Financiers of the future must know their Marx

The following letter appeared in the Financial Times yesterday with a big picture of Marx alongside it. This crisis has forced the strategists of capital to seek Marx's advice, up to a point.

I met a teacher of finance recently who works in the US but is from China. She told me that Marx was required reading in China when she grew up. This gives the Chinese Bureaucracy a major step up on the theoreticians of capital in the west. She said that here they don't really study the nuts and bolts of the capitalist economy, they concentrate mostly on the market.

Financiers of the future must know their Marx

Published: February 4 2009 02:00 | Last updated: February 4 2009 02:00

From Mr Bryn Rowlands.

Sir, Michael Lipton (Letters, January 23) asked why John McFall and Jon Moulton, when advocating bank nationalisation (Comment, January 21), added that later the banks should be returned to private ownership. May I hazard an answer: free-market dogmatism and ignorance.

I recall one late British prime minister, Harold Wilson, boasting that he failed to get past page one of Karl Marx’s Capital . More recently, Gordon Brown showed his rejection of Marx's explanation of the cyclical nature of capitalist economies with his claim to have ended booms and busts.

A knowledge of Marxian economics may have allowed our financiers and politicians to avoid, or at least have attenuated, the present crisis of capitalism. As Marx warned, more than 140 years ago, crises of capitalist credit mechanisms occur, "where the ever-lengthening chain of payments, and an artificial system of settling them, has been fully developed". Is it not the responsibility of professors of economics to ensure that the prospective financiers and politicians in the universities gain an in-depth knowledge of Marx's ideas and then, perhaps, not repeat past mistakes?