Marx On The Mark ?  

Michael West has some closing quips in his SMH column today quoting Karl Marx on the banking sector - Marx On The Mark. The stuff about the laissez-faire guys being quiet about government bailouts at the moment seems unfair (the guys at The Daily Reckoning and suchlike haven't shut up for a moment as far as I can tell, and bemoan government interference in the market every day - at length). As for Marx, you'd be hard-pressed to argue he was wrong at the moment.

Government intervention is occurring around the world on a daily basis, with barely a whisper of dissent from the laissez-faire ''let them fail'' brigade, as corporate welfare has become de riguer.

Where it will all end is unbridled guesswork but Economics 101, and indeed ideology in general, has been tossed overboard as the captains of state scramble desperately to keep the global economy afloat.

To close on a lighter note then, here is a quote from Karl Marx:
"Talk about centralisation!

The credit system, which has its focus in the so-called national banks and the big money-lenders and usurers surrounding them, constitutes enormous centralisation, and gives this class of parasites the fabulous power, not only to periodically despoil industrial capitalists, but also to interfere in actual production in a most dangerous manner-and this gang knows nothing about production and has nothing to do with it." (Marx, Das Kapital III, Ch. 33, The medium of circulation in the credit system pp. 544-45.)

I've always liked West's work ever since he did the business gossip column in The Australian (which must be a decade ago now). I had an interesting chat to him a little while ago, after he wrote an article called "Keynes is dead, let's bury him" a couple of days after my post on "locabucks", in which he dubbed Silvio Gesell a "prototypical fascist economist".

The column itself looked like a regurgitation of Jonah Goldberg's silly "liberal fascists" book that caused a stir a year or so ago (chiefly because it was completely nonsensical) so I wrote to Michael and asked if he'd written it or if it had been mis-attributed to him and was actually a Goldberg effort, and why, if he had written it, he thought Gesell was a proto-fascist.

The response was quite illuminating - it wasn't written by Goldberg, but Michael didn't write it on his own and seemingly wished he hadn't written it at all after all the feedback he'd received.

The original source didn't seem to understand the difference between fascists and individualist-mutualist anarchists like Gesell at all unfortunately - perhaps another sign of how dumbed-down we've become, though apparently the two terms aren't always mutually exclusive.