A little over two decades ago, in October 1997, the New Yorker published an issue devoted to the topic “What Next?” as the world entered the twenty-first century. One of the articles in the issue, on “The Next Thinker,” was written by the New Yorker’s talented economic correspondent John Cassidy and was entitled “The Return of Karl Marx.” Cassidy contended that 150 years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto the most important thinker to read was none other than Marx himself. His article created a big stir on the Left. In the New York office of Monthly Review — where he occasionally showed up to speak to its editors Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, and where I dropped in from time to time — Cassidy’s article repeatedly arose in the conversations in the days and weeks after its publication.

The way Cassidy told the story, he had been vacationing that summer with an old friend, “a highly intelligent and levelheaded Englishman” who was in the upper echelons of a big Wall Street investment bank. They were casually discussing when the big financial boom of the late 1990s would end, when, as Cassidy recounted,

[H]e brought up Karl Marx. “The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right,” he said. I assumed he was joking. “There is a Nobel Prize waiting for the economist who resurrects Marx and puts it all together into a coherent model,” he continued quite seriously. “I am absolutely convinced that Marx’s approach is the best way to look at capitalism.” I didn’t hide my astonishment. We had both studied economics during the early eighties at Oxford where most of our teachers agreed with Keynes that Marx’s economic theories were “complicated hocus-pocus” and Communism was “an insult to our intelligence.”… Nevertheless, I decided that if my host, with all his experience of global finance, reckoned Marx had something worthwhile to say, perhaps it was time to take a look.

Cassidy decided to do a crash course in Marx that summer. He picked up copies of the German Ideology, the Communist Manifesto, and Capital, and a collection of Marx’s selected writings edited by David McLellan, all of which he studied during his vacation, also “nibbling” at the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Theories of Surplus Value. He then wrote up his conclusions in his New Yorker article. He made it clear that he didn’t swallow Marx whole, declaring straight out: “In one way, Marx’s efforts were a failure. His mathematical model for the economy, which depended on the idea that labor is the source of all value, was riven with internal inconsistencies and is rarely studied today.” We were then told that the new Principles of Economics textbook by the Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw mentioned Marx on just one of its 800 or so pages, and that Marx lacked a lot of the mechanical models — production functions, game theory — that peppered neoclassical textbooks. Marx was not very useful, Cassidy surmised, in answering the everyday issues of price determination, while his underlying method was flawed.

Nevertheless, Cassidy went on to point to an array of unrivaled insights Marx had into the capitalist economy, including: the conflict of wage labor and capital, the centrality of accumulation (“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets!” as Marx put it), the business cycle, the reserve army of labor, monopolization, globalization, increasing inequality (called “the immiseration thesis” by Marx’s critics), the expansion of finance, the class character of the state, and more.

One would think that Cassidy might have concluded that there must have been something to say in the end for Marx’s core method, relying on the labor theory of value as the means of understanding capital’s inner logic. But instead his readers were led to believe that although Marx got the big picture on capitalism mostly right, he did so with the wrong method. In contrast, orthodox economics largely missed the big picture on capitalism, but had the right method.

As Cassidy was reading the Communist Manifesto, the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis was heating up. Shortly after, in the first year of the new millennium, the dot-com bubble burst. And seven years later, in 2007, the Great Financial Crisis began, lasting into 2009 and shaking the entire world economy. The subsequent weakening of the financialization process — which for years had been lifting the capitalist economy — produced a new normal of seemingly endless stagnation. Economic growth is weak both in the core of the system and in the world economy as a whole (though a few economies, notably China, have shown themselves to be relatively immune to the economic setback). Workers in most of the world have experienced a worsening of their conditions, a change often summed up with the word “precarity.” All of this has sparked a resurgence in interest in Marx’s critique of political economy, and in Marxian theories of monopoly, stagnation, and financialization.

Curiously, in his 2010 book on the Great Financial Crisis, How Markets Fail, Cassidy had very little to say directly about Marx. Perhaps he thought it would have been viewed as unsportsmanlike, equivalent to kicking neoclassical economists when they were down. Still, the two thinkers most lauded in Cassidy’s book were both heterodox economists, well-versed in Marx: Hyman Minsky and Paul Sweezy. Minsky was in part a product of the socialist tradition (his parents met exactly a hundred years ago this month at a party to celebrate the centennial anniversary of Marx’s birth) while Sweezy was the leading US Marxist economist for many decades. It was “Minsky and Sweezy,” Cassidy insisted, who had shown that “the fortunes of the economy at large couldn’t be divorced from what happened on Wall Street,” and who provided the most penetrating explorations into the relation between the real economy and the financialized economy. It was Sweezy (together with Harry Magdoff) who had most forcefully insisted throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s that stagnation and financialization were caught in a “symbiotic embrace.”