Marx: Not Quite Dead Yet

~ Laura

This quote has been making the rounds on Wall Street.

Owners
of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology,
pushing them to take more and more expensive
credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid
debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have
to be nationalised, and the State will have to take
the road which will eventually lead to communism.

Karl
Marx, Das Kapital,
1867

UPDATE: As we all figured out, this is Faux Marx. More from Megan McArdle.

Published by Laura

34 thoughts on “Marx: Not Quite Dead Yet”

  2. I probably should read Marx. I had to read Habermas once and after that I promised myself I’d never read any German philosphy again. I’ve got a very old comic-book version of Marx and I’ve been getting by on what I learned there.

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  4. I think it is fake. Marx talked about the “immiseration” of the proletariat and how that would lead to their revolutionary consciousness. He had a theory of overproduction that would bring crisis. I don’t think he anticipated REITs….

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  5. Kapital is not a policy manual. There is that delicious passage about the integument bursting asunder and the expropriators expropriated, which gives some kinds of antitrust advocates tingly feelings.
    In Manifesto is a call for nationalization of banks, but not based on any dialectics.
    Something about the phrasing, even in translation, sounds wrong.

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  6. The quote’s a fake. You can look at all three volumes here:
    http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf.htm
    Searching on “houses” or “homes” yields nothing remotely like this quote. Marx’s prediction was for the gradual immiseration of the working classes by falling wages, not credit, because no on in 1870 dreamed that the working classes would be able to get their hands on anything beyond a month or so from the landlord, perhaps a few weeks at the butcher’s.

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  8. Yeah. I was thinking about this while I was out. I think it is fake, too. KM writes about the prol getting more miserable and feeling alienated from the factories and what they produce. The increasing desperation, not their debt through the purchase of material possessions, brings about communism.
    He does say (in the communist manifesto) that one of the results of communism will be the centralization of credit in a national bank.

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  9. The word “technology” also bothers me in the context it’s used here.
    There’s something irresistable to some people about creating an all-too-timely quote and then sticking it into the mouth of some historical person.

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  10. I don’t think the quote is authentic either, but what I find most interesting about this is the psychology of its circulation (though I’m not clear on what “making the rounds on Wall Street” actually entails). The idea that financiers and traders are harkening to Karl Marx as a prescient voice on economics and political organization is fascinating, even if it’s not really Karl Marx.

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  12. Marx does talk about technology, but in a different context. He says the bourg. is constantly improving their machines through improvements in the factory equipment. This then brings down the price of the goods and there is a mad competition amongst capitalists to keep lowering prices. This then means lower and lower salaries for the prol and dumber/more meaningless jobs.
    Yeah, it is interesting and weird that Wall street is reading faux marx.

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  13. It bugs the hell out of me when this stuff gets traction without looking stuff it up. Thanks, Megan, for the link to the Marx archive. I wouldn’t have known where to look, and saying that the quote might be fake is marginally useful, but it’s much better to prove it.
    As my daughter said the other day, “I’m so glad I live in the time of the Internet.”
    I guess we can blame the internet for the fact that the quote gets spread around, but we can also blame it for the fact that we can so easily find the truth, too.

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  14. The debunking kind of meshes with the other discussion, doesn’t it, on the “skills divide”? Megan’s detectors were triggered by her knowledge of Marx (which I lack), others by the *overly* aptness of the comment (i.e. from the CNN greenroom. That in turn lead to a search to find the facts, using the internet. Both knowledge and technological skills were involved in the debunking.
    That this *doesn’t* occur is my fear in the reliance of people on the internet as a source of information. There’s so much information available, and much of it is so incredibly amazing, and accurate, and reliable. But then, there’s the junk. When I do a search, I can often sort the junk from the other stuff (say on autism & vaccines, which is peripherally related to my knowledge base). I hope I have enough skills to track it down on something like this Marx quote, at least before passing it on. How do we teach that, especially the second part, which relies on filtering information about which we do not have significant expertise of our own?

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  15. “As Confucius says, “The sparrow who wishes to gain attention will attribute his speech to the eagle.””
    I wish he’d said the “turkey” so I could have said “But the turkey is a truly noble bird.”
    But, sometimes this isn’t done by the sparrow — for example, the “wear sunscreen” speech by Mary Schmich, in the Tribune, that was misattributed to Kurt Vonnegut, without the knowledge of either author.

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  16. BJ, it is possible that I have a bad translation. I’m using the Penguin Classics ediction. It’s on page 24 of Confucius’s “Brief Anecdotes for Perusing on the Chamber Pot.”

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  17. I guess others find it interesting that this fake quote is making the rounds on Wall Street. Just talked to someone at the WSJ about it.

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  18. Confucius couldn’t have said turkey, right? ’cause it’s an American native. I wanted to cite the turkey quote (which comes from 1776, the musical, attributed to Benjamin Franklin) ’cause my son says it so adorably.

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  19. I can’t believe that anyone who had ever read more than a paragraph of Capital would think this to be genuine–it’s not even a *good* fake. Compare with the lengthy quote posted by Brad Delong the other day. There’s only so many ways to render 19th-century German.

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  21. “Hey. Confucius did not say that, chamber pot or not….”
    🙂
    But, we can’t really know whether Confucius said it or not, can we? We can only say there’s no documentation that Confucius ever said it.
    This kind of question came up recently in our family, because our daughter has gotten very interested in the “childhoods of famous americans” series.
    They’re fun, but you have to wonder about the accuracy (any historians available to clue me in?). Some may be pretty good — Helen Keller has an autobiography/biography that details her early years. But others, like Sitting Bull seem pretty iffy.

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  22. bj,
    The story of Chief Seattle’s speech is great fun if you are interested in this sort of thing–there are four or so different versions in circulation. As I understand it, the 1854 speech was given in Chief Seattle’s native language, translated into Chinook Jargon (which has about 500 words total, being a synthetic trade language), and then translated orally into English on the spot. Over 30 years later, the speech appeared in print for the first time as a flowery 19th century oration. Eventually in the 20th century, a version written for a film script escaped and became a rallying cry for the environmental movement, despite what should have been danger signs. Namely, the historical Chief Joseph didn’t complain about the white man’s slaughter of the buffalo, since living on Puget Sound, he had most likely never seen a live buffalo.

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  24. Yes, the story of the Chief Sealth’s speech is interesting, but like the “wear sunscreen” speech, I think the speech stands, disconnected from it’s mistaken attribution.
    Chief Joseph, though is a different person, whose statements I think are better authenticated.
    “It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. . . . I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead.
    Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

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  26. Eh, how did Chief Seattle turn into Chief Joseph in the course of a single paragraph? My apologies. I note that Wikipedia’s very short article on the Chemakum language says that “Chief Seattle and the Suquamish people wiped out the Chemakum people, killing the language off with them.”

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  30. I’m watching the market, getting another round of 401k statements, and wondering just how much this bailout is going to boost my taxes/devalue what’s left of my savings with inflation. I’m starting to wonder if Marx had anything to say about “the immiseration of the bourgeois.”
    “Professionals of the world unite! You have nothing to lose without capital gains!” (Marx, 30 Days to Stronger Abs, 1858)

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  31. While I am not claiming the research that found this website, it appears that the quote is
    “The owners of capital will stimulate the need of the working class to take expensive, collateral loans to buy their condos, houses and technological products; and, at the end, these unpaid debts will result in the nationalization of the banks upon their bankrupcy, and so the state will be on the pathway to communism”
    and belongs to Pat Caufield of the Department of Education in a satyrical United States who started a re-education programme for kids to prepare the transition to communism
    http://www.newsmutiny.com/pages/Communist_Reeducation.html

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  32. This mornin’ (awesome weather), i was looking for a great blog, and guess what!!?? i just found it…
    Great mornin’!!!!!!!!!
    You can’t find a blog like this on the web, and oh my god, i love megan…
    just amazing to read it and see it, thanks for give to me this chance!!!
    i’ll see you around, can’t wait for you to post another blog!!!!
    Have a nice day!!!!!
    Logan Imlay
    2231 Parrill Court
    Merrillville, IN 46410

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