Desmond Mallikarachchi
Former Head & Professor
Department of Philosophy & Psychology,
University of Peradeniya
This article, written as a tribute to that great materialist thinker Karl Marx on his 128th death anniversary, is intended to show very briefly how sharply he prophesied, as far back as 1860s, the downfall of capitalism. We witness today what Marx predicted a century and half ago in his monumental work Capital. When millions of people abhor Marx, characterising him as a monster, there are yet millions of others who dearly embrace and candidly venerate him as their God, Jehovah, Brahma, Mazda, Allah, and the Buddha. In an opinion poll conducted in Europe at the turn of the 2nd millennium it was Marx who had been elected as the greatest thinker of the 20th century. A few years back, thousands of Radio 4 listeners of England also elected Marx as their favourite thinker. Even today Karl Marx’s reputation as one of the most influential thinkers of all time is unassailable. The main reason for the admiration is his accurate analysis of capitalism and his predictions of its eventual demise
Read moreKarl Marx
Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, a town located in Rhineland in the kingdom of Prussia. His father was a lawyer and mother was a semi-literate housewife. He read law, philosophy and history at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, and completed his doctorate in Philosophy, at the age of 23, in 1841. As a result of his working with a radical group he abandoned his idea of becoming a lecturer and became a journalist instead of the magazine Rheinishe Zeitung. While working in it he rapidly became involved in political and social issues and contributed articles to all issues of the magazine criticising the Prussian government and its repressive politics and policies. Some said that Marx was ludicrously prolix. But this is far from the truth. I have not come across any writer on politics, economics and philosophy as intellectually promising, inspirational, and stimulating as Marx has been. If he was prolix the capitalists would not have feared him so much.
He was a prolific writer. His major works include; The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, The German Ideology (with Engels), The Communist Manifesto (with Engels), The Critique of Political Economy, Capital Vol. 1, 11 and 111, Theories of Surplus Value, Critique of Gotha Programme. In addition, he has written over hundreds of articles on political, economic and social issues. He also wrote thousands of letters to his political friends and foes. All these were written by him with a view to eradicate capitalism, which, for Marx, is the root cause of modern social evils.
Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership, free market, competition, profit motive and private ownership of the means of production. Marx’s primary concern was the intellectual demolition of capitalism. He too, like Gorge Hegel, believed in a progressive history, but unlike Hegel, Marx desired the downfall of capitalism, and hence, he, since his youth, worked day in and day out with exceptional academic insight and unceasing revolutionary spirit to accomplish this objective. Marx was never settled or happy with the political economy pioneered by Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, because for Marx, their laissez-faire theories only provided the basis and rationale for capitalists to execute ruthlessly their exploitative mechanisms against the poor and the oppressed. Marx elaborated his critique of capitalist economic in his masterpiece Capital, the volume 1 of which was published by Marx himself in 1867, while the volumes 2 & 3 were published posthumously in 1885 and 1894 respectively.
Capital
Sales of Marx’s Capital are reportedly soaring as the world realises that this was where he prophesied how capitalism will destroy itself (incidentally, Capital is amongst the three books which had a biggest sale in the 20th century, the other two being The Bible and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra). During the recession in 2008-2009/2010 in particular the leaders of effected capitalist countries and bourgeois economists started reading Marx’s Capital to know for sure whether capitalism is really taking its final breaths, and also to find out, with certainty, whether Marx was wrong in his theorization as bourgeois economists Lipset and Keynes had revealed (Lipset said Marx’s analyses were totally wrong. Keynes said they were "complicated hocus-focus"). But the fact is that Marx’s Capital was treated with respect and most desperate capitalists started to study it again. Although capitalists are reluctant to admit it openly, they know in their heart that their cherished cathedral is collapsing, and collapsing fast. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) defined world recession as "the global economic growth of 3% or less is equivalent to a global recession". By this criterion, even if we leave out the cyclical recessions the capitalist economy went through before 1980’s, at least four periods since 1985 seem qualifying the measure; 1990-1993, 1998, 2001-2002 and 2008 -2009. The recession surfaced in 2008 continues to this date without leaving even a modicum of hope for capitalism. How can they be blind to the following stark facts and figures surfaced particularly during the recession in 2008-2009?
Statistics
America
1. Twelve million people lost jobs since November 2008
2. The downfall of industrial production: by 1.6. %
3. The downfall of the production of General Motors: by 40%.
4. Gross National Income: down by 12 % (Levy Report)
5. The debt: 50 trillion dollars
6. The expenditure on war in Iraq and Afghanistan alone is 3 trillion dollars, and now on Libya, yet uncalculated.
Japan
1. Export and national economy: down by 8%.
2. Nissan, Honda, Toyota: down by 35-40%
3. In order to move out of the crisis, Japan requested a stimulus package of 150 billion dollars.
Australia
1. Hundred thousand of people lost their jobs. Increased unemployment. Low wages. Cuts on education and health
France
Job cuts; Sarcoci’s request for a bail out; Running on stimuli-packages; reduction of funding on health and education.
China
The predicted growth target in 2007 had been 8% but when the recession struck China said that it cannot pass the growth rate of 3%. The export economy is down by 25.7 %, while the national trade went down by 18%. Italy confessed in 2009 that she is experiencing a 35% economic recession.
United Kingdom
1. 290,000 public sector jobs could go by 2014 (Research Institute Centre for Cities in England),
2. Over 500,000 public sector jobs will be axed over the coming years
(Charted Institute for Personnel and Development)
3. The financial deficit is staggering 90 billion pounds
4 The value of Land, Housing, Gold and Gross individual income down by alarming percentage
5 Job cuts of 3 million people (London Telegraph Feb. 2009). British Priminister Cameroon sent 1700 postal workers home yesterday.
6 Cutting down the expenditure on education, health and other social services
7 Crises in banks. Some prosperous Banks were closed down.
Writing an article on ‘monetary history’, Robert Aliber of the University of Chicago, says that ‘ The last thirty five years have been the most tumultuous in international monetary history. More national banking systems collapsed than any previous period". Why does this happen so? Marx had the answer.
"Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks" [Marx.Capital.Vol.1.1867]. [Marx did specifically write about the perils of spiralling debt structures in Capital Vol.3]. If one understands the above statement leaving aside his or her prejudices about him he or she would confirm with certainty that Marx had been absolutely right in his analysis of capitalism. How many banks were shut down since Marx’s above observation? All capitalist economists since Adam Smith via Maynard Keynes, Alfred Marshall, Friedman, and Lipset had been trying to find desperately a permanent remedy for periodic crises of capitalism but they ended up with utter disappointment. It was Marx who rightly diagnosed the problem with capitalism and predicted its eventual collapse.
Some argue that Marx’s critique of capitalism has become obsolete and hence gone redundant in the face of today’s High-Tech Western Capitalism. But when one reads Marx attentively, one would realize that he has explained it fully through his analysis of labour as a form of value-creating activity. What high-tech labour does in High-Tech capitalist mode of production is creating new needs (or values) in people as Agnes Heller has succinctly pointed out in her Book Theory of Need in Marx and also by Jean Baudrillard in his book Critique of Political Economy of the Sign. As in early capitalism, the contemporary ‘Virtual Reality’ Founded Capitalism has not abandoned their profit motive intents or their exploitative sadistic psychological missions. As Marx has repeatedly explained the defining features of capitalism are the market economy and private property. This is true with contemporary High-Tech capitalism as much as it was with early capitalism. The only difference, which could be seen clearly is the change of the nature of the market; the market in classical capitalist economy sold only goods, whereas the market in High-Tech capitalism what is sold is a value or a sign or a symbol. In fact, in High-Tech capitalism the sign or the symbol needs to be sold prior to the real product is sold. The profit motive, therefore, is at the centre in both cases. Capitalism exists wherever the labour is reduced to an abstract, value-creating activity. The prime objective of capitalism’s is to assume evermore impersonal and abstract forms of domination. The High-Tech capitalism today does exactly this. It creates (or produces) abstract values for sale. In fact Marx has predicted this trajectory of capitalism, and in my opinion, he was absolutely correct. Marx’s critique of the law underlying capitalism thus is valid as long as capitalism endures. This is why it is impossible to bury Marx. How can one bury Marx when his predictions become increasingly true almost every day?
In 1844 Marx identified alienated labour as the hallmark of capitalism. Even in the High-Tech capitalist society not only the labour is still alienated but it is also becoming increasingly and unbearably mechanical, not merely in terms of technological expertise but even in terms of responsibility and efficacy. Though goods are produced in mass scale for the fast moving market the workers will not have any right to the products they themselves produce. Of course, they can possess what they produce but only if the goods are bought or purchased by them as other consumers do. Is not this pathetic? If the real producers of goods are not entitled to use the products they themselves produced through their own labour they become estranged, and would feel estranged. Thus, according to Marx’s analysis, alienated labour could exist, though in different form, even in High-Tech capitalist society.
Marx also has a moral critique of capitalism. It is based on his conviction that capitalism is making human beings subjugate themselves to base avarice. Based, as it is, on the private ownership of the economy, capitalism creates immense inequality and deprivation when the potential exists for providing a decent life for all. Most of the countries all over the world, except a very few, have confirmed thorough facts and figures that Marx was absolutely correct in his observations
I will conclude this note of praise of Karl Marx quoting Marx himself. "All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away; all new formed ones became antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned "[Marx .The Communist |Manifesto."[my emphasis].
The Island
