After John McDonnell praised Karl Marx’s Das Kapital on Sunday, Jeremy Corbyn today doubled down and described the philosopher as a ‘great thinker’. This has led to some light mockery today, with the Liberal Democrats’ Tom Brake getting in on the fun — claiming the Labour leader deserves ‘full Marx’ for this latest gaffe.
But the Lib Dems would do well to take heed from the old adage ‘people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’. It turns out that Vince Cable — the Lib Dem stalwart who is trying to win back his seat in Twickenham — is also a fan of Marx. In an article for the Mail, he ranked Marx as No 4 on his list of the ‘the greatest economists’:
‘OK, Marx might now be remembered as a revolutionary advocate of communism – he co-wrote The Communist Manifesto – but he was a leading 19th-century economist in the ‘classical’ tradition.
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