Anybody who even cursorily became familiar with Marxist literature (as many of us did during our radical days in the turbulent ’60s) knows that the true, socialist Left predicted our current economic chaos with a sure clarity that no purported psychic could begin to match.
“Reds” of assorted affiliations were incessantly telling us how capitalism in its imperialist stage was fatally compromised and doomed, intricately detailing the reasons why, and heavily underscoring the inevitability of the coming collapse.
But we were impatient and accustomed to instant results. We consequently dismissed those claims because they didn’t materialize at once, or even relatively soon.
Who could anticipate that many decades would pass before the “stuff” fully hit the proverbial fan?
Defenders of the bourgeois status quo, on the other hand, were so hostilely contemptuous of anything smacking of socialism that they wouldn’t deign to study, or take seriously, Marxist analysis, regardless of how cogent its penetrating view.
Commies could have tipped them off to their economic folly, but hubris and supremacism prevented it.
I recall reading, for instance, a paperback critique by Gus Hall, General Secretary of the Communist Party, USA. It was entitled Capitalism on the Skids to Oblivion.
Through very deductive and quite persuasive reasoning, he pointed out that the capitalist owning class’s constant campaign to reduce labor costs was unwitting suicide for the Wall Street set.
If bosses hold back workers’ wages, eliminate benefits, bust labor unions, saddle toilers with that portion of taxes the rich avoid through cavernous loopholes, etc., they may profit obscenely in the short run.
But ultimately a point is reached — very much like the situation we’re faced with today — where the societal majority gets sufficiently impoverished by relentless exploitation that people, by the many millions, become unable to buy back what a country produces.
The ensuing “overproduction crisis” triggers recession, and depression, and finally a broad, revolutionary awareness that capitalism is incapable of serving public welfare and the common good.
Reds also revealed how the depraved capitalist impulse of ripping off others for profit thoroughly corrupts a society on all levels, engendering festering decadence that rots culture to its core.
One need only surf America’s cable television channels to see the offensively tawdry entertainment, vile scandals, blatant hucksterism, and other pervasive negatives that have come to constitute our sick “values.”
Capitalism has plainly reached the end of its rope. It can sustain increasing levels of profitability — upon which its very survival depends — only by imposing harsh austerity on the world’s laboring multitudes, as the International Monetary Fund and similar institutions are currently, cruelly doing, with devastating impact.
That forced, collective sacrifice to save a relatively few oligarchic skins is infuriating workers everywhere, most dramatically in rebellious Greece, and it’s just a matter of time before the entire global proletariat rises in fury, understandably unwilling to have its living standards decimated simply because Fat Cats want to continue laughing all the way to the bank.
Whether the Marxists’ communist ideal can ever be gotten right and made to successfully function is definitely open to vigorous debate.
But their dissection of monopoly capitalism was so precise that you’d think they’d been reading our mail.