The self-destruction of capitalism – was Marx right?

The following podcast from the BBC Radio 4’s series, A Point of View is by John Gray, emeritus professor of European thought at the LSE and author of False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. In the podcast, he considers whether Marx, the great 19th century thinker, was right to predict the demise of capitalism.

Marx’s picture of the end of capitalism and the stages of society that would succeed it have been dismissed by most academics and commentators as quite false. Marx predicted that as capitalist economies became increasingly unstable and unequal, so workers would rise up in revolution. What would follow would be a socialist state in which the means of production would be collectively owned and output and distribution would be planned. As socialist economies became wealthier and life was perceived to be fairer, so the need for state control would diminish. Eventually the state would wither away and the ultimate stage of communism would be reached, where there would sufficient resources to reward everyone according to their needs.

Two of the key criticisms of Marx’s analysis are: (a) capitalism was overthrown in only a few countries and (b) in the countries that did adopt central planning, such as the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries, the state did not wither away; instead, they reverted to capitalism.

But whilst Marx’s analysis of a post-capitalist world may have been flawed, his analysis of the weaknesses and tensions of capitalism have been prophetically correct in many regards. As John Gray says:

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.

Listen to the podcast and try to assess whether we are witnessing a 21st century version of Marx’s 19th century vision.

A Point of View: The revolution of capitalism (article) BBC Radio 4, John Gray (4/9/11)
A Point of View: The revolution of capitalism (podcast) BBC Radio 4, John Gray (4/9/11) (see alternatively)
Has Western capitalism failed? BBC News (23/9/11)

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