Capitalist class worried about Marx's popularity.

The capitalist class is getting a bit nervous. Too many compliments are being paid to Marx’s economic analysis of capitalism by their paid theoretical gurus.  Nouriel Roubini, one of their top theoreticians because he (outside of Marxist economists) foresaw the financial collapse has praised Marx.  George Magnus a senior economic adviser to UBS Investment Bank has praised Marx’s foresight and even the Vatican’s official newspaper published an article praising Marx’s writings on income equality.

On top of this, since the onset of the present crisis, Marx’s writings have become ever more popular, especially his analysis of capitalist production laid out in the three volumes of Das Kapital. In this period of severe crisis when the confidence of the capitalist class has been badly shaken and they are looking for answers. Looking for them in Marx’s playbook is to be discouraged.

Peter Coy, the economics editor of Bloomberg Business Week Magazine, attempts to do this in the September 19th issue of Business Week and fails miserably.  Coy’s childish attempt to refute Marx reveals the complete theoretical bankruptcy of the capitalist class in this period.

Coy starts off by trying to discredit Marx noting that Aviators don’t try to fly by  “strapping wings to their arms”, as “Society generally moves on from its mistakes” but Marx seems to be an exception to this “live and learn” rule.  Having set the tone he moves on to Marx’s mistakes which, I may add, I am eager to read.  Marx’s most famous prediction failed Coy says, the workers have never held state power (he uses the term dictatorship of the proletariat) which is not quite true as the Russian revolution was the conquest of state power by the workers and peasants of that country before it was lost with the rise of Stalinism and the subsequent execution of the leaders of that revolution. The Stalinist state was a monstrous machine which also proves Marx wrong in that the state never “withered away” but grew.  Marx himself would have been executed by Stalin.

Then Coy attacks Marx through his followers, who were some of the 20^th century’s worst “mass murderers”.  He starts with Lenin, who was a Marxist but Coy gives no examples of mass murder on Lenin’s part.  He cites Mao who was not a Marxist, certainly not in practice.  The next Marx follower is Pol Pot and what he has to do with Marxism heavens knows; and lastly Stalin, who may have had Lenin poisoned, murdered all the Marxists in the leadership of the Russian revolution and sent hundreds of thousands more to the gulag and had already abandoned any pretense to Marxist ideas or way of looking at the world except in name only. Coy's point here is to scare us, not educate us which shows how weak his position is.  He wants us to associate Marx with dictatorship and the denial of basic democratic rights that Marx, and those who agree with him have fought for throughout recent history against fierce resistance from people like the economic editor of Business Week and the magazine's billionaire owner.

After this, what can only be described as infantile attempt to refute Marx, Coy is forced by objective reality to get to the nuts and bolts of the issue. As off as Marx was about the USSR and China (regimes that would have executed Marx) “there are pieces of his (voluminous) writings that are shockingly perceptive.”  Coy uses the term “voluminous” here in order to imply that anyone would be right on a few things if they wrote that much.  He is attempting to put Marx in the category of a science fiction writer.  Coy would ingratiate himself to the point of disgust were he writing a piece about any one of the famed and failed capitalist economists. Coy goes on to point out that Marx was also right about the instability of capitalism-----even Coy can’t get away with discrediting that argument, especially in the present climate.  He praises Marx for challenging his contemporaries and predecessors like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill who were lauding capitalism for its ability to provide human society with what we need. He can’t escape that one either as he lives in the richest and most powerful capitalist economy in the history of humanity and it can’t even provide its citizenry with health care, housing, an education or the security that a full belly and a roof over the heads brings; except for the two million it has in prison perhaps.

No matter; what else was Marx right about according to this great intellectual representative of US and world capitalism?  Marx predicted companies would need fewer workers due to the improvement in Labor productivity and this would keep an “industrial reserve army “ of the unemployed that places downward pressure on wages and that can always be used against workers when they withhold Labor power or simply to keep us in a state of perpetual fear on the job. “It’s hard to argue with that these days,” Coy writes. And he gives old Marx a half compliment when he says that blue-collar workers in the US are a “far cry” from Marx’s subsistence wage and “accumulation of misery” but it’s not “morning in America either.”  Coy forgets that capitalism is a global system and in that regard it has far surpassed Marx’s accumulation of misery” stage as millions upon millions do not even receive a “subsistence wage” including a huge section of US society.

Coy also agrees that objective reality proves Marx right on another crucial aspect of his analysis of capitalist production and that is its that overproduction is “endemic” to a capitalist economy because the workers aren’t paid enough to “buy the stuff that the capitalists’ produce”.   “Again, that theory has lately been hard to dispute” Coy adds, seemingly unaware that it is not a “lately” phenomenon but an ongoing problem that reaches peaks that bring the system to a grinding halt and to the edge of the abyss as it did in 2007.  Marx explained that this problem is temporarily overcome by credit which allows the system to go beyond its limits and Coy agrees, “The only way blue-collar (a substitute for workers) Americans managed to maintain consumption in the last decade was by overborrowing” The result was “crippling debt” he adds and “The resulting default nightmare is still playing itself out.”

Coy leaves a lot out of course.  He doesn’t explain why workers are paid less than the value of what we produce explaining the Labor theory of value and how this surplus value in the form of commodities is the product of unpaid Labor and created through the Labor process itself.  He may not even realize this himself and if he does, he certainly wouldn’t share it.  Marx’s views on this are covered extensively in the first volume of Capital and are not that hard to comprehend.  It is very much central to his explanation of how wealth is created and workers exploited in a capitalist economy. I’m sure Coy would rather keep this explanation brief as he’s having a hard enough time trying without much success to discredit Marx’s analysis.

He saves his best shot for last.  “But wait.” He says emphatically. What Marx “underappreciated” was “capitalism’s power to heal itself”.  This was a “fatal intellectual mistake” mistake Coy argues, or tries to argue and points to all the great advances made under capitalism, “free public education” for example and the abolition of child labor in factories.  Again, that has not been abolished and in fact is rising in some areas of the world and capitalism is incapable of education, or even feeding the worlds people and is, as we are witnessing here in the US, ending public education as we know it putting it out of reach for million of workers and our families.

It’s political leaders have “corrected capitalism’s excesses again and again” Coy explains. And gives the Roosevelt’s New Deal as one example.  But the New Deal never saved capitalism, a world war did.  Roosevelt’s reforms never prevented the deeper crisis of 1937 a scenario that will likely be repeated in the present period.  It took the destruction of three centuries of the development of the productive forces of a huge section of the advanced capitalist world and the deaths of some 50 million people for capitalism to “heal itself”.  Capitalism can regenerate itself, yes.  Capitalism, if not overthrown, will emerge from this crisis as it has others, but in a different way, it will not be the same as before it entered it.

The only permanent thing about capitalism is insecurity, misery poverty war and crisis.  There would have been another world war by now were it not for the presence of nuclear weapons.

It is important for us as workers to understand that the reason the capitalist class is writing about Marx at all and particularly when it is to discredit him, it is because his analysis of capitalist production is accurate, it corresponds with objective reality. Marx pointing out that social production and private ownership are at the root of the problem and that after capitalism socialized production it is necessary to collectivize ownership of the means by which we produce social needs gave us an alternative to this insanity.  Marx simply figured out the way the world of production and maintenance of human life works. 

A statement by Engels on what drives human history is one that perked my interest when I first read it:

“The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.”

Marxism is not a dogma; it is a way of looking at the world, of understanding the material world around us and how we got this far.  We can influence the future and control our own destiny but we have to have a plan. It is important for workers to explore Marx’s works and discuss them. The part on the commodity, the Labor theory of value, the Labor process and the eight-hour day for example are all so relevant to our daily lives. Marx made philosophy concrete.  As he said, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world---the point is to change it”.  

Peter Coy, as a major theoretician of the capitalist class cannot possibly accept Marx’s view of the world and warns his class colleagues that "It's time for another burst of enlightenment".  He is afraid that some of his colleagues might be drawn to Marx's ideas; and it is not ruled out that faced with catastrophe in the future, a section of the capitalist intelligentsia and some capitalists themselves will come over to the workers’ point of view. But no class commits social suicide; capitalism will destroy life on this planet as we know it in it’s dying days.  It is up to workers to build a future based on cooperation, collective ownership and solidarity.