
Previous: Arguments for Marxism no.85.
Keywords: child labour/child labor: Thousands of children work in African gold mines By Rukmini Callimachi and Bradley Klapper (International Herald Tribune)

Comments

jams o donnell said…
Reading articles like this and I see what you mean
Anonymous said…
Does this article really speak to the relevance of Marxism or simply the need for a living wage and basic workplace safety regulations?

I suspect what these people need to represent their interests is labor organization i.e. a union, rather than a Marxist political party.
Roland Dodds said…
I will say that stories like this make the long dormant socialist in me uppity.
bob said…
Stories like this do not make the case for "a Marxist political party".

(Actually, Marx himself was not a big advocate of "a Marxist political party": he believed in a general party of labour, as catholic as possible, and opposed those "Marxists" who sought to exclude the doctrinally impure. E.g. in the Communist Manifesto, he wrote: In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.


And he repeated this argument again and again, against the "Marxists" who sought "Marxist" parties.)

But, anyways, what the article speaks to for me is the relevance of a Marxist analysis of the world. Here in the global north, our standards of living have improved immeasurably since the days when Marx wrote Capital, and it is easy to see the analysis as redundant. However, the situation he describes has been reproduced at a global level; our relative comfort is bought at the expense of the misery ("immiseration" in the high school Marxian phrasebook) of these Ghanian kids and their like.

Popular Posts