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Full Marx if you can see history repeating itself | Business | The Observer
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May 11, 9:54am
2 reviews
•http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/20...
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So unchecked capitalism tends ultimately to eat itself then? Who'd have thunk it.....
From the page: "Marx's work is usually discredited by association with the failed centrally planned economies of eastern Europe and elsewhere, and by the failure of capitalism to collapse as he had predicted. But Marx s Marxism was never a prescription - it was Lenin and Stalin who froze it into dogma - much more a developing argument; and as Wheen notes, any errors are eclipsed and transcended by the piercing accuracy with which he revealed the nature of the capitalist beast .
In fact, apart from the predictions of capitalism s impending demise, it is remarkable how much its sharpest critic got right. Along with creeping monopolies, growing inequality and the all-absorbing momentum of the capital markets, Marx foresaw many of the effects of globalisation, which he called the universal interdependence of nations , not least the effects of an international reserve army of the unemployed in disciplining and depressing the wages of workers in the developed economies.
His description of the cash nexus foreshadowed the economic rationality at the centre of today s mainstream economic and management theories. Most prescient, as writers as different as the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter and the billionaire trader George Soros acknowledge, was Marx s insight that capitalism s most potent enemy was not outside but inside: market fundamentalism, in Soros term, or, for Schumpeter, the waves of creative destruction that would eventually swamp whole economies. Capitalism, as is now clear, has most to fear from capitalists."
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