Originally posted by Joseph K
View Post
Varoufakis is a renowned economist and a brilliantly entertaining and stylish polemicist, who admits to getting into hot water with puritanical Marxists by his self-classification as “a libertarian Marxist”, whatever that means -- to the uninitiated such as myself this shades into “The Judaean People’s Front” vs “The People’s Front of Judaea”, so I’m not exactly sure on which Marxian fence he sits, politically. David Harvey might be able to assist, I suppose, by identifying the overlapping classes of oppressed peoples which can apparently reside within the individual known as Varoufakis simultaneously.
Aren’t several of Varoufakis's assertions questionable, though ? Far from living in an environment in which, according to Varoufakis, “capitalism was fragmented, local and timid “, Marx and Engels were at the epicentre of possibly the greatest industrially-fuelled global trade boom in history, reporting on what was before their very eyes. They would have had to exist in hermetic isolation to ignore the seething cauldron of revolutionary capitalism surrounding them in the Britain of 1848.
Referring to conditions in 1991, when Fukuyama was making hubristic predictions of “The End of History”, Varoufakis says,“Most economists, including those sympathetic to Marx, doubted the manifesto’s prediction that “exploitation of the world-market” would give “a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country”. But surely Marx and Engels in 1848 aren’t predicting the future state of capitalist society 150 years hence, but taking a forensic photoshot of British commerce and economic life at that time “The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country “ i.e. they told it as it was — Britain the workshop of the world, exporting manufactured goods throughout the Empire & to the US and continental Europe, while ruthlessly extracting resources from their colonial possessions.
Marx and Engels’ assumption that revolutionary developments in this country would proceed according to continental precedents — manning the barricades, fomenting violent revolution, culminating in the triumph of the proletariat, surely underestimated the inbred English distrust of “foreign” notions and of the hegemonic power of the Victorian British state to neutralise them. Cripes ! I’ve come over all Gramsciian, there. I must sit down for a bit….Perhaps M & E can be forgiven for apparent ignorance of the fact that the English done it — you know, that revolutionary thing where you chop the monarch’s head off & substitute an assembly of citizens to run the gaff — 200 years before they wrote their pamphlet, 130 years before the American Revolution, and 140-odd years before the French botched their attempt.
Varoufakis hints that the manifesto chillingly predicts that capitalism will ultimately run amok and destroy itself “like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”. This now reads like a prophesy of environmental catastrophe, of rampant capitalism, like some monstrous black hole, ingesting the Earth, which I’m not sure was in the authors’ minds in 1848, but is certainly consistent with the general direction of travel nowadays, and so may count as their most significant prediction.
Spot-on. Hitler went down well in a society, much like our own, where "passion" was prized over logical thought. In a post-factual and forgetful world, I hope we're not destined for repetition of the mistakes of history.
Comment