Why reading Marx's Das Kapital still matters

2012-06-24 · first published in marxsite · 184 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did.

---

T he relevance of Marx’s Das Kapital to the modern capitalist world is once again getting a hearing. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the opening up of China to international capitalism, the political and economic elites declared that a new economic paradigm had arrived, bringing with it undreamt promises of wealth and consumer bliss as long as the market was left to do its own thing. Plenty of people listened to them. But their hubris and complacency rested on a massive historical amnesia that blinded them to an elementary truth borne out by nearly 400 years of history: namely that capitalism remains structurally prone to major economic crises.

That is one context in which it makes sense to return to Marx’s Das Kapital . As the title of the book makes clear: it names the beast. Without a name, we cannot really begin to define what the problems are – in their deep fundamentals; without naming this system of social and economic arrangements, the deep structural causes elude us.