“Decades of declining real wages with rising levels of exploitation and economic inequality, increasingly unaffordable energy costs, and a loss of the illusion of middle-class status. … Declining state support for social welfare programs, privatization and deregulation, record levels of migration of people, growing urban slums, and increasingly authoritarian state interventions in the lives of ordinary citizens have become the norm in the past two decades.”

Sound like a lament of the Bush-Cheney era? Sort of. It’s the teaser from the seventh annual conference of the New Marxian Times, which a dear friend (I refuse to name names) coaxed me to attend in November at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

With capitalism going through its own economic and social crises, the conference organizers asked, how can Marxism be re-thought to respond to today’s challenges?

Never mind that the proceedings were haunted by the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, something of a low-water mark for Marxists, the contrasts with capitalist collapse seemed to resonate with the surprisingly young crowd. Most seemed to be in their 20s. They may be the children of people worried that President Obama and a band of Socialists are going to make them get health insurance, but gathered in Amherst, they were speaking intellectually about abolishing private property amid a new multiplicity of states, corporations, global organizations and NGOs, and descending at times into “analytical reformulations of sexuality” and “medical tourism” and all manner of p.c. sympathies.

As a colleague reminded me, “Some things survive in academia long after they’ve outlived their use in other surroundings.”