Marx, Capitalism and the "Uncertainty" Problem

"Was Marx Right?"  from the Harvard Business Review Blog is fascinating and worth attention and analysis.

http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/09/was_marx_right.html

 We hear everyday that American business is sitting on mountains of cash but they refuse to expand and hire workers.  Why?  One word appears more often than any other in their answers: “uncertainty.”  Perhaps they’ve been reading Marx. He lays out all kinds of reasons, utopian in his day, reasonable in ours, that would give rise to a plague of “uncertainty” in the minds of those who make economic decisions in the global economy.

But perhaps Marx was wrong about all this, just another evil alarmist whose predictions about class struggle and revolution failed to materialize, or just failed.

John Gray on the BBC thinks so.  But John Gray isn’t about to provide solace to the uncertain.  More alarming than Marx, Gray makes a good case that capitalism is doing itself in.

Here’s an excerpt.  The entire essay is worth pondering.  Just don’t show it to those capitalist pantywaists who are frozen in uncertainty.  It would turn them from comatose into a state of total rigor mortis.
___________

A Point of View: The revolution of capitalism

. . . In a society that is being continuously transformed by market forces, traditional values are dysfunctional and anyone who tries to live by them risks ending up on the scrapheap.

Looking to a future in which the market permeates every corner of life, Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto: "Everything that is solid melts into air". For someone living in early Victorian England - the Manifesto was published in 1848 - it was an astonishingly far-seeing observation.

At the time nothing seemed more solid than the society on the margins of which Marx lived. A century and a half later we find ourselves in the world he anticipated, where everyone's life is experimental and provisional, and sudden ruin can happen at any time.

A tiny few have accumulated vast wealth but even that has an evanescent, almost ghostly quality. In Victorian times the seriously rich could afford to relax provided they were conservative in how they invested their money. When the heroes of Dickens' novels finally come into their inheritance, they do nothing forever after.

Today there is no haven of security. The gyrations of the market are such that no-one can know what will have value even a few years ahead. . . .

Capitalism has led to a revolution but not the one that Marx expected. The fiery German thinker hated the bourgeois life and looked to communism to destroy it. And just as he predicted, the bourgeois world has been destroyed.

But it wasn't communism that did the deed. It's capitalism that has killed off the bourgeoisie.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14764357