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.