From Socialist Worker: http://socialistworker.org/2010/11/11/system-doomed-to-crisis
November 11, 2010
Bill Mullen
KARL MARX and Frederick Engels famously described capitalism in The Communist Manifesto as a kind of insatiable monster, constantly tearing down the world in order to create it all over again. "All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed," they wrote. "They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations."
Readers of David Harvey's new book The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism will feel the power of Marx and Engels' analysis anew as an explanation for the economic disasters of the last several years. The book explains how the economic meltdown of 2007-2008 was the result of 30 years of rampant greed, deception and planning on the part of the capitalist class to find new ways to pillage and plunder.
The special villains in Harvey's book are the finance managers and world banks that benefited first from neoliberal deregulation in the 1970s, and then from state-sponsored support for limitless profit-making in the 1980s. As Harvey puts it, "It was almost as if the banking community had retired into the penthouse of capitalism where they manufactured oodles of money by trading and leveraging among themselves, without any mind whatsoever for what the working people living in the basement were doing."
Those actions culminated, as we now know, in the Obama bailout of the banks and financial industry. Yet Harvey sees the bailout as only the latest necessary "crisis" in capitalism intended to reboot the rich to plunder again.
Continue reading at: http://socialistworker.org/2010/11/11/system-doomed-to-crisis
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