The Rehabilitation of Marx. Happy 200th, Karl!

Tomorrow is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx.

I first encountered the Communist Manifesto in officer school. I understood almost none of it but I discovered that dismissing it as "Commie crap" was enough for a passing grade. Small mercies.

It was almost seven years ago that I posted a Wall Street Journal interview with American economist, Nouriel Roubini, in which he maintained that Marx has been proven right, capitalism will destroy itself through the destructive transfer of income from labour to capital leading to an economic death spiral.



In recent years there's been something of a consensus built around the idea that Marx may have been radical but he was probably right. Today's New York Times has a feature op-ed, "Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!"

Even though Karl and his kin rest in north London's Highgate Cemetery, for most of his dirt nap he's been scorned as a subversive, a threat to the natural order of free enterprise. It's nice to see him rehabilitated. After all, it looks like he was right.

"Workers of all lands unite" indeed.

Murdoch's Magic Touch - The Ruination of the Wall Street Journal

Joe Nocera has an interesting op-ed piece in The New York Times in which he canvasses how Rupert Murdoch "Foxified" the once prestigious Wall Street Journal.

Within five months, Murdoch had fired the editor and installed his close friend Robert Thomson, fresh from a stint Fox-ifying The Times of London. The new publisher was Leslie Hinton, former boss of the division that published Murdoch’s British newspapers, including The News of the World. (He resigned on Friday.) Soon came the changes, swift and sure: shorter articles, less depth, an increased emphasis on politics and, weirdly, sometimes surprisingly unsophisticated coverage of business. 

Along with the transformation of a great paper into a mediocre one came a change that was both more subtle and more insidious. The political articles grew more and more slanted toward the Republican party line. The Journal sometimes took to using the word “Democrat” as an adjective instead of a noun, a usage favored by the right wing. In her book, “War at The Wall Street Journal,” Sarah Ellison recounts how editors inserted the phrase “assault on business” in an article about corporate taxes under President Obama. The Journal was turned into a propaganda vehicle for its owner’s conservative views.

If anything the critique seems understated.  Murdoch did take one of America's most prestigious papers and turned it into a birdcage liner of the same quality as our own National Post.