Karl Marx and Global Kinetics Today

15 years ago, a good friend of mine, Helena, invited me for dinner in her father’s Penthouse in Tokyo. She was excited to show me a painting by a famous Swedish painter sent to her by her mother who owns an art gallery in Stockholm. While Helena was setting the table, she asked me to take a look at the said painting which was just lying at the corner in the living room. The first thing I did was to turn the painting around to see it and I immediately told Helena there was nothing in the canvass. She then went to the living room and said, “What do you mean there’s nothing in it?” I said, “Well, I already turned the other side and there is no painting at all”. Then she said, pointing at the painting, “Norman, there is no need to turn it around. That is the painting!”

Embarassed as I was, I honestly thought there was nothing in the painting.

A lot of critics of the work of Karl Marx may have said the same. “There’s nothing in his murky, unintelligible work. Likewise, Das capital itself is intimidating to read. Francis Wheen, in his biography of Karl Marx said that, Marx probably anticipated this and that is why just before he delivered his first volume of Das Kapital to his Publisher, he asked Friedrich Engels to read Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece which portrays the story of Frenhofer working for many years on a portrait that would depict “the most complete representation of reality”. When Frenhofer invited his friends Poussin and Porbus to his studio to see the finished work, their reaction was somehow similar to what I showed in Helena’s living room. Worst, they even mocked Frenhofer that when they left, he burned all his paintings and killed himself.

Marshall Berman noted that the most delightful irony in The Unknown Masterpiece is that Balzac’s account of the picture is a perfect description of a 20th century abstract painting.“The point is that where one age sees only chaos and incoherence, a later or more modern age may discover meaning and beauty”. The same can absolutely be said of Karl Max’s Das Kapital. During his time and even during the cold war, many leaders professed to be Marxists but their programs and dogmatic ideologies represented only their convenient if not twisted interpretation of Marx’s work. It should be noted that Marxism as practiced by Marx himself was not so much of an ideology as a critical process, a continuous dialectical argument. Lenin and then Stalin however turned and froze it into dogma. In fact, citing Mikhail Gorbachev’s book Perestroika, Francis Wheen in Marx’s Das Kapital, puts it sharply on the line:

“One can even argue that the most truly Marxist achievement of the Soviet Union was its collapse: a centralized secretive and bureaucratic command economy proved incompatible with new forces of production, thus precipitating a change in the relations of production”.

What is also noteworthy is the fact that although Karl Marx only finished the first volume of his work, he actually contracted with his Publisher in 1858 that his critical expose of the system of the bourgeois economy would be divided into six books which shall then be issued in six instalments: 1. Capital 2. Landed Property 3. Wage Labor 4. The State 5. International Trade 6. World Market. This means that about 150 years ago, this great thinker already has some concepts of what we now know as globalization.

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in their article in the Economist “A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization (2000) as cited by Wheen, acknowledged Karl Marx as a prophet of universal interdependence of nations and that his description of globalization 150 years ago is still very relevant today.

In the latest issue of the Economist, the financial crisis claims twin victims: Fannie and Freddie, two mortgage giants that the American Treasury has to save. With this move of the American government, the overriding theme in the blogosphere is : "The profits are privatized and the risks are socialized". No wonder, one subheading in the same article of the Economist is "Mark to Market or Market to Marx?

Is this the end of Capitalism? or Could it be that Karl Marx all along had the answer on the question of preventing or perhaps containing the Schumpeterian prophecy of capitalism's "creative destruction"?

If someone can just talk to the ghost of Karl Marx and thereby restore to life his seminal work to complete his magnum opus, we will probably have a much better understanding of the complex global kinetics of today and beyond.