nationofchange | On Saturday at the Left Forum in New York City, Chris Hedges joined professors Richard Wolff and Gail Dines
to discuss why Karl Marx is essential at a time when global capitalism
is collapsing. These are the remarks Hedges made to open the discussion.
Karl Marx exposed the peculiar dynamics of capitalism, or what he
called “the bourgeois mode of production.” He foresaw that capitalism
had built within it the seeds of its own destruction. He knew that
reigning ideologies—think neoliberalism—were created to serve the
interests of the elites and in particular the economic elites, since
“the class which has the means of material production at its disposal,
has control at the same time over the means of mental production” and
“the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the
dominant material relationships … the relationships which make one class
the ruling one.” He saw that there would come a day when capitalism
would exhaust its potential and collapse. He did not know when that day
would come. Marx, as Meghnad Desai
wrote, was “an astronomer of history, not an astrologer.” Marx was
keenly aware of capitalism’s ability to innovate and adapt. But he also
knew that capitalist expansion was not eternally sustainable. And as we
witness the denouement of capitalism and the disintegration of
globalism, Karl Marx is vindicated as capitalism’s most prescient and
important critic.
In a preface to “The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” Marx wrote:
No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.
Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since looking at the matter more closely, we always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist, or are at least in the process of formation.
Socialism, in other words, would not be possible until capitalism had
exhausted its potential for further development. That the end is coming
is hard now to dispute, although one would be foolish to predict when.
We are called to study Marx to be ready.
The final stages of capitalism, Marx wrote, would be marked by
developments that are intimately familiar to most of us. Unable to
expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system would
begin to consume the structures that sustained it. It would prey upon,
in the name of austerity, the working class and the poor, driving them
ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the
state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens. It would, as it has,
increasingly relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and
professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of laborers.
Industries would mechanize their workplaces. This would trigger an
economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class—the
bulwark of a capitalist system—that would be disguised by the imposition
of massive personal debt as incomes declined or remained stagnant.
Politics would in the late stages of capitalism become subordinate to
economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real
political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates and money of
global capitalism.
But as Marx warned, there is a limit to an economy built on
scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, Marx knew, when
there would be no new markets available and no new pools of people who
could take on more debt. This is what happened with the subprime
mortgage crisis. Once the banks cannot conjure up new subprime
borrowers, the scheme falls apart and the system crashes.
Capitalist oligarchs, meanwhile, hoard huge sums of wealth—$18
trillion stashed in overseas tax havens—exacted as tribute from those
they dominate, indebt and impoverish. Capitalism would, in the end, Marx
said, turn on the so-called free market, along with the values and
traditions it claims to defend. It would in its final stages pillage the
systems and structures that made capitalism possible. It would resort,
as it caused widespread suffering, to harsher forms of repression. It
would attempt in a frantic last stand to maintain its profits by looting
and pillaging state institutions, contradicting its stated nature.
