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Interest in socialism surging

www.socialistworld.net, 09/02/2009
website of the committee for a workers' international, CWI

Marx on the cover of time magazine in Europe – Capitalism losing legitimacy

Dan DiMaggio

The global crisis of capitalism has led to a surge of interest in socialist ideas all over the world.

Merriam-Webster reports that socialism was the third most searched-for term (“bailout” was #1) during 2008 in their online dictionary, which receives 125 million views per month, meaning millions of people were looking to find out what socialism means.

Sales of The Communist Manifesto have skyrocketed, with Amazon.com reporting a 700% increase since the banking collapse, according to the Times (UK) (11/9/08).

In Berlin, all copies of Karl Marx’s Capital reportedly sold out several months ago. According to Joern Schuetrumpf, the German publisher of Marx’s Collected Works, "Until 2004, we sold less than 100 copies of Das Kapital per year. In the ten months of 2008, we have sold more than 2,500 copies. It is clear that people are interested in learning what Marx has to say about why capitalism does not work.” (Inter Press Service, 11/7/08)

There’s even now a Japanese comic book version of Das Kapital, which sold 6,000 copies within a few days of hitting the shelves in December. Additionally, Kanikosen (“The Crab Factory Ship”), a Communist novel from 1929 about a group of workers rebelling against brutal working conditions on their ship, has experienced a resurgence, with sales of over 500,000 copies in 2008, up from an average of around 5,000 in previous years (Telegraph (UK), 11/18/08).

All this is evidence of the growing quest to understand the nature of the economic crisis. The coming years will provide ample opportunities to build the socialist movement as the failures of capitalism lead millions to search for an alternative.

Marx on the cover of Time Magazine

“A specter is haunting Europe …” Karl Marx made the front cover of the February 2 issue of the European edition of Time Magazine, displaying the weakening confidence of the capitalist ruling elite in their system. This is quite a striking reversal. Less than 20 years ago, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Marx’s ideas were dismissed as dead. Capitalism was seemingly triumphant worldwide.

Yet with the massive and still unfolding global economic crisis, the capitalist system is losing legitimacy around the world. The same week as Marx appeared on the cover of Time, the International Labor Organization announced that 51 million jobs could disappear worldwide in 2009. On Monday, January 26 alone, major U.S. corporations announced over 60,000 job cuts. Hundreds of millions across the globe now face the loss of their livelihoods, and with it the threat of poverty, homelessness, hunger, and family and social breakdown.

Yet none of this has deterred the insatiable greed of the “banksters.” The big Wall Street banks, it was recently reported, handed out $18.4 billion in bonuses in 2008, the sixth largest total on record. New president Barack Obama called their actions “shameful,” yet at the same time his administration just handed over another $350 billion to the banks and is preparing to dish out even more once they pass their stimulus package. Nor has it seem to have impacted the corporate titans at Exxon Mobil, which announced last week that it made a record $45.2 billion in 2008, the most ever made by any corporation (beating out Exxon’s record $40.6 billion in 2007).

Around the world, illusions that capitalism can provide a decent future are fast being broken down. As Time writes, "Nobody younger than 80 has experienced such a rapid decline in global confidence and economic activity. Markets have failed, and in so doing they have destroyed the conventional wisdom about how to run an efficient economy. It’s as if an intellectual fog has descended, and the global positioning system has broken down, leaving the world to grope its way out as best it can.”

The article goes on to quote former British Prime Minister Tony Blair: "Ask the experts what to do, and the most honest reply is ’I don’t know.’” Even Alan Greenspan, former head of the U.S. Federal Reserve and once commonly referred to as the “maestro,” admitted “I still do not fully understand why [the crisis] happened.” Trapped by the logic of the for-profit system, they can find no answers. As Marx put it in the Communist Manifesto, modern capitalism is like “the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

Yet Marx provided a clear explanation of the causes of capitalist crises (see below for an excerpt from the Communist Manifesto). The article in Time quotes Archbishop Reinhard Marx (who recently wrote his own “Das Kapital”), writing a letter to his revolutionary namesake: “[Capitalism] lasted longer than you expected back in the 19th century, but could it be that capitalism is just an episode of history that will end at some point because the system will collapse as a result of its internal contradictions?”

Marx decisively showed how capitalism was doomed to periodic crises due to these internal contradictions, specifically the contradiction between the private ownership of capital – the factories, banks, etc. – by a tiny mega-rich minority, and the socialized nature of production, in which millions toil to produce goods and profits controlled by this elite. In order to make this profit, the bosses pay workers only a fraction of the wealth they produce. This leaves workers unable to buy back all the goods they have produced, leading to crises rooted in overproduction and overcapacity.

These crises can only be solved on a capitalist basis by, as Marx wrote, the “enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces … [and] by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.” This is what lies behind the plant closings and layoffs all over the world, as well as the increasing competition for markets, showcased by the anger at the World Economic Forum in Davos over growing fears of U.S. protectionism.

As German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned in Time, if governments “are not in a position to show that we can create a social order for the world in which such crises do not take place, then we’ll face stronger questions as to whether this is really the right economic system.”

Already we have seen mass demonstrations in many countries across the world, including a strike by 1 million French workers last week, as well as a series of demonstrations in Iceland, the country hardest hit by the economic crisis so far, which brought down the government there. There has been a surge of interest in socialist ideas across the world, as millions seek an alternative to the crises wrought by the capitalist system.

As Time quotes Archbishop Marx, writing to the revolutionary Karl Marx, "There’s a question that won’t leave me in peace: At the end of the 20th century, when the capitalist West defeated the communist East in the battle between systems, were we too quick to dismiss you and your economic theories?"

This is a question that will in the coming years trouble corporate and political elites and their ideologues around the globe. Increasing numbers of workers and youth will be driven to explore the ideas of genuine Marxism (not the perversion found in the Stalinist states), and will find in them a real explanation of the systemic causes of the current crisis and the need to struggle for a revolutionary transformation of society, taking power and wealth away from the tiny gang of “banksters” and corrupt elites and placing it in the hands of the immense majority, the workers of the world.