Western Political Philosophy Assignment: “Masters of Money – Karl Marx”

Stephanie Flanders, in her 2012 BBC documentary titled “Masters of Money – Karl Marx”
explores the life and philosophy of Karl Marx, drawing conclusions on his influence on modern
economics. She speculated how Marx would have reacted to the 207-2012 global financial crisis,
and what he would have proposed to solve it. She begins her program by highlighting how she was
a student when the communist regimes in Eastern Europe began to collapse. Marx, she says,
divided the world into workers and bosses, what the comrades of the Socialist Workers Party call
the class struggle. The capitalism Marx saw was that of the industrial revolution, and for those
workers in the front line - such as coal miners - life was grim indeed, as well as nasty, brutish and
short. Flanders examines the Marxist explanation for the crisis we’ve just seen. She shows how
capitalism is surprisingly adept at "solving" problems but only by shifting them from one place to
another. When large sections of the population weren’t being paid enough to support demand, the
capitalists invented consumer credit so people could carry on spending even if they did not have
the money. Therefore the economy stayed afloat and the capitalists continued making profits.
In the program, Flanders interviews important people from public life, including Peter Hitchens
and Slavoj Zizek. The documentary by claiming that Marxist thought was ‘‘a surprisingly good
place to start for an explanation’’ of the recent financial crisis, however, till the end of the program
the message comes across as if Marx’s ideas of an alternative to capitalism were not plausible.
Flanders noted that real earnings are flat and have been falling in the US since the 1970’s, after
the breakdown of Fordist-Keynesian regime and dwindling of union power. The enervation of
unions enabled employers to squeeze pay and hence ensure profits. Flanders asserted that the
problem of low wages was circumvented by consumer credit, enabling people whose income was
declining to spend as though it were still increasing. In this context of cheap credit, mortgages in
the US began to lend to riskier clients who were ultimately not able to pay, causing the sub-prime
mortgage crisis triggering a global recession. Marx was right about the intrinsic volatility of the
capitalist system, which helps understand the recent financial crisis. It is in the interests of the
bourgeoisie to try to make it seem otherwise.
I believe that the account of Marxian economics given within the program was overly narrow and
simplistic, Flanders failed to considered more comprehensively the limits and barriers to capital,
taking away from the volatile nature of capitalism and hence the veracity of Marxian economics.
The program concludes by observing that capitalism has lifted millions out of poverty in China
and the developing world but for many ordinary people in the West, the system has not been
working at all well. Stephanie Flanders argues that what is of value in Marxism is its reminder that
if capitalism doesn’t work for everyone, it might not work at all. Flanders seemed to suggest that
capitalism should be given the benefit of the doubt and that if it is still here in 100 years’ time,
people will be speaking of Marx less. My own view is that if capitalism is still with us in a hundred
years, it will still be beset by crises for the reasons outlined above. As a consequence, Marxism
will continue to be relevant. Rather than giving capitalism the benefit of the doubt, working people
should think more critically about the sort of society that they want to live in and how to arrive at
that society.