We often talk a good Marxist point about the impact of economics on politics. And we have seen this recently in Britain.

Now, as many of you may remember, the Red Brigades was a terrorist, Marxist organization which was very active in Italy from the 1960s until the mid 1980s.

Between 1975 and 1990, under directorate of the FRELIMO party that freed the country, a single party system inspired in Marxist Leninist ideology dominated the country's political scene.

Marxist ideology had become all but a façade not even party apparatchiks pretended to believe it. Poland s economy, close to outright collapse, struggled to meet citizens basic needs, let alone repay foreign loans.

LONDON Groucho Marx has always been my favorite Marxist. One of his jokes goes to the heart of the failure of the ideology the dogmatic religion inflicted on our poor world by his namesake, Karl.

The comedy, created by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka, with Rhys Thomas directing, purports to be found TV a Romanian 1980s buddy cop drama about two Bucharest officers fighting for truth, atheism and the Marxist Leninist way.

There are plenty of honest people in all walks of life, and crooks as well. The quasi Marxist view that our morality stems from our economic position overlooks the moralizing role of family, religion, culture, and art.

But, with the overthrow of Mengistu Haile Mariam s Marxist Leninist dictatorship in 1991, Ethiopia began to transform itself. Today, it ranks among the five fastest growing economies in the world, and is a bastion of regional stability.

Accusing warriors of being traders and traders of being thieves, it shuns its Marxist origins. It will subordinate all who really do work traders, warriors, journalists, and others to party ideologues whose sole job is to search for enemies.

Zenawi has largely escaped sanction from his Western allies, in part because the erudite ex Marxist had a friendly relationship with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and cooperated closely with the Bush administration in counter terrorism efforts in the Horn of Africa.

The Communist Party s official verdict, undoubtedly the product of fierce ideological disputes, is that he was a great Marxist and revolutionary, whose gross mistakes during the Cultural Revolution were outweighed by his contribution to China. His merits, it argues, are primary and his errors secondary.

The Manchester students argue that the mainstream within the discipline (neoclassical theory) has excluded all dissenting opinion, and the crisis is arguably the ultimate price of this exclusion. Alternative approaches such as Post Keynesian, Marxist, and Austrian economics (as well as many others) have been marginalized.

In this sense, Tocqueville s intellectual heirs include the neo Marxist theorists of the Frankfurt School, as well as Hannah Arendt, all of whom feared above all the disintegration of reason in modern societies. Indeed, the French philosopher Marcel Gauchet entitled a recent book Democracy Against Itself.

In this manner, China s government managed to stop a rout, seemingly reinforcing the Marxist view that economic and financial crises do not occur in controlled economies. Indeed, China s leaders seem convinced that price keeping operations amount to an effective mechanism for manipulating stock prices in whatever way they see fit.

Hugo Chávez was very interested in the Third Way a modus vivendi between American style capitalism and state socialism as had been Tony Blair a few years earlier. Chávez himself, dressed in fatigues, briefly graced the meeting with his presence, receiving a heavy volume of Marxist texts from an elderly professor.

This view, propagated since World War II by a quasi Marxist intelligentsia, is so ingrained that the French do not even bother to understand how markets operate. They look upon economics as an ideological battleground, where all views can be entertained without being confronted with logic, much less with facts.

The ideological vacuum left by the death of Marxist orthodoxy was filled with nationalism. And nationalism in China, promoted through schools, mass media, and patriotic monuments and museums, means one thing only the firm rule of the CCP will prevent foreigners, especially Westerners and the Japanese, from humiliating Chinese ever again.

In a continent where anti Americanism remains both very popular and an effective way to consolidate national cohesion and political power, Chávez s attacks found a ready audience. In addition, Uribe s absence allowed Chávez to avoid responding to Colombia s accusations that Venezuela and its ally Ecuador support the narco Marxist FARC.

It is irrelevant that President Vladimir Putin s United Russia Party, unlike the CCP, makes no claim to any form of Marxist ideology. The way both governments operate is quite similar party bosses, tycoons, and corrupt bureaucrats divide the spoils, while promoting chauvinism and traditional values whether those of the Orthodox Church or Confucianism.

Conspicuously, Latin America s last Marxist insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), declared a unilateral cease fire just hours after the announcement that the US and Cuba would restore diplomatic ties. Over the last two years, Cuba has hosted peace negotiations between FARC and the Colombian government, with full US support.

The old state planner Chen Yuan once cautioned that Chinese reformers had created a birdcage economy in which a capitalist bird was growing within a socialist cage. His inference was that, unless Party leaders were careful, this capitalist bird would literally burst out of its socialist cage, spelling an end to China's Marxist Leninist revolution.

In a planned economy like China s, where policymakers use various tools to influence asset prices, such instability could, in theory, be avoided indeed, the Marxist view is that government intervention to stop crises is precisely why controlled economies are superior to their free market counterparts. But, in practice, that does not seem to be the case.

At the recently concluded 11th People s National Congress, the word heard most often in policy discussions was happiness, which had suddenly replaced economic growth as the official mantra. This change may augur future adjustments in China s foreign policy as well, for happiness is a word used more frequently in Chinese traditional political thought than in Marxist political philosophy.

The two party moderation thesis makes sense only if the main differences concern redistributive preferences in a simple model driven by an almost Marxist kind of economic determinism. The left wing party wants to redistribute wealth and incomes more, and the right wing party less but both need to restrain themselves, and in appealing to the median voter, they become near identical alternatives.

From employing its strong trade position to exploiting its near monopoly on the global production of vital resources like rare earth minerals, China has staked out a more domineering role in Asia. In fact, the more openly China has embraced market capitalism, the more nationalist it has become, encouraged by its leaders need for an alternative to Marxist dogma as a source of political legitimacy.

Surprisingly, both local and international analysts had predicted them to finish third, behind the Nepali Congress (NC) and the United Marxist Leninists (UML), the two largest parties that have been at the helm since multi party democracy was restored in Nepal in 1990. While experts are busy trying to explain the Maoists unprecedented triumph, much hope rests on the newly elected members of the 601 seat Constituent Assembly.