Sir, – I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiments expressed in Maeve Halpin's letter (June 9th), but her interpretation of Karl Marx is completely wrong: Marx was not, as Maeve Halpin would have it, a social democratic reformer calling for proper regulation of the capitalist system and a "return" to the primacy of politics over economics; he was a communist revolutionary who believed capitalism was ultimately incapable of reform and that the state – at least in part the expression of national politics – was nothing more than the board of directors of that particular enterprise. Your reader seems to be confusing Marx with Keynes, a classic liberal economist who believed capitalism, if it is to be saved, would have to engage with the types of reform she seems to be recommending. –Yours, etc,
EOIN DILLON,
Dublin 8.