The legacy of Marxist theorizing in this century and the last is a contradictory one. Karl Marx himself developed a totalizing view of capitalism as a global system which transformed human social relations by relying on the most advanced economic theory of his day and information about the workings of nineteenth-century capitalism gathered by bourgeois institutions. For instance, the factory inspectors employed by the British state from the early 1830s, though few in number and largely impotent, provided Marx and Friedrich Engels with a treasure trove of data without which the development of the empirically grounded arguments of Capital would have been impossible. So enthusiastic was Marx about the value of a bureaucracy armed with the tools of scientific objectivity that he described the head of the factory inspectorate, Leonard Horner, as the “censor of factories.”

The irony is that Marx’s own pragmatic engagement with “bourgeois science” has often not been shared by his followers. While left-wing economists developed sophisticated understandings of the effects of technological change on profitability and philosophers thought seriously about the right balance between the power of the individual freedom and the authority of social institutions, dogmatic Marxists often siloed themselves in theoretical ghettos. There they frequently developed a priori explanations of economic and social phenomena that fit like baggy clothes onto reality.

The Marxist economist Joan Robinson had perhaps the harshest response to this strain of “zombie Marxism”: