| > The problem with Marx is not that his analysis is nonsensical, as Mr Gauke maintains, but that his solution was far worse than the disease. What solution did Marx propose? In the afterword of Capital, Marx notes "The Paris Revue Positiviste reproaches me in that...[I] — imagine! — confine myself to the mere critical analysis of actual facts, instead of writing recipes (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future". Also Marx wasn't worried that CEOs were paid well as The Economist and "shareholder advocates" seems to be. At least that would be paid to someone who showed up for work. Marx was more concerned in noting the dividend checks that went out quarterly, if joint-stock company dividend checks went out quarterly in those days. The Economist is being indirect in stating Marx's concerns. I'd guess more out of ignorance than malice. Even the first chapter of Capital is famously a hard slog to get through. I doubt the young Economist author made it through Anti-Dühring. More importantly, Marx thought the various contradictions of capitalist production would lead to economic crises that the world saw in the 1930s (outside the USSR, whose economy was booming at the time). Eventually, the companies which are too big to fail really would fail. Capitalism's taxpayer bailouts of big business that worked in 2008 will in some future crisis not work, according to Marxian thought. He also noted how various world economies and societies were swept aside by new ones over the past ten millennia - hunter-gatherer bands for slave societies, slave societies for feudal societies, feudal societies for capitalist societies. In the red flags and worker's councils of the Paris Commune, he saw the hazy, nascent harbinger of the social relations and forces of production of those cook-shops of the future. |
He didn't, really. His proposals were pretty vague. 99% of what he wrote was a (pretty spot on) critique of capitalism.
Needless to say most of the propaganda attacks on his ideas are based upon guilt by association.