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Considering all the insecurity we are feeling over our way of life, I am surprised that it has taken this long for me to come across Marx. Even here, it is a good, moderate treatment: no call for arms and to stampede Wall Street more effectively.
Mr. Gray merely notes the prescience of Marx in seeing how capitalism would eventually undermine the middle-class. Gray assumes, probably correctly, that the market and capitalism are likely to remain, but perhaps without a broad middle-class. He does not address a question, though, which comes to me: can democracy survive without a broad-based middle-class? Is it possible that our only real choice for a political system will be between oligarchy and totalitarianism?
_ _ _
Marx was wrong about communism. Where he was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It's not just capitalism's endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours.
More profoundly, Marx understood how capitalism destroys its own social base - the middle-class way of life. The Marxist terminology of bourgeois and proletarian has an archaic ring.
But when he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we're only now struggling to cope with.
-- John Gray for The BBC
Mr. Gray merely notes the prescience of Marx in seeing how capitalism would eventually undermine the middle-class. Gray assumes, probably correctly, that the market and capitalism are likely to remain, but perhaps without a broad middle-class. He does not address a question, though, which comes to me: can democracy survive without a broad-based middle-class? Is it possible that our only real choice for a political system will be between oligarchy and totalitarianism?
_ _ _
Marx was wrong about communism. Where he was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It's not just capitalism's endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours.
More profoundly, Marx understood how capitalism destroys its own social base - the middle-class way of life. The Marxist terminology of bourgeois and proletarian has an archaic ring.
But when he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we're only now struggling to cope with.
-- John Gray for The BBC
