How can we teach Marx to today’s students?

Teaching Marx in an economics programme is, today, a difficult task. From the perspective of an Italian university teacher, such difficulty mostly resides in the diffusion of a dogmatic attitude: the end of the Soviet Union, and hence of the Stalinist use of Marxism, necessarily entails the dismissal of Karl Marx’s works. This dogma shows a cultural crisis, which has also affected many economists. The paper stresses that a crucial concept in Marx’s analysis is reproduction. Teaching Marx starting from the reproduction schemes and introducing on these bases the theory of crisis leads – according to our experience – to three main outcomes: 1. It allows students to be aware that crises are not casual accidents; 2. It clarifies why in Marx we find powerful analytical tools to explain the forms assumed by capitalist crises; 3. It can raise doubts about the putative indisputability accorded to the scientific method of orthodox economics for the understanding of reality.