[lbo-talk] Leo Panitch on Marx on the Real News

Left-Wing Wacko leftwingwacko at gmail.com
Sat Jun 6 09:52:31 PDT 2009


On Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 6:12 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


>
>
> Left-Wing Wacko wrote:
> >
> > * Leo Panitch on The Real News on the relevancy of Marx.
>
> The word "relevancy" often -- usually -- ushers in numerous pages of
> nonsense. How is this work different. Relevant to what?
>
> Carrol
>

Carrol, To a critique of modern capitalism. And yes of course, many on this list never doubted that. I posted the link because I thought that it would be of interest in that Leo Panitch has been interviewed by Doug on his radio show, and it is calling attention to an article of Panitch's in Foriegn Policy mag, which I infer from the interview doesn't usually talk about the relevancy of Marx.

Here is a link to the article, see if it meets your standards, or is numerous pages of nonsense. I thought it quite good.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4856&page=0

Thoroughly Modern Marx By Leo Panitch

The economic crisis has spawned a resurgence of interest in Karl Marx. Worldwide sales of *Das Kapital* have shot up (one lone German publisher sold thousands of copies in 2008, compared with 100 the year before), a measure of a crisis so broad in scope and devastation that it has global capitalism—and its high priests—in an ideological tailspin.

Yet even as faith in neoliberal orthodoxies has imploded, why resurrect Marx? To start, Marx was far ahead of his time in predicting the successful capitalist globalization of recent decades. He accurately foresaw many of the fateful factors that would give rise to today’s global economic crisis: what he called the “contradictions” inherent in a world comprised of competitive markets, commodity production, and financial speculation.

Penning his most famous works in an era when the French and American revolutions were less than a hundred years old, Marx had premonitions of AIG and Bear Stearns trembling a century and a half later. He was singularly cognizant of what he called the “most revolutionary part” played in human history by the bourgeoisie—those forerunners of today’s Wall Street bankers and corporate executives. As Marx put it in *The Communist Manifesto*, “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. . . . In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”

But Marx was no booster of capitalist globalization in his time or ours. Instead, he understood that “the need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe,” foreseeing that the development of capitalism would inevitably be “paving the way for more extensive and exhaustive crises.” Marx identified how disastrous speculation could trigger and exacerbate crises in the whole economy. And he saw through the political illusions of those who would argue that such crises could be permanently prevented through incremental reform.

Continues at link above


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