Marxism rises from capitalism's ashes

Published on Saturday 27 September 2008 19:55

IT IS interesting that Bill Jamieson, an entrenched fan of free market capitalism, should now be forced to devote an entire column to Marxism ('Only capitalism rises phoenix-like from the ashes', Insight, September 21).

More than a century before Gordon Brown abolished "boom and bust", Marx argued that the cycles of capitalism could no more be abolished than the tides or the seasons. Since the 1990s, Marxism has either been ignored or dismissed by almost all mainstream economists and media commentators as an old time religion, of no relevance to the modern world.

Indeed, during a debate with me on globalisation in 2005, George Kerevan – Bill Jamieson's fellow free marketeer – passionately rubbished my suggestion in the Scottish Socialist Party booklet Two Worlds Collide that "capitalism is not in as healthy a state as it likes to pretend. It is a fragile, precarious system in which fortunes can evaporate overnight. While investors are confident that their money will keep growing and growing, they will keep investing and investing. But if they fear their money will start shrinking, they will pull out at the speed of light."

George, in contrast, set out a utopian vision of a century of uninterrupted capitalist progress.

Bill Jamieson, moreover, caricatures Marxism when he repeatedly refers in quotation marks to the "final collapse of capitalism". Karl Marx himself was more sophisticated than that, as Mr Kerevan, no stranger to Marxism, will testify. Marx's analysis avoided such mechanistic determinism. Capitalism, he recognised, could always find a way out of crisis, but such slumps would invariably cause human suffering on a mammoth scale. That's why Marx was not just an economist, but a political activist striving to create a political movement to change the world.

Alan McCombes, Glasgow