Hey, now I'm the hipster douche!

I was a communist before it was cool.

And then I dropped it right as it got "mainstream." Shit, I knew I was a trendsetter. Pretty soon, everyone is going to leave Communism and become Syndicalists, and then I'll drop that for neo-feudalism. It'll be great, I promise.

Seriously though, anybody attempting to read Capital as a guide to what is going wrong in the current crisis is a fucking fool. That is some dense reading material, and anybody without at least some economics training is going to be lost.

Anyways, anyone looking for a slightly better evaluation of orthodox Marxism needs to read:
1) Marx's Revenge by Meghnad Desai
2) Beyond Marxism by Sidney Hook

Good discussions of the classic misinterpretations of Marx's work. I think Hook might be a little off, given that he thought Marx really had some sort of moral considerations, but he puts up a good argument. Desai is a relatively famous economist, and he shows where (particularly in Capital) Marx may have realized that Capitalism was not necessarily doomed to failure. On the other hand, the failure of Keynesianism and the victories of the neo-Classicals like Friedman might mean that Marx was right, after all. Keynes' work really fucked with what Marx thought was necessary, and Friedman's work shows that Capitalism really can't be "fixed."

The problem Marx presents is that he had such an ambivalent view towards Capitalism. He saw it, I suppose, as something similar to a walk in baseball - a good thing, but not the best thing. It made real surplus of wealth possible for the first time in human history, but it came at the cost of exploitation and inequality.

In any case, anybody who's turned off of Capitalism from this little spat in the economy needs to get a grip. But if they're looking for some sort of answer to the damn thing, don't look to the classical Communist parties. They're a bunch of tools.