The Abolition of Capitalism

Tariq Ali “How would Karl Marx have suggested solving the crisis is, of course, by the abolition of capitalism.”

Is capitalism living on borrowed time?

Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali “Sometimes it doesn’t feel that far fetched. Here’s why I’ve been thinking more about Marx – it’s because the last few years hasn’t felt like an ordinary recession. It hasn’t felt like a crisis for one economy or for a group of economies in the West.”

At times it really has felt like a crisis for the system, for capitalism as we know it. You want a bigger explanation. And no one’s ever had a bigger explanation for everything that’s happened than Karl Marx.

Karl Marx

Capitalism’s most implacable critic was born in the picture-postcard town of Trier in what is now south-west Germany. Today, his birthplace makes his own contribution to the local economy – it’s a big draw for tourists.

Local shopkeeper “We have more than 40,000 tourists a year with 25% from China, to see Karl Marx’s birthplace.”

The man with the big theory about our world had big dreams right from the start.

When he was 17, Karl Marx had to write an essay about picking the right career. He said the best position in life was to serve all of mankind, so your deeds would live on perpetually at work and over your ashes would be shed the hot tears of noble people. I wonder, would that young man, that rather grand young man, be surprised to hear that his first home had been turned into a museum?

But for all his ambitions, Karl Marx was hardly a model student. When he was at university in Berlin he earned a reputation as a radical thinker.

Tristram Hunt MP “KIarl Marx comes across as a young man, as this, sort of, energetic, fiery, hairy figure. He was known as the Wild boar of the Moor, which, sort of, points to his, sort of, Levantine complex he was full of ideas. He was full of debate. He liked big drinking sessions and then deep philosophical debate about the nature of Christ and German Romanticism and politics.”

By the time he was 24, Dr Marx was a bit of a Renaissance man. He was an expert in law, philosophy, you name it. In fact, the only thing he didn’t know much about was economics.

That all changed in 1842. Karl Marx, by now working as a journalist, heard about a controversy in this wood which would shape his understanding of how the world works.

Peasants taking sticks from the forest floor to use as firewood were being prosecuted for theft. Wood had been gathered here for centuries, now the landowners had declared it belonged to them. What had been freely shared was now private property.

You could say that thinking about this question turned Marx into an economist, but that wouldn’t really capture it. He came to think that economics, the nature of economic relationships between people, was at the heart of absolutely everything.

Tristram Hunt “The foundations of Marx’s thinking was materialism, that when you cut away religion, ideology, politics, at its root were the material relations between man – the need for food, the need to have a roof over your head. This is what ultimately drives so much of human interaction.”

Professor Slavoj Zizek “What was unique in Marx, he didn’t see economy just as a special sphere. He saw economy as the structuring principle of the entire social totality.”

For Karl Marx, it all begins with private property, which divides the world starkly – there are those that have it, and those that don’t.

The Power of Possession

Take this wood. Before it became private property, I could do what I liked with it. I could heat my house with it, I could make a chair and exchange it for food. But if it belongs to someone else, the whole relationship changes. Now Marx would say I’ve become a member of the proletariat, now I have to work for the owner of the wood, the capitalist, for a wage. Then he can sell what I’ve made for more than he paid me. Look what’s happened, something that was part of my life is now a financial transaction. And the capitalists made profit. He can use that to buy more wood, build factories, make more profit. And so it goes on. Profit is now the heart of everything.

So, there you have it – the Marxian view of capitalism, or the gist of it, anyway. If you want more, you’ll have to wade through hundreds of pages of Marx, yourself.

The key point for us is that that driving force of capitalism, the need to earn more and more profit, well, Marx thought that was also a recipe for constant crises.

So, Marx would say you could trace the roots of the crisis we’re in today right to the very heart of capitalism, to its need to generate profit.

What Marx was seeing in Trier was a world in flux. Feudalism was on the way out – an entirely new way of doing things had arrived. Now, we know what capitalism is really made of, and the power of money today means a lot more than just throwing a few peasants in jail. A bunch of guys on a trading floor can turn the entire economy upside down. Around the world, all of our lives depend on markets, on capitalism being able to deliver. If Marx is right, if it’s fundamentally flawed, well, that’s a really big problem.