The celebrated historian,back in the public eye with a biography of Henry Kissinger, joined us to answer your questions – and tackled the likes of Isis, and Obama and Christopher Hitchens 2.20pm BSTThat’s all from Niall todayThank you for all your questions,serious and frivolous. Forgive me for not answering them all. This was rather like the kind of exam one has nightmares approximately: an infinite number of questions, some of them quite clearly unanswerable. As this is the Guardian, or I have no doubt I have failed the exam. 2.18pm BSTSamSquanch asks:In your opinion,what did Marx glean wrong (or upright) approximately the historical development of capitalism?I used to say that I was a Marxist, except that I was on the side of the bourgeoisie. To be serious, or Marx's gargantuan mistake in trying to marry Hegel to Ricardo was to believe in the inexorable polarisation of wealth distribution. He was certain the proletariat would just withhold getting crushed and failed to foresee that capitalism would require workers also to be consumers. The notion of inexorable widening inequality continues to fascinate - hence the popularity of Thomas Piketty's equally wrong book.
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Source: theguardian.com