All this talk of an imminent financial crisis on an unprecedented scale has made me wonder whether Karl Marx might have been right all along. The financial meltdown certainly makes a change from that other popular discourse of the apocalypse - the melting ice-caps and other environmentalist doomsaying - but maybe it could be good news. Well, good news for anyone who would welcome the final collapse of capitalism due to the stresses caused by its own internal contradictions.
For those of you who like a challenge, here is an excerpt from Marx's Das Kapital, which strikes a chord with me when I come to look at the market shenanigans and economic hocus-pocus that has resulted in the vast majority of us having to tighten our belts (again).
The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-expansion appear as the starting and the closing point, the motive and the purpose of production; that production is only production for capital and not vice versa, the means of production are not mere means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers. The limits within which the preservation and self-expansion of the value of capital resting on the expropriation and pauperisation of the great mass of producers can alone move — these limits come continually into conflict with the methods of production employed by capital for its purposes, which drive towards unlimited extension of production, towards production as an end in itself, towards unconditional development of the social productivity of labour.
The means — unconditional development of the productive forces of society — comes continually into conflict with the limited purpose, the self-expansion of the existing capital. The capitalist mode of production is, for this reason, a historical means of developing the material forces of production and creating an appropriate world-market and is, at the same time, a continual conflict between this its historical task and its own corresponding relations of social production.
[Source: Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, Part III, Ch. 15]
Some of you will no doubt point out that Marxism has been proven wrong by the Soviet venture and by other communist states, all of which could be seen as palpable failures. Nevertheless, I could make the case that each such regime deviated from Marx's vision in some way, or indeed that the required conditions were not in place for a global transition from capitalism to socialism as the mode of production.
Then again, perhaps Christmas has arrived just in time. After all, it is the annual consumer-hogfest during which we buy plastic tat that we don't need. A proportion of which we give to people we don't like in order to celebrate an event that many of us don't believe in. So if you want to contradict Marx and my good self, make sure that you spend lots of money over the next few weeks and boost the economy, or at least maintain its life support system.
Recently Graham at Entrecard published a post promoting the use of social content website Mixx. Having become disillusioned with Digg I thought I would give it a try. I have created a profile on Mixx and added the code to my template to put a button in the footer of each blog. The code available on the Mixx site didn't quite work properly so I have edited it to work on Blogspot pages. This code will now use the correct URL for the post, making submission easier.
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