/lit/ - Literature

>>20470364
>Why do people still take Marx's works seriously in academia and such?
To answer this question seriously, because the cracks in liberalism as a political and economic system are growing increasingly apparent. Marx was the philosopher whose critique of liberalism and whose predictions about the ultimate future of capitalism most closely match the post-globalization world, and so Marx is who anyone with two brain cells to rub together inevitably returns to. The present crisis is probably best explained (somewhat unwittingly) by the reformist liberal political economist Branco Milanovic:
(Lecture covering same beats as his most major paper
https://youtube.com/watch?v=SMsirg7Z0bU))
(Slides from a more recent lecture
https://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/Events-Assets/PDF/2017/2017-ST02/20170705-Branko-Milanovic-PPT.pdf))
for over a century, capitalism and imperialism produced a world in which where you were born had a much greater effect on your eventual wealth than which class you were a member of. But in the last few decades, countries have begun converging faster and faster. At the same time, global household inequality, something we have only been able to measure since the 1980s, has been consistently high and slightly growing in the wealthier countries that the rest of the world is trying to catch up to and is being molded to resemble. In a few more decades it seems as though we will return to a Marxian world. Milanovic, being a world bank economist and too pot committed to liberalism to abandon it, suggests a bunch of totally pie in the sky anemic reforms as a solution. But other academics are bolder. Eric Hobsbawm, the eminent European historian, put it very plainly in the conclusion to his book-length reflection on Marx and Marxism:
>It is evident that even between major crises, ‘the market’ has no answer to the major problem confronting the twenty-first century: that unlimited and increasingly high-tech economic growth in the pursuit of unsustainable profit produces global wealth, but at the cost of an increasingly dispensable factor of production, human labour, and, one might add, of the globe’s natural resources. Economic and political liberalism, singly or in combination, cannot provide the solution to the problems of the twenty-first century. Once again the time has come to take Marx seriously.

>>12071518
>why don’t poor people in deindustrialized slums with shit schools subjected to a 40 year federal war on them because of ‘muh drugs’ follow my neoclassical homo economicus model of human behavior and use their marginal utility calculation units to determine and pursue degrees that will maximize their lifetime income?
Gee I wonder