About 150 years ago, a very brilliant man named Karl Marx, developed an analysis of capitalism that stated that it was doomed to failure like the preceding economic systems of slavery and feudalism. Also, he analyzed history as a continuing class struggle between the haves and have-nots. His ideas so frightened the capitalist class that today the very name of Karl Marx inspires fear in a majority of working class people around the world due to the unrelenting corporate propaganda against his ideas and the man himself. This is true even though his ideas were for the benefit of ordinary working people. This indicates the enormous power and sophistication of the global capitalist propaganda system. Universities today teach a form of economics, which to my thinking is a labyrinth of obfuscation and rejection of Marx's ideas. I have two degrees in science and when I read Das Kapital I was impressed by how clear and logical were the theories developed by Marx. It was like reading a scientific treatise. The capitalist class hate Das Kapital with such vehemence that I could not find an unabridged copy of it anywhere on the Internet or in most bookstores and there was always a preface and introduction, which was so derogatory in nature concerning it, that reading those alone wanted to make one, who was unacquainted with Marx's work, to throw it into the waste paper basket. This is deliberate, of course. One must not question why 1% of the American population controls 90% of the wealth, or why government bailouts always go to the rich and never the poor.

I have seen the capitalist system survive other periods of crisis due to government intervention or war, which is very beneficial to capitalism due to vast expenditures of tax money for weapons. Franklin Delano Roosevelt definitely rescued capitalism by increasing the purchasing power of people by such programs as Social Security, unemployment compensation and disability insurance. Also, there were job creation programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps, The Tennessee Valley Authority and so on. Capitalism always creates overproduction of commodities because workers are not paid enough to buy back all the products they produce with their labor. Lately, this has been temporarily alleviated by debt and the use of the credit card. However, as we have seen this debt must someday be repaid and capitalist schemes to take advantage of the gullibility of people to make enormous profits only creates a future crisis. Marx said that the only part of the national wealth that truly belongs to the people is the national debt, which now stands at ten trillion dollars, thanks to the policies of the Bush administration and borrowing most of the money to fight his imperialistic wars. I have also seen capitalism rescued, at least temporarily, by vast injections of money from the Federal Reserve Bank.

I have a feeling that this latest World-Wide crisis is different in nature and may be the death knell of capitalism. They may have run out of fingers to put in the dike and hold back the flood. Even General Motors, once the largest corporation in the world, and Ford have gone to the government for a bailout of taxpayer money, which is mostly from the poor and middle class because the richest corporations pay no income tax at all.

I certainly hope this is the death of capitalism, a system which has caused wars, starvation and untold suffering all through the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries and now threatens to destroy the ecosystem on which life on Earth depends.





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