Marx in the Era of Pandemic Capitalism

Details: Published on Monday, 13 April 2020 09:18; Written by editor

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2054 ... April 13, 2020
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Marx in the Era of Pandemic Capitalism

Dimitris Fasfalis

How could Karl Marx (1818 -- 1883) help us interpret the current crisis? His theory of history offers critical resources to interpret the unprecedented crisis which is shaking the world today, while indicating at the same time that ‘the world after’ so much mentioned could only be anti-capitalist.

Before tackling the problem of links and multiple mediations between the capitalist world system and the Covid-19 pandemic, let us return first to Marx and the theoretical framework he proposed to grasp the great historical crises. In 1845-46, Marx, a political exile in Brussels, writes in The German Ideology these words which will later be taken up and will form a digest of what Friedrich Engels will call after Marx’s death "historical materialism":

"At a certain stage in the evolution of the productive forces, we see the emergence of productive forces and means of trade which, under existing conditions, only cause disasters. They are no longer productive forces, but forces of destruction (machinery and money)."
In 1859, Marx takes up this idea almost word for word in his famous "Foreword" to his Critique of Political Economy. It reads:

"At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society collide with the existing relations of production, or with the relations of property within which they had hitherto evolved, and which are but their legal expression. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution."

The extract from The German Ideology is more general in scope, while that of the "Foreword" of 1859 is more economics-oriented. First of all, it is important to emphasize that Marx tried to interpret "disasters" from the mid-1840s. From his historical and economic studies conducted in the years 1840-1844, he identified breaks in the long view of history in which a radical change takes place in the world-system. It is a dialectical change which transforms the productive forces (technology, means of communication, capital, workers, workplaces, sciences, etc.) from forces of development or progress into "forces of destruction": they "only cause disasters."