archive : s0metim3s

Following the recent Long Sunday blogweave on Spivak … wait, there’s more …

Francis Wheen’s biography of Karl Marx begins at his funeral, thus setting the scene for opening remarks on Marx’s legacy. Wheen writes:

The history of the twentieth century is Marx’s legacy. Stalin, Mao, Che, Castro - the icons and monsters of the modern age have all presented themselves as his heirs. Whether he would recognise them as such is quite another matter. Even in his lifetime, the antics of self-styled disciples often drove him to despair. On hearing that a new French party claimed to be Marxist, he replied that in that case ‘I, at least, am not a Marxist’. Nevertheless, within one hundred years of his death half the world’s population was ruled by governments that professed Marxism to be their guiding faith.

And yet, the 20th century came to a close with the declarations of a triumphant liberalism that had, it was said, brought history to an end and, thereby, exhausted the legacy of Marx in that purportedly faithful expression of Marxism as raison d’etat.

Jane Jacobs, was one of the first, if not the first, chroniclers of this mad spree of deceptions and vandalism and waste that was called urban renewal, passionate defender of the flaneur and the multitudinous life of the street, foot people and, of course, the city itself as a form of life.