Imran Khan
Section 8
Third Installment
Predictions and Theories
Karl Marx made many different predictions during his time
about the world and our society. Many of these predictions have actually come
true today. The ideas and theories Marx had developed are more relevant now they
have ever been before. I would like to discuss a little bit about the
predictions and ideas Marx had on Globalization and our Markets. Marx had
actually anticipated globalization and how it would spread across the world.
Globalization has only showed up quite recently in our society. The world’s
markets are now controlling almost all aspects of life and are a major controversial
issue of our time. Marx predicted a single global market under capitalism in
his book the Communist Manifesto. One
of Marx’s other predictions was about monopolies. Marx believed that eventually
all of these small family owned businesses would become increasing larger and
turn into huge companies like Walmart. He said that almost every section of our
economy would be basically centralized with only a few major monopoly
businesses controlling the vast majority of that market. The next idea Marx had
was about recession and how these large monopolies could be the cause of future
recessions. He believed that these companies would have such a drive to make
high profits, which in turn would cause them to lower their workers wages and
up the production of goods. The great depression and even the dot-com
associated with the Internet can be linked back to Marx’s theories on
capitalism and globalization. Our societies markets continue on pushing out as
much produce as possible until there is no need for that produce anymore or no
new debts can be made. This is one of the reasons we had a huge crash in our
economy in 2008. As you can see Marx had so many different theories and
predictions of how our world would come to be. When he was living not too many
people paid it any attention, but now we can see how all of his work comes
together to explain many economical issues today.
Sources: 1) http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/marx-was-right-five-surprising-ways-karl-marx-predicted-2014-20140130
First Installment: http://cophilosophy.blogspot.com/2015/11/karl-marx-by-imran-khan-8.html
So, the historical question remains: can industrial capitalism learn from Marx, reform itself, bust the trusts, and forestall a workers' revolution? There's plenty of "alienation" among the proletarians of today, but not a lot of discernible revolutionary zeal. Are we all too distracted and entertained by the monied interests (especially now that they're vying for explicit political office) to mount an effective challenge to growing inequities in our society, or even to care?
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