Marx Book

Singer looks at Marx, the Philosopher, and relegates Marx, the Economist to the background. This allows Singer to put aside all the 'refuted' aspects of Marx and focus on the key and relevant ideas. Singer discusses alienation and historical materialism in some detail and tracks their evolution in Marx's thought, but the most interesting segment is when he tries to pin down marx's own conceptions of what a communist utopia should be like. Turns out Marx was extremely pragmatic about it and let slip such ideas only in moments of weakness. As I always like to say to anyone discussing Stalinism wrt Marxism -- just because the prescribed treatment turned out to be off the mark, the diagnosis is not to be dismissed (and that is if the Soviet Russia was even remotely Marxist! Marx must have anticipated all this and is known to have cried out in later life: "All i know is that I am not a Marxist!").

Marx is strongest when he is identifying the deficiencies of capitalism, not when he is trying to propose solutions. Those are our responsibility too. After all, we shouldn't leave everything to one man.