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News & ArtsTuesday, March 31, 2009
Economy Das Kapital Today
Posted by Charles Mudede on Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 11:12 AM
In the "The Revenge of Karl Marx," Christopher Hitchens says something that all Marxist have known since the rise of neoliberalism: Marx is still relevant. In fact, David Harvey even argues that the central ideas in his most important book, Das Kapital, are more relevant now than in Marx's own time (the 1870s).
And now for the most important paragraph in Hitchens' short article:
As I write this, every newspaper informs me of frantic efforts by merchants to unload onto the consumer, at almost any price, the vast surplus of unsold commodities that have accumulated since the credit crisis began to take hold. The phrase crisis of over-production, which I learned so many long winters ago in “agitational” meetings, recurs to my mind. On other pages, I learn that the pride of American capitalism has seized up and begun to rust, and that automobiles may cease even to be made in Detroit as a consequence of insane speculation in worthless paper “derivatives.” Did I not once read somewhere about the bitter struggle between finance capital and industrial capital? The lines of jobless and hungry begin to lengthen, and what more potent image of those lines do we possess than that of the “reserve army” of the unemployed—capital’s finest weapon in beating down the minimum wage and increasing the hours of the working week? A disturbance in a remote corner of the world market leads to chaos and panic at the very center of the system (and these symptoms are given a multiplier effect when the pangs begin at the center itself), and John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, doughty champions of capitalism at The Economist, admit straightforwardly in their book on the advantages of globalization that Marx, “as a prophet of the ‘universal interdependence of nations,’ as he called globalization … can still seem startlingly relevant … His description of globalization remains as sharp today as it was 150 years ago.” The falling rate of profit, the tendency to monopoly … how wrong could that old reading-room attendant have been?
Sadly, the rest of the article is not as impressive as this paragraph. Lastly, people have to dissociate Karl Marx from the USSR. They are not the same thing. More than anything else, Marx is "the prophet of the ‘universal interdependence of nations..." Meaning, he is the prophet of the world that we live in now.
1
I always liked Engel more.
Not as cool a beard, but far more insightful and not as much of a show off.
Not as cool a beard, but far more insightful and not as much of a show off.
2
Have you ever been to a communist state?
I have. I was in Moscow in 1991. I saw the effects of communism first-hand. They were giving us 10X the official exchange rate for dollars. The lines for essentials. The disrepair. The unmotivated workers. I was hungry a lot, and I was on vacation.
I kissed the ground when I got back to the US. Our system is far from perfect, but it is far better than the disaster that is centrally planned economies.
I know it's cool and all, but c'mon. Go there. You'll be happy you live here.
Have you ever been to a communist state?
I have. I was in Moscow in 1991. I saw the effects of communism first-hand. They were giving us 10X the official exchange rate for dollars. The lines for essentials. The disrepair. The unmotivated workers. I was hungry a lot, and I was on vacation.
I kissed the ground when I got back to the US. Our system is far from perfect, but it is far better than the disaster that is centrally planned economies.
I know it's cool and all, but c'mon. Go there. You'll be happy you live here.
4
@2
that's a misleading comparison. to take the USSR right before it collapsed and compare it to the economic superpower of the US is apples and oranges. what would you say if you visited the us during the height of the great depression, when our country almost collapsed as well?
by your logic, i could point to the great third-world democracy of thailand and declare that capitalism/democracy is a failed system.
and don't forget that, when the communists came to power, it was because russia was a third-world backwater in the middle of a world war. the communists survived a civil war, a nazi invasion, a world-wide blockade, and still managed to turn the country into a military and economic power.
not saying the ussr was not a deeply flawed, totalitarian system. but it is unfair to compare it to the us.
and, as charles noted, it should not be the measure of marx/communism's merits. it became it's own beast.
that's a misleading comparison. to take the USSR right before it collapsed and compare it to the economic superpower of the US is apples and oranges. what would you say if you visited the us during the height of the great depression, when our country almost collapsed as well?
by your logic, i could point to the great third-world democracy of thailand and declare that capitalism/democracy is a failed system.
and don't forget that, when the communists came to power, it was because russia was a third-world backwater in the middle of a world war. the communists survived a civil war, a nazi invasion, a world-wide blockade, and still managed to turn the country into a military and economic power.
not saying the ussr was not a deeply flawed, totalitarian system. but it is unfair to compare it to the us.
and, as charles noted, it should not be the measure of marx/communism's merits. it became it's own beast.
5
@2 - um, no, for years I wasn't permitted to travel to them without both a pre-briefing and a post-briefing, due to my clearance level.
But I hear Cuba's great for tourism.
But I hear Cuba's great for tourism.
6
Maybe the lines of jobless have increased, but the lines of hungry? I've seen no evidence of that. Our communist government support system has taken care of those people.
8
I just finished reading "The Big Three in Economics" by Mark Skousen, comparing Marx, Smith, and Keynes. I was trying to learn about economic theory, but mostly I was trying to discover why Marxism was not successful in the USSR or really anywhere. Ultimately it was unsatisfying, because clearly the author was a staunch Smith advocate.
So what I'm wondering is whether anybody can recommend a book that talks about how maybe Marxism, socialism or even communism could have worked - was it just a nasty coincidence of personalities that led to distillation of power over public interest? Is Marxism working somewhere? Know any good books?
So what I'm wondering is whether anybody can recommend a book that talks about how maybe Marxism, socialism or even communism could have worked - was it just a nasty coincidence of personalities that led to distillation of power over public interest? Is Marxism working somewhere? Know any good books?
9
@8 - Russia and Cuba never had a working capitalist democracy before trying to impose communism, so by textbook they would not have been good locations for such an experiment.
Mind, that doesn't explain Eastern Germany or Poland, both of which did.
They're all Enlightenment ideals from Western approaches anyway, and thus doomed to failure as they are crushed by the Eastern hybrids.
Mind, that doesn't explain Eastern Germany or Poland, both of which did.
They're all Enlightenment ideals from Western approaches anyway, and thus doomed to failure as they are crushed by the Eastern hybrids.
10
Marxism will always be popular. Just like people turn to God in desperate times, people turn to Marx when the status quo has a reshuffling period.
12
@7: I read it but missed your link to harvey. You should quote from him. Marx may be relevant, but Hitchens isn't.
13
I'm about as avowed market fundamentalist neo-liberal as has ever posed on Slog, and I agree with Charles on this one point: Marx was brilliantly priescient in his analysis of capitalist society.
But of course, he had absolutely no idea how to constuct a viable alternative.
But of course, he had absolutely no idea how to constuct a viable alternative.
14
@10: Marxist critique of political economy hasn't been debunked. Marxist teleology has. Almost no one believes in the historical inevitability of communism anymore. But if you read Capital, you'll see that Marx is almost entirely writing about capitalism, not about the world after capitalism.
15
Amen Trevor. People who haven't actually read Marx make that mistake all the time. Almost all of his writing was about capitalism. In fact, he had an enormous amount of respect for capitalism.
17
Just to add to the "Marxism shouldn't be equated with The Communist Manifesto" thread:
Marx did a brilliant job of debunking the notion that there is a stable basis for monetary value. The value of a monetary unit is always relative to a series of other abstractions, which are in turn variably related to that same monetary unit. His point is that there is never anything at the root of all those relations. The critique of fetish value in Capital is almost a standalone explanation of why things like CDS both work so well and fail so spectacularly.
Marx did a brilliant job of debunking the notion that there is a stable basis for monetary value. The value of a monetary unit is always relative to a series of other abstractions, which are in turn variably related to that same monetary unit. His point is that there is never anything at the root of all those relations. The critique of fetish value in Capital is almost a standalone explanation of why things like CDS both work so well and fail so spectacularly.
18
Hmmm... So the recent crisis proves Marx right? Yet the massive buildup in wealth over the last half century, the exponential slope of global GDP since the end of the 19th century, the increase of life expectancies in non-developing countries, and the systematic decline of every centrally planned economy doesn't prove him wrong? Trade leads to monopolies? Ridiculous. This is a classic case of selective evidence, the same kind that periodically makes Nostradamus look prescient or sends the Christian apocalyptics scurrying into their basements. Decoupling Marx from the USSR is all well and good, yet in EVERY instance in history Marxism lead to dictatorship. The idea that you could have a ruling party that is less corrupt and power hungry than those that exist under institutional democracy is naive in the extreme. Economies (and societies) are emergent phenomena-- they cannot be planned from the top down, period. As such, there will always be unfortunate side effects (inequality, bubble economies, etc) that can be limited but not eliminated. Marx will always come into vogue during a downturn. When the economy recovers, and it will, he'll be relegated back into obscurity. Enjoy it while you can.
19
@8 kathryn - I would recommend Charles Edward Lindblom's "The Market System." I have not read a better single volume explanation of why the alternatives to the market system have universally fallen before capitalist societies. Quite simply, the market provides for "free" a great number of essential functions for society that otherwise require enormous human effort.
20
After dissociating Marx from USSR, you need to dissociate him from China. And then from Cambodia. And then from East Germany. And then...
Isn't one of the definitions of insanity to keep conducting the same experiment over and over, expecting to get a different result?
Isn't one of the definitions of insanity to keep conducting the same experiment over and over, expecting to get a different result?
21
Again:
Have you ever been to a communist state?
If not, withhold your judgment until you have.
You will not be such a staunch defender of what is inherently an unnatural system.
Communism allows corruption to thrive at levels that best even ours, which is saying something.
Again:
Have you ever been to a communist state?
If not, withhold your judgment until you have.
You will not be such a staunch defender of what is inherently an unnatural system.
Communism allows corruption to thrive at levels that best even ours, which is saying something.
22
@18: How is that a case of "selective evidence" [sic]? Marx was well aware that industrial capitalism could dramatically improve overall productivity and therefore create the conditions in which the average person could expect to have a decent quality of life.
For fuck's sake people: Marx did not coin the positivist philosophies of the Lenins and Maos and Stalins of the world. He did not say that communism would come about as the result of a worker's party vanguard of revolutionary leaders. What he said was that capitalism is constantly working to resolve this series of internal contradictions, and that we would sometimes see those contradictions smoothed over by progressive reforms, and sometimes see those contradictions cause crises of value that would threaten to topple the system.
It was never "One day there will be a crisis of overproduction and communism will live happily ever after lawl." It was: capitalism will continue to experience those cycles of extremes until (if ever) its power basis is fundamentally restructured.
For fuck's sake people: Marx did not coin the positivist philosophies of the Lenins and Maos and Stalins of the world. He did not say that communism would come about as the result of a worker's party vanguard of revolutionary leaders. What he said was that capitalism is constantly working to resolve this series of internal contradictions, and that we would sometimes see those contradictions smoothed over by progressive reforms, and sometimes see those contradictions cause crises of value that would threaten to topple the system.
It was never "One day there will be a crisis of overproduction and communism will live happily ever after lawl." It was: capitalism will continue to experience those cycles of extremes until (if ever) its power basis is fundamentally restructured.
24
whoops- I used the marxist website link that has deleted that part.... find a harvard classic and support your local bookstore...
26
@22-- You're right, obviously. Marx was more nuanced than he's often given credit for (though he was still wrong about most things). However, the "Marx was right!" jubilation that appears every time there's a financial crisis is ridiculous. So Marx predicted boom-and-bust cycles? So what? Every other economist noticed the same thing. Marx was the one that predicted the end of capitalism. And he was wrong. And while we're not associating Marx with the practitioners of his theories, why do we have to associate this crisis, or the United States, with capitalism? Adam Smith never wrote about Credit Default Swaps.
27
Adam Smith had a hilariously naive belief, but that doesn't invalidate the fact he set much of the foundation for economic thought for us to build up and tear down.
Also, if you water down Marx enough because a lot of what he says has been shown to be wrong (like LTV) then he really isn't saying anything unique.
Also, if you water down Marx enough because a lot of what he says has been shown to be wrong (like LTV) then he really isn't saying anything unique.
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