Wednesday, February 11, 2009

What Marx Said, Or Did Not Say, or Maybe He Did

My friend Ignoto shipped me the quote that follows, reporting with a chortle that he intended to send it on to a moonbat conservative of our mutual acquaintance:
Owners of capital will stimulate the 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, which will have to be saved by the government and nationalized; the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.

--Karl Marx, 1867
Hm, doesn't sound right. Working class buy goods? In 1867? Houses? Technology. Criminentlies.

A moment's Googling made it clear that this one has gone viral, usually with uncritical acceptance. There are a few skeptics, and in particular this pretty good take-down from Megan McAradle, whose integrity is put in doubt only by her claim to have read all three volumes of the master's masterwork.

But scroll down to the comment of one James Heartfield, hitherto unknown to me, who offers up this totally non-bogus bit of Marx:
"A larger part of their own surplus product, always increasing and continually transformed into additional capital, comes back to them in the shape of means of payment, so that they can extend the circle of their enjoyments; can make some additions to their consumption funds of clothes, furniture, &c., and can lay by a small reserve-funds of money. But just as little as better clothing, food, and treatment, and a larger peculium, do away with the exploitation of the slave, so little do they set aside that of the worker. A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it." [Das Kapital] Chapter 25, p 579-580, Lawrence and Wishart edition.
So I'd say he--the anonymous mischief-maker--had it just about right. Just a free translation.

Afterthought: Puts me in mind of an insight I picked up from--I'm not sure, could be Hyman Minsky--about Keynes in the great depression. Minsky (?) points out that the standard conservative mantra about the great depression was that there was nothing you could do about it except suck it up, cross your legs and think of England. And the Marxists believed essentially the same thing: they believed that capitalism was unstable, not just by accident, but inherently and inevitably. Hence the Marxists believed, like their conservative brethren, that you might as well just tough it out.

Keynes (at least via Minsky) does seem to have shared the Marxist belief that instability in capitalism was substance, not acciddent. But he believed is was worthy trying to do something about it. In this he differed from conservatives and Marxists alike.

Update: Don't miss Tom's (Doug Henwood's) (Marx's) contribution in the comments.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Karl's take on another part of the credit meltdown:
"The credit system, which has its focal point in the allegedly national banks and the big money-lenders and usurers that surround them, is one enormous centralization and gives this class of parasites a fabulous power
not only to decimate the industrial capitalists periodically but also to interfere in actual production in the most dangerous manner - and this crew know nothing of production and have nothing at all to do with it."
- Marx, Capital, vol. 3, chap. 33

(this quote is the epigraph to Doug Henwood's Wall Street, which you just kindly lent me. that's about as far as i've gotten.)