This BBC News magazine article by John Gray offers the opinion that while Karl Marx misjudged how his own communist theory would work in reality, he was dead on in his critique of capitalism. Gray writes:
Capitalism has been described as a process of creative destruction, and no-one can deny that it has been prodigiously productive. Practically anyone who is alive in Britain today has a higher real income than they would have had if capitalism had never existed.
The trouble is that among the things that have been destroyed in the process is the way of life on which capitalism in the past depended.
He argues that the very success of capitalism is the agent of its own destruction as it now wreaks havoc on the middle class it depends on to flourish. Marx argued that the communism would eventually bring about the end of the bourgeoisie, but in practice the bourgeoisie could not be wiped away by the forces of communist regimes, it took the forces of the rapacious market.
Writing at his blog “Global Guerillas”, author and social theorist John Robb had a post entitled “Hollow States and a Crisis of Capitalism” that echoes some of the same ideas. Robb says that capitalism has resulted in nation states rotting from the inside out as they lurch from crisis to crisis:
The other idea I’m currently working on is: “a crisis of capitalism.” It may also take 3-4 years for people to really get that it is real.
The idea is simple. That capitalism, as it works today is failing. It lunges from crisis to crisis, each with increasing severity and duration. Ceteris paribus, we are headed for a decade long economic depression.
Why is it failing? Its decision making is EXTREMELY centralized. Centralized economic deicison making (aka “central planning”), as the Soviet nomenklatura found out, doesn’t work in a complex modern economy.
Now, the notion that capitalist economies are centralized seems opposite of the way we have been led to think of the difference between capitalism and communism, but he points out that most economic policy in the West is made by an extremely small group of elites who have become ossified by their own ideology and the hollowing out of political institutions that might otherwise counterbalance them.
