Friday, October 24, 2008

Global Economic Crisis and the Spectre of Marx



With the impending collapse of the entire capitalist system, the revolution must surely be at hand. More likely the media needs fuel to feed its ever expanding furnace, and Marx is useful fodder, as the most tenuous link is all that is needed to run with a story, especially in the world of opinion and columnists.

What we have learned in the past few weeks is if you are not promoting the individual in economic practice, then you are a socialist, or worse, a communist. We know this from recent congressional debates over the Wall Street rescue package; this is a socialism for which I will not stand called several Republicans.

It is easy to see why we have seen such a surge in the term 'socialism' being bandied about in the media.

Apparently Germans have been rushing to buy up Marx's Das Kapital. BBC Story.

The obvious reality is that some good old fashioned Keynesian capitalism is being deployed to solve a problem of deregulated capitalism, so I really don't know how or why Marx has come into any of this at all (other than his analyses of capitalism is still fundamentally strong and some US senators still fear those reds under their beds to the degree that even George W Bush is an evil socialist).

Still, rather than buy yourself a copy of Kapital, or even to read it, Librivox has recently released it in free digital talking book form. Librivox Das Kapital