In his column “Red flags, not red-baiting, on wage petition” (Op-ed, March 16), Tom Keane denounces red-baiting, then proceeds, it seems, to red-bait Julie Ann Matthaei, one of 600 economists who signed a petition in favor of raising the minimum wage.
First, Keane concentrates on the “Marxist” part of Matthaei’s self-description as a “Marxist-feminist-anti-racist-ecological-economist” as a reason to reject an argument for raising the minimum wage.
He then confuses Marxism, an analytic theory of class struggle and the revolutionary change of society, with the worst excesses of applied communism. No one could deny those excesses, but Keane seems to forget the “toxic mix of repression, dictatorship, and mass murder” that has sometimes resulted from the application of capitalism as well.
Many Marxists today are trying to figure out how to have a more democratic society with a more egalitarian class structure. So are many non-Marxists, including many of the other economists who signed the petition in favor of raising the minimum wage.