32 The Nation. April 30/May 7, 2018
becomes entirely antagonistic. Marx’s final
message to workers, Roberts tells us, is that
political economy is merely “the science of
their subjection,” and thus that they “need
have nothing more to do with this.” A simi-
lar injunction seems to hold for us: If Marx
is solely critiquing political economy rather
than doing it, there’s no point in scrutiniz-
ing his account of capitalism as if it were a
normal social-scientific theory.
However tempting it might be to see
Marx as doing something essentially differ-
ent from the economists and the historians
and all the rest, I don’t think these fire walls
can ultimately hold. Not between Volume
I and all the other writings—it is surely
relevant that Marx aimed to write the final
two volumes, and surely relevant that he
never managed to—or between Marx the
theorist and the various other versions of
him that we might discern. He was doing
it all, or trying to. Hence his enterprise
is vulnerable to attack on any number of
fronts, from the grandly philosophical to
the hairsplittingly empirical.
The task for readers of Marx today, then,
is not to reconstruct a neater and more
pristine version of him that will avoid such
vulnerabilities, but to decide which parts of
his brilliant, sprawling, and monumentally
ambitious project we can accept, on the
assumption that it certainly won’t be all
of it and might not be most of it. Which
parts must one accept to be a “Marxist”?
That might have been a meaningful ques-
tion in the days when Marxist parties and
regimes bestrode the political landscape,
but it seems considerably less meaningful
today. Despite the evident nostalgia for old
battles between Marxists and anti-Marxists,
there is no pressing need at the moment to
refight them.
We sometimes ask whether Marx “mat-
ters today,” whether he’s “still relevant.”
Taking the question at face value, the an-
swer has to be: Yes, he matters, just as every-
one else who reorients our ways of thinking
matters, above all because the problem
of capitalism that he opened up remains
central to any attempt to understand the
contemporary world. But often the ques-
tion seems to stand in for another: whether
Marx’s thought provides all the resources
that we need for this task. This is prob-
ably not a useful criterion to apply to any
thinker, because it sets a bar that neither he
nor anyone else could ever meet. We would
do better to emulate Marx’s own attitude
toward his predecessors, taking what we
can from him without too much agonizing
about what we’ve left behind. Q DETROIT, 1967 (AP)
FREEDOM FOR EVERY CITIZEN
The missed opportunity of the Kerner Report
by WILLIAM P. JONES
G
iven the state of race relations in
the United States today, it is not
surprising that the Report of the
National Advisory Commission on
Civil Disorders—popularly known
as the Kerner Report—is widely viewed
as a missed opportunity. Named for the
commission’s chair, Illinois Governor Otto
Kerner, and released on February 29, 1968,
after the urban rebellions that had raged in
more than 160 American cities the previous
summer, the report sought to address thepoverty, discrimination, and police violence
that its authors believed were not only the
rebellions’ root causes but, ultimately, a
threat to American democracy. To that end,
the report urged President Lyndon Johnson
to couple dramatic increases in funding for
job creation, housing, education, and other
public services with reforms to policing,
media coverage, and political power in
American cities—nearly all of which was ig-
nored by an administration facing increasedWilliam P. Jones is a professor of history at the
University of Minnesota and the author of The
March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the
Forgotten History of Civil Rights.Separate and Unequal
The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling
of American Liberalism
By Steven M. Gillon
Basic Books. 400 pp. $20.99