As Capitalism Crumbles, Chinese Embrace Mao, Marx

The woes of international capitalism are fueling renewed interest in the ur-texts of Chinese Communism, MSNBC reports. Sales of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and Mao’s “little red book” are skyrocketing in China, where the publisher of Kapital has seen a fivefold increase in sales since late last year. The German publisher of the anticapitalist work is also doing swift business. “The financial crisis brought us a huge bump,” he said.

“We’ve been wading across the stream by feeling the way, trying to reach the other side of the stream in capitalism,” one Chinese professor said. “Now the building on the bank has collapsed, and we realize maybe we had a wrong goal.” The books by Marx and Mao, nearly ubiquitous decades ago, fell out of favor during China’s capitalist experiment. A return is natural “when we find what we believed earlier isn’t always correct,” the professor explained. (More Karl Marx stories.)