Karl Marx Was Right
On Saturday at the Left Forum in New York City, Chris Hedges joined professors Richard Wolff and Gail Dines
to discuss why Karl Marx is essential at a time when global capitalism
is collapsing. These are the remarks Hedges made to open the discussion.
Karl Marx exposed the peculiar dynamics of capitalism, or what he
called “the bourgeois mode of production.” He foresaw that capitalism
had built within it the seeds of its own destruction. He knew that
reigning ideologies—think neoliberalism—were created to serve the
interests of the elites and in particular the economic elites, since
“the class which has the means of material production at its disposal,
has control at the same time over the means of mental production” and
“the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the
dominant material relationships … the relationships which make one class
the ruling one.” He saw that there would come a day when capitalism
would exhaust its potential and collapse. He did not know when that day
would come. Marx, as Meghnad Desai
wrote, was “an astronomer of history, not an astrologer.” Marx was
keenly aware of capitalism’s ability to innovate and adapt. But he also
knew that capitalist expansion was not eternally sustainable. And as we
witness the denouement of capitalism and the disintegration of
globalism, Karl Marx is vindicated as capitalism’s most prescient and
important critic.
