Karl Marx lead the dream life of a Jew, sitting every day in the British Museum studying, writing, debating, like Tevie The Milkman's song:
If I were rich, I'd have the time that I lack
To sit in the synagogue and pray.
And maybe have a seat by the Eastern wall.
And I'd discuss the holy books with the learned men, several hours every day.
That would be the sweetest thing of all.
One Marxian idea is the cyclical crises of capitalist overproduction. Is the current crisis a problem of lack of markets? Apparently Obama's economic leadership thinks so, because they are creating artificial demand by public spending and by buying and destroying older cars. Marx said that demand was created by colonial wars, but today it is being supplemented by Government stimulus to encourage civilian spending.
Another Marxian concept is the bitter struggle between finance capital and industrial capital. Could the packaging of subprime mortgages and widepread spaculation interpreted as a battle between two kind of capitals, the indistrial investment and the financial speculative?
The next concept is the need for the Capital to create a hungry “reserve army” of the unemployed, which is the Capital’s weapon in beating down the minimum wage and increasing the hours of the working week. The mass immigration of Mexicans to America - allowed by Bush - intended to create this reserve army of cheap and ready temporary workers.
Globalization is a Marxian idea. Any problem in a colonial market leads to chaos and panic at the center of the system. Giant banks like Lehmann could not resist the panic. Other concepts are the inevitable falling rate of profit, and the tendency to monopoly.
The only way out of these defects of the capitalist system was, according to Marx, colonial wars. These wars would destroy vast amounts of stock and create the demand to move the wheels of production. The Iraq war fulfilled its mission but now, what?
6 comments:
Monopolies usually only flourish when protected by the government.
One of these days you should read The Creature From Jekyll Island, it is the story of the founding of the Federal Reserve, although it is badly written.
Mass immigration as the "reserve army of the unemployed" sounds very credible to me, although the recession has certainly proved more than generous in that regard.
What is also interesting is how the "left", ie the Democratic Party, which should be a bastion of support for the trades unions, is not acting to protect its supporters by doing what it should, which is to send these immigrants back home en masse.
Instead it is promoting mass immigration, not only by not deporting them, but by enticing them in with the prospect of "free" health care, lax enforcement and the usual human rights hypocrisy.
This is profoundly against the interests of unions, and suggests that the Dems are thoroughly infiltrated by capitalists. It also opens the question of how manipulated the average union member must be.
Marx, at least, would not have been surprised by any of this. And nor should we.
Anon.
It is one thing to enumerate the weaknesses of capitalism, but quite another to accurately predict the net outcomes. I think Marx was passably good at the former (and, arguably, amongst the first to try), but execrably bad at the latter.
Predicting the future in a complex (as opposed to merely a complicated) system is next to impossible. Complex systems contain more interacting elements than can be enumerated, and the laws of interaction are frequently unknown, or are known to be nonlinear. Add to this the unpredictability of human behaviour...
Therefore, he can be forgiven for being wrong, although the same cannot be said for those who persisted in following him slavishly into the morass of communism, even when the early results were unequivocally awful.
If the real lesson is the unpredictability of the economic future, then it must also be acknowledged that capitalism as we know it today cannot necessarily be relied on to always deliver a high and rising standard of living.
My personal view (not necessarily original) of the irreducible determinants shaping the medium-term economic future:
1. The ratio of people who solve problems to people who create problems (message to the USA-you are already close to being on the wrong side of this line, and heading rapidly in the wrong direction).
2. The success or failure of efforts to deliver safe energy "too cheap to meter."
3. Just one incident of nuclear war or terrorism, or other successful deployment of WMD by anybody whatsoever.
These are my dark horses; but I think the odds are poor that we will succeed in overcoming or escaping any of them and I think they are the really the horses of a coming apocalypse.
Anon.
Anon, somehow I don't think the libtard-colored alliance cares about the future. One part of that alliance is explicitly evil and the other part is too dumb to care.
I'm thinking in terms of libtard voters when I make that comment, since certain states seem to love to vote Democratic despite being extremely White.
Anon wrote...
What is also interesting is how the "left", ie the Democratic Party, which should be a bastion of support for the trades unions, is not acting to protect its supporters by doing what it should, which is to send these immigrants back home en masse.
Anon, I want to point out something you may not know. In the US "blue states tend to have workforces that are are around 25% unionized, which is another factor dragging them to the left. Most "red" states however are what are known as right-to-work states and they have unionization rates of between 2-8%. The two groups of states have different forms of economic organization, which contributes to the different political views in the two blocs of states. Or maybe it is the other way around.
This means that except for California most union members live away from the Mexican border. Second, in the long term the colored vote is/will-be bigger than the union vote. Most of the unionized companies in the US are in long term decline (think of GM) and many of the remaining unionized employees work for the government.
This makes sense, Ronduck, since I see the current Democratic Party assault on traditional American values emanating now much more from an unholy alliance of illegal immigration, non-whites, and Wall Street greed than from the union movement.
Anon.
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