Karl Marx Was Right

Intelligence Squared

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4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2016

⏱️ 60 minutes

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Summary

We can’t say Karl Marx didn’t warn us: capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. In their chase for ever higher profits, the capitalists shed workers for machines. The higher return on capital means that the share of profits rises and the share of wages falls, and soon the mass of the population isn’t earning enough to buy the goods capitalism produces. And that’s exactly what’s been happening over the past four years of the Great Recession: ever increasing income inequality, leading to ever weaker aggregate demand – temporarily disguised by an unsustainable credit binge – leading to collapse. You don’t have to be a communist to see that this is so. We should all be Marxists now. Or should we? Every time capitalism hits an inevitable bad patch, Marx’s name is invoked with wearisome regularity. But no serious economist or political thinker – with the possible exception of Gordon Brown – has ever suggested capitalism can break free of booms and busts. Once bust, as we’ve seen time and again, the... Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/intelligencesquared. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this Intelligence Square podcast.
0:03.0	For more information on our debates, talks and discussions,
0:06.0	visit intelligence squared.com and sign up to the newsletter.
0:10.0	Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,
0:12.0	and welcome to this Intelligence Square debate on the motion.
0:16.7	Carl Marx was right.
0:19.0	Capitalism post-2008 is falling apart under the weight of its own contradictions. Since the
0:26.4	collapse of the Western banking system in 2007 to 2009, the advanced
0:32.4	industrial economies have struggled to recover in spite of highly
0:37.5	unorthodox measures, huge monetary stimulus, and yet the constraints of high public debt and anemic growth have proved
0:49.6	as yet almost insurmountable. Is this an illustration of the inherent
0:55.2	contradictions of capitalism, the immiseration of the proletariat, the
0:59.6	rate of the profit, the tendency of the
1:05.0	rate of profit to fall, or are we instead seeing some exceptional event brought about not by the
1:08.8	contradictions of capitalism but by the failure of one particular segment of the economy, the financial system,
1:16.3	and at the same time seeing the productive power of the market in other parts of the world,
1:20.6	notably China. The motion... of the motion
1:25.0	proponents of the motion will speak first.
1:28.0	The motion again, Karl Marx was right, capitalism post-2008
1:32.0	is falling apart under the weight of its own contradictions.
1:35.0	The speaker who's going to introduce that motion is Tristram Hunt, historian,
1:40.0	Labour MP, and author of a biography of Friedrich Engels.
	...

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