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COMMUNISM'S LEGACY
His writings had greater influence on the 20th century than those of anyone else. But is Karl Marx still relevant in the 21st century?
Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion Gareth Stedman Jones Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2016, 768 pp., $35
Why Marx Was Right Terry EagletonNew Haven: Yale, 2011, 272 pp., $40
In March 2017, traveling through Havana, I pointed out to my Cuban guide one humming construction site amid all the gorgeously decrepit, decaying buildings around us, many in the midst of reconstruction efforts that seemed permanently stalled. My guide laughed, because this building was being built by Indian construction workers, brought in and housed by the Cuban state and a capitalist partner. How, I asked, could it possibly be profitable to fly construction workers halfway around the world to do a job? Were there no Cubans with the requisite skills? My guide assured me that Cuba's elaborate vocational education system produced many such workers, but they could not be hired for the project. In the modern Cuban economy, paying Cuban construction workers the wages received by the Indians would have been socially disruptive, because they would then be making more than Cuban doctors, lawyers, and professors. Cuban construction workers, once trained, avoid low paying public jobs, and instead work in the black/gray market on projects where they can make more in a single day than a month at official communist rates.1
In a country allegedly devoted to the philosophy of Karl Marx, who sought the abolition of private property, the public infrastructure was in a near constant state of crisis, but the private property of the wealthy, the politically connected, or those who worked for visiting capitalist foreigners was well kept indeed.
For many, such hypocrisy and economic absurdity, along with the crushing political oppression of the Cuban state, are the main legacy of Karl Marx-who turns 200 years old, as it were, on May 5. The destructive impact of Marxist economics remains real for Cubans, but it is hardly the entire story. In that very same Havana, Cubans have access to a better health care and education system than the poor do in most countries of Latin America or the Caribbean. Most folks would rather be middle class in Guatemala...