Karl Marx and the Future

What is it about?

ABSTRACT The still unresolved world capitalist crisis that erupted in 2007 has demonstrated the actuality of Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism, particulary in his magnum opus, Das Kapital. Mainstream bourgeois economics, both “orthodox” and “heterodox”, have failed to predict the crisis or to explain the failure of the extraordinary measures taken by Central Banks and Governments to resolve it the last decade, or , to provide a prognosis for an uncertain future. Marx has developed the dialectical method to probe to the deeper nature of the crisis of the capitalist mode of production finding its true barrier to capital itself. Capitalist production as production for capital and not for the needs of the life processes of society, by reversing the relation between means and goals together with all social relations, creates the conditions for its negation through a transition beyond capitalism. The current global crisis is the violent manifestation of the unresolved contradiction between capital and the deepest demands of social life, in the epoch of advanced capitalist decline, as well as the contradictory expression of a non-linear process of historical transition towards a new, truly human, emancipated world of the “associated producers”. Keywords: Karl Marx; Das Kapital; Value Form; Capitalist Crisis; Globalization; Financialization; Hyman Minsky; Life process

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