Marx’s communism : An idea whose time has come back ?

A German publisher has reported that, with the current economic and financial crisis, sales of Marx’s Das Kapital have tripled. No doubt sales of Francis Fukuyama’s book about “the end of history” have ceased. This is understandable as Marx’s description and criticism of how capitalism works is still the best there is, while the apologists for capitalism don’t know what’s hit them. Their theories and justifications are in tatters.

Those who read the book will indeed find, amongst much else, an explanation as to why crises are both possible and unavoidable under capitalism.

Early on, in the chapter on money, Marx identifies the possibility of crises – as interruptions in production – precisely in the fact that things are bought and sold for money. “There is”, he writes, “a contradiction immanent in the function of money as the means of payment . . . This contradiction bursts forth in that aspect of an industrial and commercial crisis which is known as a monetary crisis. Such a crisis occurs only where the ongoing chain of payments has been fully developed, along with an artificial system for settling them” (Penguin edition, pp. 235-6).

Later, when he comes to examine industrial capitalism, he notes:

“The factory system’s tremendous capacity for expanding with sudden immense leaps, and its dependence on the world market, necessarily give rise to the following cycle: feverish production, a consequent glut on the market, then a contraction of the market, which causes production to be crippled. The life of industry becomes a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation. The uncertainty and instability to which machinery subjects the employment, and consequently the living conditions, of the workers becomes a normal state of affairs, owing to these periodic turns of the industrial cycle”. (pp. 580-1)

And, in answer to the monetarists:

“The superficiality of political economy shows itself in the fact that it views the expansion and contraction of credit as the cause of the periodic alternations in the industrial cycle, whereas it is a mere symptom of them.” (p. 786)

But what the reader won’t find in Das Kapital is any claim that capitalism will automatically collapse of its own accord because of its internal contradictions. Nor will they find any proposed policy measures aimed at preventing or dealing with crises.

Marx was not concerned with how to run capitalism, but about political action by the majority class in society, the class of wage and salary workers, to end it and establish a society based on “co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production produced by labour itself” (p. 929). What earlier on he had described as “an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force” (p. 171). In other words, a society where production would be under conscious human control and no longer at the mercy of uncontrollable economic forces acting as if they were forces of nature.

He called this society “communist society”, though today the more commonly used term is “socialism”. But it had nothing to do with the failed system of state capitalism that used to exist in Russia and elsewhere. Marx’s communism has never yet been tried.

Because it is based on common ownership and production solely for use, this society would have no need for money or banks or the rest of the financial superstructure. Now there’s an idea worth thinking about – and acting on.

ALB