Journal entries - October 2008.
29th October 2008
Karl Marx was right all along.
Ecomomists, journalists, talking heads on the telly, learned academics, politicians of many hues have spent decades trying to prove Karl Marx wrong.
"End of history" said Fukayama, "we've broken the cycle of boom and bust economics" said New Labour. "Capitalism has triumphed" said the free-marketeers.
Through all this pap and nonsense the voice of Marx and Engels still rings clear from the "Manifesto of the Communist party", written 160 years ago. We are living in a time of economic madness, billions live and die in dire poverty whilst Capitalism now goes through a crisis of overproduction!
You can listen to a reading of the Communist Manifesto or download the text
Excerpt from the Manifesto of the Communist Party,
Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels - 1848.
"Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly.
In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.
The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.
And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented."
* end of excerpt from the Communist Manifesto
Reading of the Manifesto of the Communist Party.
Ogg-vorbis format
- Chapter 1 - Bourgeois and Proletarians
- Chapter 2 - Proletarians and Communists
- Chapter 3 - Socialist and Communist literature
MP3 format
- Chapter 1 - Bourgeois and Proletarians
- Chapter 2 - Proletarians and Communists
- Chapter 3 - Socialist and Communist literature
Text of the Manifesto of the Communist Party - This is a .txt file
