Galbraith on Marx

In homage to Karl Marx’s birthday on May 5 and the recent passing of John Kenneth Galbraith, I read Galbraith’s The Massive Dissent of Karl Marx in The Essential Galbraith (originally published in The Age of Uncertainty).

Here is Galbraith citing and commenting on Marx.

Marx, during these years, was not only gathering ideas but considering the role of ideas themselves. For John Maynard Keynes ideas were the motivating force in historical change. Marx, while not denying the importance of ideas, carried the proposition a step further back. The accepted ideas of any period are singularly those that serve the dominant economic interest:

. . . intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed. The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of the ruling class.

I have never thought Marx wrong on this. Nothing more reliably characterizes great social truth, economic truth in particular, than its tendency to be agreeable to the significant economic interest. What economists believe and teach is rarely hostile to the institutions that reflect the dominant economic power. Not to notice this takes effort, although many succeed.