Was Marx Right?

In the NYT:

For Karl Marx’s birthday last year, his hometown of Trier, Germany, displayed 500 figures by Ottmar Hoerl. Thomas Wieck/Agence France-Presse-Getty Images

In the golden, post-war years of Western economic growth, the comfortable living standard of the working class and the economy’s overall stability made the best case for the value of capitalism and the fraudulence of Marx’s critical view of it. But in more recent years many of the forces that Marx said would lead to capitalism’s demise – the concentration and globalization of wealth, the permanence of unemployment, the lowering of wages – have become real, and troubling, once again.

The fall of communism discredited Marx’s political vision. But, as observers have wondered before, is his view of our economic future being validated?

Here’s the voice of reason in the debate:

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  A Return to a World Marx Would Have Known

  DOUG HENWOOD, LEFT BUSINESS OBSERVER

  For years, excessive consumer borrowing muted the effects of stagnant wages. But low demand is stifling the economy, with no end in sight.

COMMENT: Crisis of a Gilded Age [Doug Henwood]

For the past two or three decades skeptics watched as deregulated finance got ever more reckless, as the gap between rich and poor widened to a chasm not seen since the turn of the last century, and they said, “Someday there’s going to be hell to pay for all this.” But despite a few nasty hiccups every few years–the 1987 stock market crash, the savings and loan debacle of the late 1980s, the Mexican and Asian financial crises of the mid-1990s, the dot-com bust of the early 2000s–somehow the economy regained its footing for another game of chicken. Has its luck finally run out?

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