[Mark Seddon of the Labour national executive committee had an interesting take on Marx's win in today's Guardian (below). What makes the UK (recent bombings and all) a more promising place to live than the US now is what Seddon notes -- that voting for Marx as greatest philosopher means "that thousands of Britons must believe that real change is possible." I think the number Americans who believe real change is possible is vanishingly small -- I'd say the feeling national despair (largely unacknowledged) here has never been worse in my lifetime.]
... But should we really be so surprised [by Marx being voted greatest philosopher]? Marx, now freed from his flawed pupils, is as liberating as he was when he published the Communist Manifesto 150 years ago. ... Marx reaches through the centuries not only because he understood how modern capitalism would exacerbate the divide between rich and poor, but because he could see that, left to its own devices, it would create monopoly and exploitation.
He could have left it there, but of course he believed that there had to be an alternative. And in these dumbed down times where Lord Birt's blue-sky thinking and management consultancy gobbledegook has our technocratic political class in a vice-like grip, it is refreshing to discover that thousands of Britons must believe that real change is possible. Amazingly for the slayers of social democracy in New Labour, as many of these people probably live in places like Esher and Surbiton as they do in Oxford and Cambridge.
Market fundamentalism has now replaced Marxism and its many derivatives in the west, as it has done in the east. Elsewhere, nationalism and religious fundamentalism vie to fill a dangerous, illiberal void. It is as if the age of enlightenment, of the Renaissance, had never happened. Marx spawned some horrors, and the flight from him by the political class has been so total that the gentler tradition of democratic socialism has been all but lost. ...
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1528011,00.html>
Carl Pompous sneering buffoon but beloved by his dog