Why we need a new Marx; because the market isn't moral.

• Author: Boo, Katherine

Only 11 people came to his funeral: Karl Marx was ued to being an unpopular guy. Still, 1991 might have thrown him. As the yoke of communism was lifted from a quarter billion people, apostasies abounded. Forget the erstwhile Soviet Union: Even China dismissed Marx's ideas as "not necessarily appropriate" to the times. And after 35 years of tilting at privately owned, socially irresponsible windmills, Britain's stalwart Marxist Review ceased the struggle.

In the epic contest between Marx and Adam Smith, Smith's market economy has won in a rout. As Maggie Thatcher recently remarked, "The whole world is now following the American lead." But don't imagine Marx recanting in his grave: There are still a few glitches in our system that would send that old schadenfreude down his spine. In the salad days of 19th-century capitalism, profit-motivated entrepreneurs left beetles in the bread; today they leave fecal matter in the whitefish. His capitalists poured gunk into the Thames; ours leak tritium into the Savannah. And more than a century after Das Kapital, those prospering capitalists still leave behind a politically marginal class of improverished people.

Nine million of us are out of work; 35 million don't have health insurance; 13 percent live in poverty as the income "gap" between rich and poor stretches into a canyon. Even Marx, who had the soul of an accountant, would be sick of the figures. But he'd see that all this misery can't be blamed on business cycles alone. In the eighties, a decade that fuel-injected the incomes of the upper and upper-middle classes, the ranks of the poor and near-porr burgeoned.

"Buy something," begged a recent ad for Range Rover, neatly summarizing Bush's latest recession remedy. "Buy a microwave. A basset hound. Theater tickets. A Tootsie Roll. Something. Because if we all wait for the recession to be officially declared over to start spending again, the problem will simply keep feeding on itself." Yet as the president prescribes more capitalism, he seems to be unaware of a problem more capitalism, from Marx's day to ours, perpetually creates: If the workers are too poor, they can't buy what they, or anyone else, produce. To Marx, that fact presaged the revolution. To us, it suggests a way out. Maybe what America needs in its overexamined economic convalescence is not more market after all. Maybe what we need is more Marx.

Well, not more Marx, exactly, but a reconstructed one: a Marx convinced finally that capitalism is the best way to organize our economic lives, who grasps the importance of investment incentives and a vigorous GNP, yet who sees capitalism's fault lines, from the unemployed worker to the polluted river to the cancerous down-winder. So seeing, perhaps he'll arouse some popular passion for the third party the old Marx most despised: the state, whos role in crafting capitalism with a moral dimension has never been more needed.

Capitalist punishment

Ahmad Saloum has a life so simple it could be an elementary school diagram of market exchange. A Syrian immigrant in Brooklyn, he accepts no government assistance. Instead, six days a week, the 27-year-old sells his labor--12 hours of it a day--to a Queens shoestore. In return, he receives $ 360 a week, which he quickly sends back into the economy in exchange for food and shelter. But even a fourthgrader could figure out what's missing from this economic case study: opportunity--in Ahmad's case a very tangible thing. After a year in this country, he speaks virtually no English. He cannot read or write it. He doesn't enroll in classes because his work schedule doesn't permit it; his stomach doesn't permit cutting back his hours. He'll be stacking shoe boxes for a while.

Ahmad's expansive working day is a classic capitalist tendency in action. With the machines bought and the rent fixed, labor--man--becomes the great economic variable. In order to maximize profits, the owner strives to get more work--surplus value--from labor. According to Harvard economist...