Marx was right - the BBC

Following up from previous reports, even the BBC is reporting that Marx may have been right!

"As a side-effect of the financial crisis, more and more people are starting to think Karl Marx was right." writes the BBC contributor John Gray. He goes on to add

"[Marx] was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It's not just capitalism's endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours. More profoundly, Marx understood how capitalism destroys its own social base - the middle-class way of life. The Marxist terminology of bourgeois and proletarian has an archaic ring. But when he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we're only now struggling to cope with."

Gray continues, "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."

Gray then concludes "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."

SOYMB cannot expect BBC writers to fully and accurately convey the content and meaning of Marx's political and economic thought but hopefully it will draw more workers to try to understand what Marx was endeavouring to explain and start investigating the contradictory nature of capitalism themselves.