Given all the turmoil and uncertainty that has struck us like a hurricane it is a pleasure to read old Marx. Trillions of dollars are being thrown about to spur demand. People must buy, trade must continue. Centuries old institutions are collapsing. Governments have collapsed. Fortunes have been lost and millions have been driven from their homes the ranks of the starving have swelled. All because there is too much stuff. Our existence is determined by production.
Marx said about trade in a capitalist economy:
"How does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand – a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear – while with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and, implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again?"
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