A description of today's capitalist crisis written 130 years ago

Does this seem familiar? Does it not describe what is happening today? It was written by Marx's friend and collaborator Frederick Engels in 1878. His alternative was the socialization of the ownership of the productive forces, or more plainly, ownership and control of what we produce how we produce it and how we exchange our products. The big business economists claim in their papers to this day that economic crisis like the one we are experiencing are not predictable and are in fact unavoidable; they're wrong.

"Commerce is at a standstill, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy, execution upon execution. The stagnation lasts for years; productive forces and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass of commodities finally filter off, more or less depreciated in value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again.

Little by little the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit and speculation, which finally, after breakneck leaps, ends where it began--in the ditch of a crisis... The fact that the socialised organisation of production within the factory has developed so far that it has become incompatible with the anarchy of production in society... The whole mechanism of the capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the productive forces, its own creations.

It is no longer able to turn all this mass of means of production into capital. They lie fallow, and for that very reason the industrial reserve army must also lie fallow. Means of production, means of subsistence, available labourers, all the elements of production and of general wealth, are present in abundance... For in capitalistic society the means of production can only function when they have undergone a preliminary transformation into capital, into the means of exploiting human labour power."

Frederick Engels's--- Socialism: Utopian and Scientific