Prepare for Marx's four horseman as the end of capitalism fast approaches

Great post yesterday from Chris Dillow over at Stumbling and Mumbling who believes that Karl Marx's Final crisis of capitalism has arrived.

According to Chris,the four features which Marx predicted are upon us.

Just to remind you they are

1.The rate of profit would fall, reducing the motive to invest and producing slower growth and bigger recessions.

2.Low returns on real assets would lead to speculative bubbles and swindles and hence financial crises.

3.Increased inequality would exacerbate economies’ propensity for crises, by creating a mass of people too poor to buy the goods which capitalism produced.

4.capitalism would cease to be a means for developing the economy’s productive forces and become instead a barrier to their development

Did Marx predict twitter?

An interesting argument from Chris Gillow who asks

Does the Trafigura/Carter-Ruck case vindicate Marx? ie
Marx argued that technical change was a powerful force behind social change, so technology influenced power relations between people:

Would Trafigura have got away with it without the new media?

In the pre-web age, they might well have gotten away with trying to suppress free speech. But thanks to technical change - the emergence of the web and twitter - their efforts backfired spectacularly and inadvertently led to one of the most effective viral marketing campaigns of recent years.

Marx is on the up

Apparently, or at least according to the Independent sales of Marx's Capital are on the up.

Mark Steele reports that

Sales of Marx's Capital are at an all-time high, and this can't just be due to the current rage against characters such as Fred Goodwin and his merry bonus. It must also be because Marx fathomed that under capitalism, boom and slump would remain a perpetual cycle, as opposed to those such as Gordon Brown, who said once an hour for five years, "We have abolished boom and bust", a theory which is now in need of a minor tweak.

Was Marx right?

Was Marx correct all along?

There has been much conjecture that the recent financial meltdown heralds the end of capitalism.This has also coincided with a renewed interest in Marxism.

This morning's Times carries a good article from Philip Collins where he reminds us that

His basic point is that there is some good news and some bad news. He gave you the bad news first: capitalism is dreadful. The workers are exploited and the capitalists get rich at their expense. So far, so Lehman Brothers. The good news was that the bad news was bound to come to an end. Capitalism wasn't just nasty, it was doomed. It would collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions. A bit like Lehman Brothers.

But then points out that

It doesn't really sound a lot like the credit crunch. It is hard to think of investment bankers as the benighted proletariat labouring under the burden of false consciousness. If they are exploited at all, then the bonuses probably soften the blow. Many layers of management, most of it very highly paid, has inserted itself in the gap between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. And there's not much sign of revolution from the working class

Worth a read