If you walk through London's Highgate Cemetery and listen carefully, you can hear the faint sound of laughter coming from the grave of it's most famous resident.
The world financial system is in meltdown, the Governments are taking a controlling stake in the banks and are considering renationlising the utilities companies while people are contemplating putting their money in tins or under the mattress. Banker is the most hated profession and financial institutions collapse with the money makers losing their positions while the workers are losing their properties.
Could it be that Karl Marx's had been on to something?
His basic point was that capitalism is awful. He predicted that the workers would be exploited and the capitalists would get rich at their expense. The good news was that it would collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions.
Can't argue with his assessment so far, he certainly had Capitalism's number with the call that it was prone to crisis. It is exploitative (seen any of your utility bills recently?) and unstable with regular crashes that see's millions thrown onto the unemployment lines while making many homeless when it all goes wrong, as it has consistently down the decades with calamitous results.
The irony is, as we have seen, that only the Governments are big enough to intervene and sort the mess out by taking control and sidelining the capitalists who made the mess in the first place.
We should recognise that a phase of this particular flawed system has passed and we must think of another one or forever repeat the cycle because it is collapsing under its own weight.
14 comments:
As a critique of capitalism, I think Das Kapital still stands up today as unusually prescient, perceptive and ahead of its time. Marx was an all-time great writer on political economy and will always be regarded as such. And I do love his tomb in Highgate too.
That's Marx then.
MarxISM on the other hand, doesn't stand up at all. Which is why, if we look around the world, we can see that it basically hasn't. Any remaining pockets of Marxist or communist governance is only being kept in place by coercion.
Any system that doesn't accomodate aspects that are inherent to human nature (e.g. wanting to better oneself, natural competitiveness, the desire for freedom of choice) is pretty much doomed to failure from the start.
I do view Marxism as a last century idea but then i do Capitalism as well. Any system would need to incorporate the best of both. The competitive nature of Capitalism to keep prices down entwined with the equality nature of Marxism.
I know i get it in the ear everytime i bring it up but i do consider the idea of paying everyone the same or within a rigid pay frame as a key component to achieving it.
You speak of Marx as if he is some mild breed socialist. He wasn't anywhere near a mild breed socialist. In fact, he'd like to see mild breed socialists (like our dear Lucy) offed in his bloody revolution.
Marx' writings on political economy were based on numerous very antiquated theories like the Labor Theory of Value, the Iron Law of Wages, and pre-Mengerian monetary theory. And of course he came from the Continental Philosophy tradition which is for almost all practical purposes inferior to Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy. And his belief in the impending collapse of capitalism was based on his adherence to a particular form of Hegelian materialism.
Marx is also misunderstood here. At points he mentions that for the working classes the second best economic model to communism is pure capitalism. In many respects he was a loyal Smithian free-marketeer except for the violent revolutionary communism part. He opposed restrictions on free trade and so on, and he strongly opposed gradualistic approaches to implementing socialism.
And Marx' "capitalism" is wildly different from present-day "capitalism". I would watch the equivocation of terms. We aren't an industrialized dystopia, we live in a post-industrial world where hell hasn't frozen over.
So yeah, except for the fact that he was often an almost free-marketeer Marx was 110% wrong about everything.
And haven't y'all noticed the world-wide evening out trend. The Chinese and the Indians are getting richer a little faster, but once they catch up they'll get richer at a steadier pace. There is also a greater disparity of wealth in developing countries. Additionally, the notion of "old wealth" is rapidly losing relevance (and it means nothing in the States).
Take Bill Gates. Love or hate Microsoft, he's a genius. He has brought many thousands of times as much wealth into the world as the average Joe, and he has made many thousands of times as much as them. And he'll either give all of his money away or his descendants will spend it all in one to three generations and they'll start at square 1. Is that "unfair"? I wouldn't think so.
And of course, one cannot have both equality of distribution and equality of opportunity. You have to pick one equality at the expense of the other. If you want equal distribution, you can't have equal opportunity and similarly in the reverse. I'd say that for all of the flaws in the world, modern societies have a pretty good balance between the two. Heaven forbid a certain kind of equality be inherent in "capitalism"!
-Nog
Lucy, do i agree with Nog or not? i'm confused.
Just nod and start talking about the weather Chris.
It's good stuff though - he makes me feel quite nostalgic for this 'Origins of Western Political Thought' paper I did more years ago than I care to remember.
Cheezy, do you still have that paper? Could you post it?
I'm sure it would provide some interesting discussion.
Cheers.
Ah, I see what you've done there... an amusing joke based on the double meaning inherent in the word 'paper'. You're coming along nicely, mate!
You continue to disappoint, Cheezy.
Provide the paper you wrote and share with us your expertise in, and comprehension of, things political.
There's a good chap!
I'm not sure what you're driving at, David.
What do you mean by "provide the paper"? (Hmmmm, maybe you don't get out much)...
In 1990, I took a paper called 'Origins of Western Political Thought' in the first year of my BA.
'Paper' is the word we used to describe each of the 'modules' (I suspect that's the trendier word these days) that made up the degree.
Now, in terms of things I can 'provide', there are essays that I wrote as part of completing this paper. I can remember writing about Das Kapital, John Locke's 'Two Treatises of Government', and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's stuff about man in his natural state and the social contract etc.
This was before I owned a computer, so they're all written on type-writer. Or even handwritten, I think, when that broke down. They're probably still all at my parents place (which, by lucky chance, I am visiting in about one month's time).
So... When I get there, do you want me to snail-mail all the essays I wrote when I was 18 years old over to you, like, personally?
OK then! Send your address to me at scratch-sniff@hotmail.com and I'll photocopy them all and send them on.
I'm not sure how much they'll say about my "expertise in, and comprehension of, things political" because, like most people, I've learned a few things since I was an undergrad. But you never know, you may find something of interest in them. Send me your address and I'll happily oblige...
PS: Apart from all of that, David, it's still OK for you to post something to reveal your own perspicacity about Marx and Marxism... y'know, to actually comment on the substance of the post, which is always a nice, polite thing to do.
Go on, son, why don't you actually try and address the topic of the post (i.e. without behaving like a cunt)... See if you can do it.
I'm curious now...
Cheezy, I don't have any time for lowlife people who use filthy language.
Why expose your total lack of breeding and class and bring Lucy's blog into disrepute as well?
As I said once before: you're a British Tosser, one with a small, seamy mind.
Begone!
Breeding?? Seriously, your comeback to Cheezy is to dig up a 25 yr old paper, and accuse him of a lack of BREEDING? Daniel, by any chance have you been accused in the past, of lacking any semblance of humor, tact or personality?
I do have to say that having an Australian lecture us about breeding is probably the funniest thing that Daniel has ever posted. Daniel, leave and go make the sheep nervous.
Buh Bye
I haven't received your email, David. Don't you want to read what I thought about the works of John Locke when I was a teenager?
Sheesh... Now you've offended me.
Right, sarcasm over. Because I'm guessing that nobody else here would have any interest in reading it either. Don't blame 'em.
Moreover, I'm pretty sure that everyone knows why you brought this matter up in the first place.
Because I'm someone who has taken issue with the way you comport yourself on this blog (i.e. no substantial comments, just snide little insults) then you've got the hump with me, and decided to insinuate that I don't have an education.
Once again David, an insult, not a substantial comment. And ONCE AGAIN... I invite you to actually provide evidence for an assertion that you have made.
i.e. If you can find any comment of mine which would indicate that I am so politically naïve that I can't possibly have taken the aforementioned paper in Political Studies... (even though it was only a Stage 1 paper... straight out of school... back in the days when they paid us to go to University, rather than vice versa)... then kindly provide this evidence and we'll discuss.
Please. For once. Discuss an issue.
Or better yet, how about you just shut up about things you know nothing about?
Just a thought.
Although, hang on, here's fun: You've asked me to provide something that I can't post electronically - i.e. my two-decades-old essays (although I'm still more than willing to post to you, by snail mail - let me know).
OK then, how about you do the same?
On David's toe-curlingly pompous homepage, we can read that he describes himself as a "manager, teacher, journalist and author".
Author? Now I'm curious. Morbidly so. How can someone whose ideas can't sustain a paragraph's worth of comment possibly deal with having a fill a whole book?
Amazon link please? This I must see.
Post a Comment