When I claimed on Twitter this morning that Blair is an out-of-date ideologue, I was met with the snark: "but you're a Marxist, nerr nerr." This misses the point, in two different ways.

First, we all have ideologies, in the sense of belief systems - even technocrats and centrists. What makes you an ideologue is not so much what you believe as the strength which which you believe it. There's a big difference between being an extremist and being a fanatic. The compact OED defines an ideologue as:

A person who follows a system of ideas and principles in a strict and inflexible way.

By this definition it is not we erratic Marxists who are ideologues so much as those who are fanatically centrist. Indeed, my Marxism arises in part out of scepticism - a suspicion that centrists over-estimate the payoffs to small tweaks to capitalism.

Secondly - and I might have mentioned this before - there are many ways in which Marxism is relevant today. To offer just five:

- Secular stagnation might be due to a fall (pdf) in the rate of profit and/or to the possibility that decentralized capitalists under-invest for fear of future competition.

- Crony capitalism - whereby the state stifles the free market and gives favours to big business - exemplifies Marx's claim that the state is not a neutral actor but rather "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

- Research into cognitive biases has vindicated Marxists' claim that inequalities persist in part because capitalism fosters beliefs (pdf) which legitimate (pdf) inequality.

- Inequality exists not (just) because of differences in marginal product, but because of differences in power: bosses have it; workers (with some exceptions) don't.

- The failure of managerialism to raise aggregate productivity, allied to evidence for the effectiveness of cognitive diversity and for the efficiency of coops poses the question: could it be that top-down management is not a means of increasing efficiency, but a process whereby bosses can extract rents for themselves? This is a Marxian question.

My point here is not that Marx was right about everything. He wasn't: in particular, he was wrong to believe that workers would become a revolutionary agent. And it should go without saying that my Marxism is about as far from Stalinism as you'll get: it's the Stalinists in boardrooms who are the object of my ire.

Instead, what I'm doing is trying to reject both overconfidence - remember the title of my blog? - and a simple-minded tribalism which splits us all into "goodies" ("centrists") and "baddies". Sadly, however, overconfidence and tribalism are dominant features of politics now.