I appreciate your point -- but let me restate mine and add another.

1) Marx represented the last serious challenge to the capitalist's grand narrative that I am aware of. So when people like Judt dismiss Marx, they are creating an intellectual vacuum that could only intensify the excesses of "the market" -- as it seems to in fact have done.

2)You and I both, I suspect, would be more than happy -- even eager! -- to consider new ideas that might fill that dialectical vacuum. But where are they? Society as a whole can hardly be expected to recognize, much less embrace, something that isn't there to begin with.

Lacking new ideas for a way forward, we regress to old ones and go backward. Some to Islam. Some to the winner-take-all capitalism of the robber barons and a sort of neo-feudalism. Most to simple despair and the perception that they are fated to be the losers in a zero-sum game.

We seem to need to return to ancient fundamentals. To questions like "who should get the best flutes" taken up with an attitude that the correct answer almost certainly isn't "whoever can pay the highest price for them."