Marx and Price Controls

This disinformational email campaigning makes me crazy, so I made the header on this post one that would be anathema to every winger.

Seems our redoubtable right wingers are having fun with email;

'There is a quotation flying in and out of email boxes of the financial capitals of the world, and it goes something like this:

"Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to the bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to Communism."
(snip)
Firstly, the big thing in the 19th century was class conflict, and Marx believed that falling wages would affect one class more than another, precipitating revolution. He explained it through an interesting concept known as “added value”- which is simply the amount retained in a sales price after labor, materials and costs are factored in. While this sounds a lot like what we call “profit”, it's a little more complicated than that. Marx believed that the change in labor relations was what changed everything: the working class became exactly that once they lost their tools and control over their labor and became a wage-earning class. This allowed the capitalist form of exploitation to emerge, the misery from which, he believed, would bring about world revolution.

I do agree with Marx’s tenet that the increasing profit factor in everything we buy has had a totally destructive effect on labor. It increasingly has lost value while the mogul hordes/robber barons have free rein to rake in the bucks. The deregulation curse of the past eight years has shown that the drive toward excessive profits for the corporate level is a generally unwise, and dangerous, trend. It deprives our consumer economy of consumers.

The writer goes on to show a lack of similarity between Marx’s world concept and what actually is taking place in the financial industry. As mentioned, I don’t totally agree, but will take it into consideration. The use of the massive untrue email should be noted though, as it is so much a part of the tools used against the presidential campaign. I also saw a lot of this sort of misinformation while working in a financial office over the past several years.

This is a good ending to the article:
The bankers are in their last throes of insolvency- but the Marx quotation was a pretty good joke- while it lasted.