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Was Marx Right About Capitalism or Are Americans Too Stupid To Compete With China?
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Regardless of your political convictions, grappling with Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and Communist Manifesto is a strategic and moral imperative.
The Prussian’s (I use the term ‘Prussia’ because there was no nation-state by the name of Germany at the time of his birth in 1818) extraordinarily perspicacious analysis of the logic of capital has stood the test of time.
Drawing from disparate sources such as the Holy Bible, Dante’s Inferno, Mary Shelley’s Frankinstein, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Hegel’s Abstract Idealism, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to paint a compelling portrait of the contradictions of capitalism remains unmatched.
It was Marx, a philosopher by trade, who built into his arguments, the notion of trade cycles — boom and bust — from having carefully studied the manner in which industries operated in the 19th century.
Our protagonist believed that the contradictions within capitalism, would lead to its destruction and this takes us to the entity which crystallizes the business of accumulation—America.
Even more than its atavistic predecessor, the United States sought to take the logic of capital to its apogee by commodifying and monetizing everything…