Of late, with the pillars of Capitalism crumbling all around us, many of us have gone back to Marx’s Das Kapital and assorted writings to confirm that well yes, Marx had said all along that it would end somehow like this.
So why am I roundly declaring that poor Marx was wrong? Well, in his latest post Yani Varoufakis, has reminded us of a fact we have tended to minimize in all the hot toxic air emanating from the financially blown up bubbles. What Yani Varoufakis has reminded us is that the Germans were probably among the first victims of how this crisis came about. (And not the Greeks). In order to keep increasing profits German industry, as condoned by the German government, had been squeezing and squeezing wages tighter and tighter so that real working income was falling to very low levels despite the high productivity achieved by this workforce.
Now that, you may say is what Marx always said would happen. Capitalists squeezing wages more and more in order to increase profits. Indeed. This lead to the surpluses swishing about around Europe that inflated the bubbles which burst. Again, not something a Marxist analysis would not agree with. So where was he wrong?
Well, Marx had always expected that the Communist Revolution would start in Germany, that is in a highly industrialized country with a large exploited proletariat. But the German proletariat, one squeezed into lower and lower real income levels, probably more than any other in Europe, never so much as muttered resentment, still less organized strikes on any grand and meaningful scale at the injustice of this.
So why was this? Well, later in the day of course the German public was fed on all that… propaganda that it was the lazy Greeks at fault to whom they were giving all these hand outs. Just as most of the Greeks don’t realize how much the German working force has been and is being exploited, so the German public was never told that these funds flowing into Greece by the billions, were not hand outs at all but expensive loans which didn’t even go into the Greek economy but were just being recycled back into the European and particularly German banks.
Marx’s analysis of Capitalism remains unsurpassed. However, though he did realize it was devious, he probably didn’t realize just how resilient it is.
Propaganda (or Communication as it is called today) works, of course. And we can see how well in all the racial stereotyping rearing its ugly head all over Europe (I mean, forget the Germans and the Greeks for a moment and look at the French and English!). However, Propaganda can never be enough in the long haul. If Capitalism is to survive then it will have to display its greatest resilience yet.