Derb, I wouldn’t be the first to say that Jerry Cohen was the best Marxist apologist I’ve come across. He’s now the late Jerry Cohen, but I was lucky enough to see him give a lively talk called “Wild Philosophers I Have Known” at the Jowett Society in 2005.

As a founder of what’s called “Analytical Marxism” — what Cohen called “Non-Bull**** Marxism” — he brings to the subject the almost exhaustive precision of someone trained in 20th-century Anglophone philosophy. If Marx himself could be baroque and obscure, his students were even worse. But Cohen is able to cut through the ideological fog and distill the theory down to something like a set of propositions constituting an argument. It’s still false for all the familiar reasons, but at least it’s coherently false.

Here’s the first part of a video Cohen did sometime in the late 80s called “Against Capitalism.” You can find much more on Youtube. He’s clearly presented the argument in such a way as to make it comprehensible to the broadest possible audience. Unfortunately the result is that his tone comes across as a bit condescending.

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Which reminds me of a review essay I wrote on this subject in a recent issue of NR. Look at that! I didn’t even start this post with the intent to self-promote.