Marx - Prophet of capitalism, Business Standard, V V / New Delhi, Apr 16, 2009

About fifteen years ago, after the collapse of communism in east Europe, there appeared a general impression that Marx was now irrelevant: he was dead, and buried for ever under the rubble of the Berlin Wall. No one need read him again. “What we are witnessing,” Francis Fukuyama proclaimed at the end of the Cold War, “is not just the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.” But history soon returned with a vengeance. First in August 1998, the economic meltdown in Russia, currency collapse in Asia and market panic around the world that made London’s Financial Times wonder if we had moved “from the triumph of global capitalism to its crisis in barely a decade.” The article was headlined, “Das Kapital Revisited.” The current financial crisis has reiterated the enduring relevance of Marx which has been ably presented for the common reader in Francis Wheen’s Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’: A Biography (Atlantic Books, $11.50).

Wheen tells us that the bourgeoisie has not died. But nor has Marx: his errors or unfulfilled prophecies about capitalism are eclipsed and transcended with a piercing analysis with which he revealed the nature of the beast.

“Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, were swept away, all new found ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air,” he wrote in the Communist Manifesto.

And not just in capitalism’s homelands: “The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarous nations, into civilisation.”

One reason why Marx has been dismissed as a ‘determinist’ and ‘an economic materialist’ is because Marxist thought has not been studied in depth or simply because its critics have deliberately twisted it for their own ends. Marx did not believe in an entity called the ‘economy’. The core of his thought and the reason why it survives which Wheen shows in clear, simple prose, is the conflict between the forces and relations of production. In the Manifesto Marx acknowledges the genius of the capitalist system, its inventive and creative nature and its scorn for tradition, custom and fetish.

But the menace occurs when it erects a thing beyond the control of its creators. Take ‘environment’. It is the common property of all human beings. Yet, as Marx put it, “At the same time as mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy.”

As Wheen shows, Marx had a love-hate relationship with capitalism and that is why he will be relevant as long as long as capitalism endures. Thus, the term ‘exploitation’ that our comrades use so often, does not mean starvation and misery (though in the capitalist world it may do so in these times), it signifies the extent to which the skills and abilities of those without capital are appropriated by those with it.

“Although every capitalist demands that workers should save, he means only his own workers, because they relate to him as workers. By no means does this apply to the remainder of workers, because they relate to him as consumers. In spite of all this pious talk of frugality he searches for all possible ways of stimulating them to consume, by making his commodities more attractive and by filling their ears with babble about new needs.”

How does the present financial crisis make Wheen’s Das Kapital especially relevant? You don’t need to read the newspapers for bailout packages or the frantic efforts by manufacturers/wholesalers to unload the vast surplus of unsold commodities that have accumulated since the present credit crisis hit us: just visit the shopping malls for bargain prices. The crisis of overproduction that we read in textbooks is for all to see. There is talk of American capitalism caught in a mangle to the extent that cars may cease to be made in Detroit as a consequence of the insane speculation in worthless paper ‘derivatives’.

The sad part of the story is that many financial experts had seen it coming. Meghnad Desai’s Marx’s Revenge and Jonathan Wolff’s Why Read Marx Today, both published some years ago, had advised that we go back to Marx to understand the workings of the capitalist system. George Soros said as far back as 2005 that “Marx… gave a very good analysis of the capitalist system 150 years ago, better in some ways than the equilibrium theory of classical economics…The danger this time (to the capitalist system) comes not from communism but from market fundamentalism.” Wheen’s Das Kapital explains why, in clear, simple language.