The new reading of Marx’s Capital David F. Ruccio,

Transcript:The new reading of Marx’s Capital David F. Ruccio,:
The new reading of Marx’s Capital David F. Ruccio, University of Notre Dame Lattelecom International Conference: New Strategies in the New World (October 2011) Nouriel Roubini So Karl Marx, it seems, was partly right in arguing that globalization, financial intermediation run amok, and redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital could lead capitalism to self-destruct. George Magnus Policy makers struggling to understand the barrage of financial panics, protests and other ills afflicting the world would do well to study the works of a long-dead economist: Karl Marx. The sooner they recognize we’re facing a once-in-a-lifetime crisis of capitalism, the better equipped they will be to manage a way out of it. Why now? After 30-year campaign to stamp out Marx —within the discipline of economics and in the wider society Then, CRASH of 2008 Why Marx? Failure of mainstream economics Didn’t predict the crash Didn’t consider the possibility of a crash Didn’t know what to do after the crash Growing problems DEREGULATION and growth of finance Housing BUBBLE OUTSOURCING of jobs DECLINE of labor unions Plus Productivity-wage gap Unequal distribution of income And mainstream economists? Efficient markets Inequality good for growth just technology and globalization [Also, no economic history or history of economic thought] problems worse since 2008. . . high and persistent and long-term UNEMPLOYMENT increasing POVERTY and food insecurity STAGNANT WAGES and declining average incomes recovery only in PROFITS Renewed interest in MARX Umair Haque “Marx's critiques seem, today, more resonant than we might have guessed.” “You don’t have to sleep in a Che Guevara T-shirt or throw rocks at McDonald’s to acknowledge that Marx’s thought is worth studying, grappling with, and possibly even applying to our current challenges.” Peter Coy But. . . They haven’t read Marx’s Capital They haven’t read scholarly work on Marx’s Capital Marx’s Critique of Political Economy Alienation Commodity fetishism Immiseration Crisis Stagnation Alienation Marx argued that workers are divorced from the product of their labor. It confronts them as an alien power, something independent of them. “Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labor are brought about at the cost of the individual laborer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy