My hedgie pal sent it around last week with the heading "Communism on the way?"
This was my response:
It's not in _Capital_ so far as I can tell and I don't think it's Marx. He would never suppose that this form of nationalization would lead to a communism that would benefit the working class. There is such a thing as corporatist nationalization. It was more the MO of Mussolini who, along with Hitler was fiercely anti-communist. But if you want the trains to run on time...
Though Marx is generally a good source to look to for the irrationalities of the pure market system, I don't think he could ever have predicted the kind of incorporation that exists today. I've attached a short passage (about 10 pages) from a draft of my dissertation. These will probably not make it into the final draft because they are somewhat tangential to the overall argument, but the last four or five pages are specifically focused on the current crisis. I don't know if it is clear enough for anyone else to make sense of it (like the quote from Abraham Lincoln, "I didn't have time to make it shorter) but if it makes sense to you, I'd be interested in your view since you work in the finance field.
In general, I'd say that the idea that we are _just now_ having state intervention in the economy is a total misnomer: it was very involved in setting up the monopoly capitalism of the inter- and -post war era, strongly supporting consumer spending and lending in order to bolster demand for the massive industrial infrastructure we built before and during WWII; and then strongly supporting the push to privatize the economy, undermine wage growth and social wages (education, SS, welfare, unemployment) in the last 30 years, with private credit picking up the slack (with college and health care accounting for close to half of the costs paid for by consumer credit card debt). It was an unsustainable model since eventually people you lend money to have to be able to make the money to pay it back.
Finally, we aren't headed for communism in any real sense because, even though individual Americans will bear the brunt of this downturn, they aren't at all organized or conscious of their common situation, nor is there a coherent left to provide any direction or information in that direction. The election of Obama has taken a lot of the steam out of the popular reaction, but he doesn't seem to have much new to offer except calming rhetoric. When the programs he tries to put in place--mostly in the service of helping the financial class buy new ($400) shirts to replace the ones they lost--fail to create new jobs or repair the economy on the scale needed, what meager solidarity there is with the left will dissipate and 2012 will be prime territory for Caribou Barbie and Joe the Plumber to stage their fascist takeover in full. It's an exaggeration, but only slightly.
In any case, unless there is a spontaneous uprising forcing Obama to the left (not at all likely) even the nationalization of the banks (something that still hasn't happened here, even if a few countries in Europe are giving it a go) would basically be a form of socializing the losses to all of the country, and setting up those institutions for the next round of capitalism. Then the former owners, with their funds safely stowed in baskets of mixed currencies and Swiss bank accounts, will be able to buy back the solvent ones for a song. In short, if Marx were around today, he'd probably find most of this fairly depressing and would in no way predict that Communism was on the way. This quote points to the bourgeois state nationalizing bourgeois finance: it is just a case of the institutions scratching one another's backs in a new way. In his theory it was never the top-down nationalization that would have brought this about, but the bottom up expropriation. He was overly optimistic in this way and was obviously unable to predict how plasma screen tvs and American Idol would be so much more entertaining than bloody protest and class struggle.
I'll leave you with the only place I can find in CAPITAL where he really gets into what will happen next: note that he is very clear that this is something the people call for. He was always a fan of the American and French Revolutions--often mentioning that he was sure the US would be the most likely place for working class communism (and Russia the least). To him, it was just the continuation of the political revolution with an economic one. But for the latter to occur, there needed to be a political force from below to, as the passage says, "expropriate the expropriators." Today there is no such force in the US; but some people (such as the Indian economist Meghnad Desai
http://books.google.com/books?id=S2XOt7Z6CyYC ) speculate that Marx's theory will only bear fruit when we have a total domination of capitalism on a global scale. In that case, it's a bit like what Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai famously said, when asked in the 1960s what the impact of the French Revolution had been, "It's too early to tell."
Here is the passage, from the second to last chapter of Capital:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm
"As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the laborers are turned into proletarians, their means of labor into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialization of labor and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the laborer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many laborers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralization of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labor-process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated."