close

Discovered in

Find other sites about

Related Sites

  • 1 review
  • Reviews of the site
  • Join StumbleUpon or login to add a review! default avatar

  • Rated by whoaohoh on Jun 01, 1:37pm

    Why are we saying he predicted this crisis? I could possibly see manipulating his argument into predicting the Great Depression, but I guess that's not very appealing as the Great Depression did not lead the the "inevitable" demise of the bourgeoisie and the adoption of Communism (on the contrary, it helped spark Fascist governments). Marx had a simplistic view of history which caused him to see the relatively recent fall of the aristocracy and the ensuing rise of the bourgeoisie as evidence that the final revolution would be the proletariat's overthrowing of the oppressive bourgeois class. Marx made the overly simplistic conclusion that history had been a litany of societal revolts with the oppressed class overthrowing the oppressors by looking at the French Revolution and the conditions that caused it and concluding that the "last" class, that is the class that will have the last revolution and absorb all others, was the proletariat. Marx saw the atrocities of the beginning of the Industrial Revolution with horrific workers' conditions, an increasingly apathetic and affluent bourgeois class, the ever-growing class gap, and overall utter unfairness towards the proletariat, so he sympathized with the workers and envisioned a future where they could take hold of their money-grubbing rivals. The capitalism he saw was brutal and unforgiving. He predicted that it would collapse very soon. Well, it hasn't. Instead Communism has fallen time and time again. The current "Communist" states are mostly only nominally so. He did not have "premonitions of AIG and Bear Stearns trembling a century and a half later." He saw factory owners going bankrupt and workers taking over. He saw the proletariat leading a mass, world-wide revolution and absorbing all others into their class. He saw this as the end of history - the zenith of human history that man-kind has been working for. Instead, revolutions happened, Communist states were set up, and most faltered. No world-wide revolution happened. His predictions were ultimately wrong. Capitalism suffered a huge blow during the Great Depression but it rose even stronger. Panitch makes claims as to what Marx would have to say about this current economic crisis, but I feel that Marx would be completely aghast when he saw how completely and utterly WRONG he was about how history would turn out. He'd see that well over a century since his death, Capitalism had not collapsed. He'd see that the USSR, founded on his and his contemporary Lenin's beliefs, ultimately became a state for the "bourgeois proletariat" as what was supposed to be a classless society had government workers and higher-ups living lavishly while their supposed counterparts toiled away at the factory. He'd see that it ultimately collapsed from the sheer struggle of trying to keep it afloat. He'd see that no widespread revolution happened; instead Fascism rose and Capitalism became stronger. He'd see that he was just wrong.