How Does Capitalism Work, and How Does it Fail? | Marxism 101 | Briefing #5

“The Crises of Overproduction Are Coming, and I Can’t Stop Them!”

NOTE: This is part of our series of briefings on Marxism 101. Check out the Introduction if you haven’t already.

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INTRO: THE STORY SO FAR

This is where it all starts to come together. Before we go further, let’s review what we’ve discussed in prior briefings on Marxism 101:

What is Class? – Briefing #2

Marxism sees us all as members of different classes in society. What class you belong to depends on your relationship to the means of production (or capital). Today, Marxists talk about two principal classes. One of them is the capitalist class, or the bourgeoisie. The capitalist class owns the buildings, materials, and tools in society. We need this capital to produce goods and services and create wealth. The other is the working class, or proletariat, which has no capital except their own labor power. They work for the capitalists and their corporations in exchange for wages. Class relationships change over time based on the society in which we live. In prehistory, class relationships didn’t really exist. They emerged as we grew to have surpluses left over from our labor together. This led to hierarchies, property relationships, and power imbalances between people. Slavery and feudalism are both examples of class systems in place before capitalism.

Capital, Commodities and Value: Briefing #3

When we’re talking about capital, we’re also talking about private property. This is because in capitalism, the means of production are privately held by a class of owners. Private productive property is anything of value that we can use to create more value. This is different from personal property. Marxists aren’t coming for your house or your PlayStation. Capitalists use the property they own to make commodities, products we can buy or sell. Each commodity has both use value and exchange value. They only sell if someone finds them useful. We can pay a certain amount of money, or price, for each commodity, too. Even the work you do – your labor power – is a commodity under capitalism. The price of labor affects the price of commodities, and those prices change over time. But knowing the use value of something won’t tell you its price, or vice versa. It’s more complicated than that. Prices get determined in part by competition between buyers and sellers. When sellers get enough money from their commodities, they profit. They’ve created more value than there was before they started. The secret ingredient to creating that new wealth is labor.

The Labor Theory of Value: Briefing #4

We need labor to make a commodity, and the work we do infuses things with value. In this way, Marxists value commodities by the amount of labor it took to produce them. Still, it has to be labor is socially necessary. This means workers used an average amount of skill, time and resources in producing it – it’s “state of the art”. The tools we use and training we undertake also count in reckoning a commodity’s value. They pass on some of their value into each product made. Workers take raw materials, tools and training to create commodities. In doing so, they actually create more value than what existed before. That’s called surplus value. Still, workers aren’t paid for the full value of what they make. If they did, the capitalists who hire them wouldn’t be able to profit! Instead, capitalists pay workers for their labor power in the form of wages. That wage is the price of their labor power. It covers not the value they created, but the cost of reproducing their labor. By that, we mean it covers what it takes to eat, rest, pay bills, raise kids (a.k.a future workers) and do it all again tomorrow. Too many of us know that too often, a wage doesn’t even cover that cost of getting by, or subsistence. The more surplus value capitalists can extract from workers, the more they can profit. Because of this, capitalists work to keep their costs as low as possible – including the cost of your wages. So now you’ve got your profits. Under capitalism, what do you do with them?

HOW DOES CAPITALISM CREATE WEALTH?

Once you, the capitalist, have sold your commodities, you have to pay your bills. And think of all the bills you have to pay! It’s a bit like what I had to do as a restaurant server back in college, when I was getting paid in tips. Before I counted up my own profits, I had to tip out to the bussers, runners and the bar. After all, I wouldn’t have been able to do my job if they hadn’t played their own role in getting people drinks and meals. So does a capitalist business owner have to tip out? Yep. Some of their surplus value goes to:

• The LANDLORD (in the form of rent on their facilities),

• The BANK that financed them (in the form of repaid principal and interest on loans they’ve taken out),

• The LABOR they hire to produce their products (and to whom they pay a wage).

This is why it’s a real good idea for a capitalist to have his own land, buildings and financing, if he can swing it. He’ll get to keep more of his profits than just about anyone else does.

What remains of the surplus value at this point is what we call profit. But the capitalist doesn’t get to pocket all that profit and spend it on a mega-yacht. Some of that profit is going to get taxed for schools and roads and healthcare and such. Oh, and unemployment, and Social Security. Some of it also has to go to the business’s own insurance and rainy day funds (because shit happens).

Then, a capitalist has to cover their constant and variable capital. They’d use some of their revenue to replenish the raw materials they used. They also have to compensate for the wear and tear on their machines – to maintain and replace them if needed. You must pay for any tools your business needs, as well. This is what Marxists call investment in constant capital. Remember, they’re also paying for variable capital – Marx’s term for workers and the wages paid to them.

And if this was all capitalism was, and all it required, it’d be simple enough. The worker would get paid enough to get by, the business would cover its expenses and make a tidy profit. The capitalists would take the profit that’s left and have a good old time. They’d enjoy their lavish lifestyles while the working class enjoys something far less. Still, it’d be a way of life, and stable enough as things go.

But that’s not what it requires – capitalism can’t settle for stability. It can’t abide a reasonable, sustainable amount of profit. It doesn’t matter if plenty of business owners would content themselves with that. The system’s not built for it. Capitalism is a system that always seeks out more growth and more profit. Without this, it will die. There’s one reason for this above all, driving the behavior of capitalist enterprises.

“Competition is the beating heart of capitalism… Individual capitalists may fancy themselves as above the fray. They may want to position themselves as caring capitalists… But in the end, no capitalist can opt out of competing and none is protected from upstart challengers.”

– Hadas Thier, “A People’s Guide to Capitalism”

Capitalism is based on competition. Every capitalist selling goods is selling them on a market. In that market, other firms can sell, and usually are selling, similar goods. They have competition from these other companies. There’s no guarantee that any of these sellers will gain enough market share to profit. If they gain market share, others will lose it, and vice versa.

Capitalists use many techniques to maximize their market share. Branding is one of them. Create a good brand reputation, one known to be quality, fashionable or fun, and customers may stick to it. Related to this are marketing and advertising. Getting the word out is essential, especially if there are other choices available. As an alternative, capitalists can lower their prices to capture more market share. If this succeeds, they can increase prices later when their competitors have folded.

Capitalists don’t know for sure how much of a product to produce, or if enough buyers even exist for them. We already mentioned the anarchy in the production process from many competing companies. There’s also ignorance of how much to produce, around which companies have to do their best to plan anyway. They conduct market research to determine what needs exist or what customers desire. In the Google & Facebook Age, data-mining can tell them about consumer preferences. But it’s all, still, a guess. They’re trying to predict what a market wants and will bear when the market isn’t forthcoming. It’s made of too many moving parts to ever know for sure, and it’s always changing. Make the right guess and create the right products in the right quantities, and you will be rich. Make the wrong choice, and you’ll go belly-up. Your unsold merchandise will gather dust in a warehouse or on the shelves of T.J. Maxx.

The best move for a company is to make products more cheaply and quickly than their competitors. Marketing and price reductions may not help if your products still cost too much to make. One way around this problem is to start using cheaper, shoddier raw materials. If your products use cheaper parts, you can sell them for a similar price to those of your competitors. In theory, you can profit more than they will because your costs will be lower than theirs. But this is very risky. If customers decide your products are inferior in quality, it could hurt your brand. They may not want to pay a comparable price for your product, forcing you to lower prices. Eventually they may not even be willing to pay discounted prices for crap quality. As a result, you will lose too much market share to stay in business. The best choice is often to cut the costs of making a similar product to your competitors.

By and large, the largest cost which the capitalist will want to cut is the cost of labor. Their goal will be to produce the most product with the least amount of labor invested. In Wage Labour and Capital, Marx identified two main ways to accomplish this. Either use greater division of labor, or greater use of technology and machinery.

Capitalists invest back into their businesses with new tech, buildings and materials. In other words, they are concentrating capital, which allows them to expand production. Other, conventional economists might call this “organic growth” for a business. This is not optional for most capitalists that want to stay afloat. They have to increase their market share. They have to make more of their product to meet demand. Indeed, they have to conquer new markets. Concentrating capital, in turn, means companies have to hire more workers, too. Demand for labor goes up. Yet this often doesn’t lead to higher wages or better conditions to entice workers. The increasing division of labor and use of technology helps explain why, and we’ll get to that. Marx says that in the end, the capitalist is the only one who really gets ahead.

Investing in new tech to keep profits up is effective, but only until competitors catch up. For a while, this can give you a huge advantage: you can make more of your widgets, faster, than your rivals! That allows you to corner the market, and make sure that more of the widgets sold come from you. Plus, your widgets take few work-hours to make, so your labor costs are lower. You can now make your prices lower at the point of sale to entice buyers if that’s your strategy. Also, remember – if your lowered costs allow you to make more product, you also have to make sure you can sell more of them. Whichever way you exploit your technological advantage, enjoy it while you can. Once the others catch up, the cost of producing a product goes down and so do prices – and profits per item – for everyone.

Capitalists can drive costs and prices down so much that they can no longer profit off a product. If it’s no longer worth your money and time to make that product, what’s your next move? It might be to make a different product or invest your money in a different area of business altogether. But if you’re planning to stay in the same market as before, there may only be one play available. In that case, the arms race begins anew! You’ll engage in more division of labor. This means turning the work of your skilled employees and artisans into more specialized and repetitive tasks. These tasks can take less training and cost less in wages, which reduces your labor spending and increases efficiency. You’ll also invest in more technology, and expand into new markets for labor and sales. But the products you make will tend to get cheaper over time, and yield you less in revenue when they’re sold. This means you have to sell more and more just to get the same profit margins you did before.

Workers, of course, get screwed by the drive for division of labor and more efficiency. They have to do more and more work, and as division of labor increases the work tends to be less skilled and pay less. It’s also less satisfying and less dignified. The result? Workers work more and more to receive less and less for it. New forms of technological innovation also worsen conditions for workers. This is they reduce the need for labor when implemented, and force laborers to find new, often worse jobs. One exception to this is the skilled tech workers that build the labor-saving tools. But the day that comprises the only human workforce is far off, if it ever comes at all. In the meantime, all the other workers also deserve lives of dignity with adequate pay.

Constant capital – the machines and tools companies use to produce things – can only impart so much value. Why does constant capital generate no surplus value? Because a commodity’s value contains the labor it took to make it. That means not just the labor from the worker that assembled it, mind you. It’s also labor from the parts, tools and expertise that were necessary to make it. Remember that the parts, tools and machines used in production are commodities of their own. Capitalists buy these commodities for what they’re worth, and that includes all the labor needed to build them. Marx says that the amount of value that machinery can add to new commodities is what it contains, no more and no less. How much juice can you squeeze out of an orange? As much juice as it had when you bought it. If you use it all up, that’s it. It’s done. And if you let that orange rot (or a machine rust and fall into disrepair) it won’t get you much at all.

Meanwhile, the profit problem comes up as firms spend more on constant capital. In the long run, Marx says, expanding production in this way still tends toward lower profits. You’ll produce more, but each unit will sell for less. So why exactly is that happening? More complex machinery means more upfront costs for companies. It’s more expensive to outfit a factory with modern computers and machinery than to do everything with hand tools. Marx explains that when companies invest in more complex machinery, they are spending more on tools that don’t add value. As a result, they’re spending less on the labor that does add value. Less surplus value means less profit, since profits come from a portion of that surplus value that labor generates. This all contributes to a phenomenon Marx foresaw called the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Businesses also engage in centralization of capital in order to increase profits. Think of a cartoon you’ve seen where fish get eaten by progressively bigger fish. That’s what’s happening here. Businesses that can no longer make enough profit get bought by larger ones. Ones that go bankrupt get bought up at auctions, piece by piece, for bargain prices. The less competitive businesses get consolidated, defeated and dominated by the winners. Capitalists often talk about this move using terms like mergers and acquisitions.

Monopolies and conglomerates form out of the carnage. Once the dust settles, victorious firms have even more capital and resources. They can produce more goods and services than ever, and crowd out their competitors. If they do this well enough, they can dominate their chosen markets. Sometimes this process leads to one company being completely dominant in an industry. Think of Microsoft in the early 2000s, when almost every PC had Windows and hardly anyone had a Mac or Linux system. Still, we can list them all the same, which should say something about the effectiveness of such laws. Other corporations instead spread their endless tendrils into many different industries. These are conglomerates, which include modern media companies like Sony and Comcast. They’re doing a lot more than making CD players or laying cable lines nowadays. They’re running networks and movie studios, creating video games, and owning record labels. Monopolies and conglomerates reap huge profits and produce endless goods and services. But they’re also anti-competitive, crowding other businesses out of the market. These corporate machines gain a momentum that difficult to stop, even when they make bad choices in a market they now rule.

Aside – If You Want the Math

• The capital invested in the production process has two major components: constant capital (c) + variable capital (v)
  • Capital = c+v

• The capital companies have after the production process is even greater because it includes surplus value. Capital’= constant capital (c) + variable capital (v) + surplus value (s);
  • Capital’=c+v+s

• The Rate of Surplus Value is Surplus value (s) / variable capital (v)
  • s/v

• The organic composition of capital is the ratio of constant (c) to variable (v) capital. That means how much companies spend on facilities, tools, machines and materials vs. how much they spend on labor from their workers.
  • when c rises relative to v, more means of production are used relative to labor

• Rate of profit is the ratio between surplus value and total investment (capital);
  • s/v+c

• In this formula, if C > 0, then the rate of profit is less than the rate of surplus value. This factors into Marx’s theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. In other words, it’s part of Marx’s explanation for economic crises.

Remember – surplus value comes from variable capital, not constant capital. So when competition forces companies to spend more on tech, their rate of profit tends to fall because surplus value falls (and profit is s/v+c)If profits fall too low, investment dries up, products and companies fail. The tendency of profit rates to fall isn’t an ironclad law – there are countertendencies. But capitalists fight against the tendency constantly.

DOESN’T MORE WEALTH MEAN MORE FOR WORKERS, TOO?

The gap between rich and poor grows even when workers enjoy better times. More growth should mean more demand for workers to staff those booming businesses. That, in turn, should means wage growth as companies try to attract those workers. But the disparity between rich and poor can and often will grow anyway. If worker’s wages grow a little while capitalist profits grow at a much higher rate, is everyone cool with that? Especially if, per Marx, labor creates value?

Inflation can mean a stable wage actually becomes a pay cut. Marx notes that if wages stay constant while the prices of goods rise, then real wages have decreased. This is an effect of inflation. The opposite is true if the price of goods goes down – your money goes further, which is awesome. As I write this in 2022 though, the US and much of the world is experiencing high price inflation.

The numerical amount of wages is only part of the story – it also matters what we can buy with them. Want an example? The real wage increases workers saw from the growth of “big box” stores like Wal-Mart in the 2000s comes to mind. Workers with stagnant wages started shopping at Wal-Mart rather than more conventional stores. As a result, their dollar stretched further even if the dollar amount of their wages didn’t. They could buy more at big box stores than they could at department and grocery stores with the same money.

The general rule is that capitalist profits rise as workers’ wages fall. Despite breaks like the deals found in big-box stores, on the whole workers still get screwed. This is, in part, due to capitalism’s drive for greater division of labor and more efficiency. They have to do more work than before, sometimes several times over. The work is often less skilled and pays less than before. The work is more unsatisfying to them, and less dignified than it once was. On top of that, they face possible replacement someday through automation and robotics.

The end result? Workers work more and more to receive less and less for it. If they can’t handle that, they’re sacked. They must find new jobs, and usually that work is even worse than what they had, paying even less than before. One of the most effective ways to blunt this trend, Marx argues, is unionization. But even unions can end up acting mostly as a stalling tactic that slows the pace of this change. Unionization alone can’t stop it, despite the occasional victory.

This isn’t just happening to blue collar workers, either – white collar folks are also feeling the squeeze. The professional classes suffer wage cuts with longer hours, doing more for less. This includes the classic professional occupations like small business owners, doctors and lawyers. But teachers, software engineers and mild-mannered civil servants also count. Bit by bit, they become proles, too.

CRISES OF CAPITALISM

Capitalism is a beast no one can cage or tame. Marx said capitalists were like “the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells”. And I think he’s right. Accumulated Capital, consolidation and centralization all seem like good ideas to the capitalists. The amounts of wealth they create seem almost magical. At first, it must seem like they’ve found a cheat code to existence itself – “my wealth creates more wealth!” Yet in the end, they tend to lead to an anti-competitive market that overproduces goods. This causes lowered profits, withheld investment, shuttered businesses and lengthened unemployment lines. In other words, chaos – or what we call recessions or economic crises. Consider the perspective of workers and even capitalists who get wiped out by a crisis. They might agree that capitalism has unleashed forces it is unable to control.

Capitalist crises are crises of overproduction, not scarcity. People are pretty used to thinking of an economic crisis as when there isn’t enough of something. Something has to be lacking, whether it’s jobs, housing, food, gas.  In pre-capitalist eras, the most common cause of an economic crisis was usually famine. In those circumstances, it’s true that there isn’t enough food being produced to go around.  But in capitalism?  The crisis comes from over-production.  If it seems fucked up and counter-intuitive, that’s because it is.  

When overproduction happens, the goods produced aren’t as profitable anymore. When thinking of pre-COVID economic crises, the Great Depression always comes to mind. Baby boomers might also remember the “stagflation” and gas crisis days of the mid to late 1970s.  But my generation, the millennials, will always think of the 2008 “Great Recession”.  It changed our trajectory fundamentally. Job opportunities seized up and low-wage work characterized most job growth afterward.  Millions of people lost their homes and life savings.  Banks got themselves bailed out while they (and the government) left the rest of us to suffer.  Student loans skyrocketed, doubling in the decade after.  So what exactly stopped being profitable around 2008 that crashed the global economy?

Capitalist economies over-relied on financial markets and debt instruments to generate profits. This is likely the subject of a longer briefing of its own, but I can’t overstate how important it is. Credit and debt are super important to making capitalism work, and in making it fail. Credit makes more investment possible, and more consumption possible.  The average company has more debt now than they have in earnings. But this credit-debt cycle also contributes to capitalist crises by hastening overproduction. It also encourages profits to fall over time.   Companies need to borrow to keep producing at a steady clip. If they waited until all their goods sold before they invested in new production, the system would be full of starts and stops.  It wouldn’t be constant, and a capitalist economy needs to keep moving.  

Financial capital is largely fictitious capital. When Marx calls it fictitious capital, he’s calling out that the assets banks have are based on promises. They’re tied up in debt on promises of things that don’t currently exist. Every extension of credit is, in a way, an act of faith – belief in the evidence of things not seen. But after banks extend that credit, they’re not willing to let it all go on faith. They work to hedge their bets and minimize their risk. After all, they know that not every bet works out. But along with the availability of credit comes an easier assumption of risk.  With more to spend, you can make much bigger bets.  And you can spend it on investments that are less likely to pan out, too.  Those riskier investments, if made through loans, will carry higher interest rates.  This kind of debt often finances the big gambles corporations make that don’t pay off. They can take workers and communities down with them, too.

Risky bets lead to speculation.  You’re using a real asset (cash) to back up an ever-increasing series of fictitious, speculative assets that may or may not pan out.  This is how bubbles form – and when the profits aren’t realized as hoped, the bubble can crash.  Large amounts of credit in a market, as a sector overproduces, can make it easier for it to keep overproducing until the consequences are clear.  It muddies the waters, since companies don’t have to worry about exactly how much real cash they have on hand. They don’t need to know the exact relationship between supply and demand at any given moment.

And yet credit is also a fickle bastard.  When a crisis happens, creditors are the first to clam up.  Their debtors don’t have the ability to make their payments anymore once the crisis begins. So the bank starts taking losses, and they get nervous.  They hold onto their money, stop lending it out and making investments.  They get cautious, right when companies need them to be courageous.  This makes the crisis even worse.

The 2008 recession came about from overextending bad mortgages and other financial instruments. Banks lent out “subprime” mortgages with terrible terms and low odds of repayment. Then they doubled down on that bad bet by packaging those mortgages together and selling batches of them. We called these financial instruments collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. When buying CDOs, investors got to collect on the interest payments made for those loans. But because these CDOs were often based on terrible loans, it seemed prudent to hedge again. Banks started selling insurance against their failure – instruments called credit default swaps. Investors bought those by the truckload. According to Hadas Thier, the payout value of these credit default swaps would be more than the whole US economy. When bad mortgages went into default, the CDOs they were bundled in went under as well. So many did this that there was no ability for banks to pay out on all the credit default swaps. The housing market, and the banks that fucked with it, took everything else down with them. This is when

Capitalists claim to be nearly clueless about what really causes recessions. They talk about monetary policy – prices, markets, stuff like that.  But Marxists believe the problems arise at the core of the economic process. They think it lies with the production of goods and services, and the way capitalists use the profits from this to accumulate capital.  

“At best, a “healthy” capitalist economy depends on exploitation, poverty, oppression, and environmental destruction in order to function.  But even this ‘health’ gives rise to contradictions, which are only resolved through crises.”

– Hadas Thier, “A People’s Guide to Capitalism”

The carcasses of the losers will nourish the vultures that win under capitalism. When the weaker corporations call it quits or go belly up, those left standing buy their assets on the cheap. In stock trading parlance, they’re “buying the dip“. What a bargain!   In the desperate post-crisis job market, workers accept work at for lower wages than during the boom years.  This way, capitalists get to save on labor, too!

The remaining capitalists take hold of their accumulated capital and get it producing again.  They use the profits to accumulate even more capital. They put in place new labor-saving techniques to lower costs and increase profits.  As everyone does this, the economy grows again.  The cycle begins anew. And if you think the bankers who caused the 2008 recession learned their lesson or that we reined them in, think again.

This cycle repeats itself, over and over. Supply and Demand don’t reach some equilibrium where it all balances out most of the time.  There’s always this process of accumulation, followed by a bust. Then comes another boom as capitalists reorganize and the lucky survivors get richer.

The crisis is by design.  Recessions and depressions aren’t anomalies. They’re how the system always works.  There’s always tension between the need to produce and the consequences of overproducing. It is an inherent contradiction of capitalism.  For some corporations, a crisis is an inconvenience – for others, it’s an opportunity.  For small businesses, workers, families and the vulnerable, it’s often a catastrophe.

“WE’RE IN THE ENDGAME NOW”

Marx argued that capitalism is better than anything else we’ve tried when it comes to creating wealth – but the cost was grave. Even when it creates more value than our society has ever seen, it’s sowing the seeds of its own destruction. Over time, profits have a tendency to fall and capitalists only have so many tricks they can use to fight this. To Marxists, the drive to beat competitors and maximize products always leads to crisis. Whether it’s overproduction or financial fuckery, the markets will crash. The crisis will come. When it resolves, a few will stand richer than ever, and in a better position to dominate the future. The rest will suffer lost wealth or even a loss in livelihoods.

Pressure toward lower wages and worse working conditions continues until it is intolerable. I cite the example of business magnate Henry Ford. He was an extremely problematic person who was right about one thing in particular. He knew that it was best for the economy if his workers could feasibly afford one of the cars his company made. This underlies a truth about capitalism – workers who create wealth are also consumers. Marx noted that capitalism needed the working class to make enough in wages to reproduce its own labor. The whole system starts to collapse when workers can’t make enough to get by. If there’s no one that can afford to buy a product, what good is making the product? We now face a rising cost of living and decades of stagnant wages that still haven’t caught up with inflation. Consumers have come to rely more and more on personal debt like loans and credit cards to make up the difference. At what point does this become unsustainable and the system begin to break? Is that already underway? What exactly will give next?

Capitalism requires exploiting underdeveloped nations. This is the subject of a future briefing (after I’ve finished more reading). But after reading the books cited here, plus some works by Vladimir Lenin, I know that imperialism is an essential part of this system. Capitalism requires new markets to sell its goods. It needs to exploit cheap labor and plentiful resources that are available abroad. Core capitalist countries compete against each other to secure these markets. They use military force, financial coercion and other tactics to secure their influence. While the age of explicitly creating colonies may be mostly over, imperialism isn’t gone. The exploitation just takes on new and insidious forms.

Capitalism requires destroying the environment. Keep in mind that in order for capitalism to keep working, the companies that drive it must keep growing. And I mean they must keep growing forever – there is no point where those involved say “that’s enough.” To do this is to invite ruin. As profits tend to fall, a company that doesn’t expand and innovate will lose out to competitors. Same goes for a company that can’t keep finding ways to produce more while spending less on labor. Complacency is death. This means there’s always a new forest that must be cut down, a new area of the ocean to fix, a new mountain to strip. We must always be seeking new sources of energy, and we’ll exploit the cheapest sources first. That means fossil fuels. It’s true that socialist economies also engage in environmental destruction. But some of the damage human beings caused only became clear in recent decades, after the socialist heyday. In other ways, the damage these countries caused then and now can also be chalked up to keeping up with capitalist competitors. Marxists argue that capitalists can’t deny that impulse toward growth at all costs. They are incapable of the long-term planning that could avert planetary catastrophe.

Marx believed the best hope for the planet was in the overthrow of capitalism by a revolution of the workers. Instead of private control of the means of production, workers would control them. Working people would make decisions about what to produce, how much and under what conditions. They would do this democratically, by considering common needs and all available data. This would lead to a centrally planned economy that no longer relied on markets. Many movements and countries have tried to foment this revolution since Marx’s time. Much can be said about their successes and failures. Many believe all attempts were dead ends or even great crimes. Others believe capitalist narratives suppress the accomplishments of socialist movements. Still others believe that tools we have available now but not in the days of the USSR could change the game. Could advanced computing algorithms change the fate of a future centrally planned economy? Can new forms of democratic organization correct the mistakes of the past? These questions are still debated by Marxists and capitalists alike. I’ll keep reading and writing, because any possible answers should be available to all.

TIRED OF READING?

This video by the UK’s Royal Society for the Arts (RSA) features a short, animated look at capitalist crisis, narrated by Marxist academic David Harvey.

Second Thought is one of the best Youtubers out there discussing Marxist ideas. Here’s his guide to “Socialism for Absolute Beginners.”

Cover Photo by Daniel Lloyd Blunk-Fernández on Unsplash

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