Marx and Lenin Revisited
By Paul Craig Roberts
“Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Karl Marx
October 06, 2009 --- If Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin were alive today, they would be leading contenders for the Nobel Prize in economics.
Marx predicted the growing misery of working people, and Lenin foresaw the subordina
More..tion of the production of goods to financial capital’s accumulation of profits based on the purchase and sale of paper instruments. Their predictions are far superior to the “risk models” for which the Nobel Prize has been given and are closer to the money than the predictions of Federal Reserve chairmen, US Treasury secretaries, and Nobel economists, such as Paul Krugman, who believe that more credit and more debt are the solution to the economic crisis.
In this first decade of the 21st century there has been no increase in the real incomes of working Americans. There has been a sharp decline in their wealth. In the 21st century Americans have suffered two major stock market crashes and the destruction of their real estate wealth.
Some studies have concluded that the real incomes of Americans, except for the financial oligarchy of the super rich, are less today than in the 1980s and even the 1970s. I have not examined these studies of family income to determine whether they are biased by the rise in divorce and percentage of single parent households. However, for the last decade it is clear that real take-home pay has declined.
The main cause of this decline is the offshoring of US high value-added jobs. Both manufacturing jobs and professional services, such as software engineering and information technology work, have been relocated in countries with large and cheap labor forces.
The wipeout of middle class jobs was disguised by the growth in consumer debt. As Americans’ incomes ceased to grow, consumer debt expanded to take the place of income growth and to keep consumer demand rising. Unlike rises in consumer incomes due to productivity growth, there is a limit to debt expansion. When that limit is reached, the economy ceases to grow.
The immiseration of working people has not resulted from worsening crises of over-production of goods and services, but from financial capital’s power to force the relocation of production for domestic markets to foreign shores. Wall Street’s pressures, including pressures from takeovers, forced American manufacturing firms to “increase shareholders’ earnings.” This was done by substituting cheap foreign labor for American labor.
Corporations offshored or outsourced abroad their manufacturing output, thus divorcing American incomes from the production of the goods that they consume. The next step in the process took advantage of the high speed Internet to move professional service jobs, such as engineering, abroad. The third step was to replace the remains of the domestic work force with foreigners brought in at one-third the salary on H-1B, L-1, and other work visas.
This process by which financial capital destroyed the job prospects of Americans was covered up by “free market” economists, who received grants from offshoring firms in exchange for propaganda that Americans would benefit from a “New Economy” based on financial services, and by shills in the education business, who justified work visas for foreigners on the basis of the lie that America produces a shortage of engineers and scientists.
In Marx’s day, religion was the opiate of the masses. Today the media is. Let’s look at media reporting that facilitates the financial oligarchy’s ability to delude the people.
The financial oligarchy is hyping a recovery while American unemployment and home foreclosures are rising. The hype owes its credibility to the high positions from which it comes, to the problems in payroll jobs reporting that overstate employment, and to disposal into the memory hole of any American unemployed for more than one year.
On October 2 statistician John Williams of shadowstats.com reported that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has announced a preliminary estimate of its annual benchmark revision of 2009 employment. The BLS has found that employment in 2009 has been overstated by about one million jobs. John Williams believes the overstatement is two million jobs. He reports that “the birth-death model currently adds [an illusory] net gain of about 900,00 jobs per year to payroll employment reporting.”
The non-farm payroll number is always the headline report. However, Williams believes that the household survey of unemployment is statistically sounder than the payroll survey. The BLS has never been able to reconcile the difference in the numbers in the two employment surveys. Last Friday, the headline payroll number of lost jobs was 263,000 for the month of September. However the household survey number was 785,000 lost jobs in the month of September.
The headline unemployment rate of 9.8% is a bare bones measure that greatly understates unemployment. Government reporting agencies know this and report another unemployment number, known as U-6. This measure of US unemployment stands at 17% in September 2009.
When the long-term discouraged workers are added back into the total unemployed, the unemployment rate in September 2009 stands at 21.4%.
The unemployment of American citizens could actually be even higher. When Microsoft or some other firm replaces several thousand US workers with foreigners on H-1B visas, Microsoft does not report a decline in payroll employment. Nevertheless, several thousand Americans are now without jobs. Multiply this by the number of US firms that are relying on “body shops” to replace their US work force with cheap foreign labor year after year, and the result is hundreds of thousands of unreported unemployed Americans.
Obviously, with more than one-fifth of the American work force unemployed and the remainder buried in mortgage and credit card debt, economic recovery is not in the picture.
What is happening is that the hundreds of billions of dollars in TARP money given to the large banks and the trillions of dollars that have been added to the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet have been funneled into the stock market, producing another bubble, and into the acquisition of smaller banks by banks “too large to fail.” The result is more financial concentration.
The expansion in debt that underlies this bubble has further eroded the US dollar’s credibility as reserve currency. When the dollar starts to go, panicked policy-makers will raise interest rates in order to protect the US Treasury’s borrowing capability. When the interest rates rise, what little remains of the US economy will tank.
If the government cannot borrow, it will print money to pay its bills. Hyperinflation will hit the American population. Massive unemployment and massive inflation will inflict upon the American people misery that not even Marx and Lenin could envisage.
Meanwhile America’s economists continue to pretend that they are dealing with a normal postwar recession that merely requires an expansion of money and credit to restore economic growth. Less..
Added: Oct 6 2009 In: news_politics
Recorded on: Oct 6 2009
By: Big__Beezy
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- Comments: 40
Comments - sort by newest to oldest
I remember when I was 8 they were teaching us about Lenin and how good he was. Ahhh memories.
Posted Oct-6-2009 by "Russian_Warlord" (R)
thanks for the dumb commie info there mr. stalin
Posted Oct-6-2009 by "star53" (R)
Marx & Lenin would be leading the democrat party .... oops ... come to think of it ... their evil spirits ARE.
They must remember one thing ... WE, The People, the Veterans, have never lost a war to communists .
progressive politicians may have surrendered, but we almost totally destroyed the communist forces before then.
The kill ratio? about 1000 communists to 1 American. That does include chinese and russians also!
So think about it ... before anyone thinks about the next confrontation ... what are the odds YOU are one of the next 1000 ?
Posted Oct-6-2009 by "spadata" (R)
We Americans can figure it out
Posted Oct-6-2009 by "bro77dog" (R)
They must remember one thing ... WE, The People, the Veterans, have never lost a war to communists .
progressive politicians may have surrendered, but we almost totally destroyed the communist forces before then.
The kill ratio? about 1000 communists to 1 American. That does include chinese and russians also!
So think about it ... before anyone thinks about the next confrontation ... what are the odds YOU are one of the next 1000 ?
an empty jar for a head...
Posted Oct-6-2009 by "bro77dog" (R)
They must remember one thing ... WE, The People, the Veterans, have never lost a war to communists .
progressive politicians may have surrendered, but we almost totally destroyed the communist forces before then.
The kill ratio? about 1000 communists to 1 American. That does include chinese and russians also!
So think about it ... before anyone thinks about the next confrontation ... what are the odds YOU are one of the next 1000 ?
an empty jar for a head...
Maybe debate him instead of callin him names?
we'll he flubs when he claims we never lost a 'war'. I can only assume he means guns and fighting.
He makes a narrow quantitative argument as if the world has a big scoreboard. What's the point of debating him?
Posted Oct-6-2009 by "bro77dog" (R)
also, I didnt call him a name. I implied he's hardly thinking.
Posted Oct-6-2009 by "bro77dog" (R)
Do I need remind anyone of the actual failure of Marxist/Leninism?
Like babysitting a kindergarten class here on liveleak at times.
Pro Tip:
Communism FAILED.
Posted Oct-6-2009 by "Fire37Rescue" (R)
They must remember one thing ... WE, The People, the Veterans, have never lost a war to communists .
progressive politicians may have surrendered, but we almost totally destroyed the communist forces before then.
The kill ratio? about 1000 communists to 1 American. That does include chinese and russians also!
So think about it ... before anyone thinks about the next confrontation ... what are the odds YOU are one of the next 1000 ?
We didn't do real well in Viet Nam.
Posted Oct-6-2009 by "sclaus4" (B)
I have to wonder if this guy thinks that the system that has cost more human lives than any other in history is the way to go. Are we supposed to give it one more good old college try and HOPE that it does not happen again? Marxists and leninists consistently deny that the system they so love in theory does not, can not, has not and never will work. Oh and btw, one of the main tenets of marxism is the eradication of the top ten percent of civilisation in terms of intelligence and success in order to restart civilisation in the marxist way. To put this into perspective, the earth with 6 billion people on board would have to eradicate (murder) six hundred million souls before even beginning to put the plan in place. Tell that to the marxist professers and their sycophants at your local university and watch the sparks fly. They never seem to be able to pull a valid response out of their hat, just accusations and insults.
Posted Oct-6-2009 by "sanhan" Premium
Huh, I guess if you really want to distract people from a reasonable assessment of things just say: "marx and lenin predicted it". Whats the point of even leading an arguement with them, especially here on liveleak?
But it is true though. I've got a friend who works for a company making plastic tubes(or something like that, i can never understand what he says they really do, something about mandrels). They laid off 3/4 of the employees and now have a deal with the chinese to make these plastic tubes. My buddy knew this was going to happen when he heard that they sent someone over to China to make a business deal. Now they ship the tubes to the factory, where he has to do the work of 3 people because he is the only one left on his shift, and they stack the tubes to make it look to the company's costumers like the tubes are made right here in the states. LOL.
But it is all probably to late now anyways to fix anything. We're gonna get royally fu cked in the coming years.
Posted Oct-6-2009 by "funkymonkey101" (R)
Marx was a huge fan of the central bank, the institution that brought this crisis. Redistribution of wealth by means of inflation is an old leftist scam. Keynes, the socialist who's doctrine guides central banks of today, once said that capitalism could be destroyed by debasing the currency.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/ydtlusm
http://keynesatharvard.org/index.html
Posted Oct-6-2009 by "QIQrrr" (R)
Wow, people really do get off subject. I didnt read anything about vietnam in this article. Or about any war for that matter. Or about any communist/socialist economic models.
STALIN, HITLER, MARX, BUSH, LENIn, LENIN, MORE BUSH, OBAMA, OSAMA, WWII, COLD War, NEo NAzi SKin heads, KKK.....llololol.
Posted Oct-7-2009 by "funkymonkey101" (R)
They must remember one thing ... WE, The People, the Veterans, have never lost a war to communists .
progressive politicians may have surrendered, but we almost totally destroyed the communist forces before then.
The kill ratio? about 1000 communists to 1 American. That does include chinese and russians also!
So think about it ... before anyone thinks about the next confrontation ... what are the odds YOU are one of the next 1000 ?
We didn't do real well in Viet Nam.
That was political. Soldiers that understood how to fight the war were not allowed to implement their ideas properly across the board. There was a status quo that could not be changed by the only people that knew it needed to be changed. It was not the soldiers that lost that war. And the communists payed in blood to endure to the end. That is how communists seem to fight wars, they throw their people to the slaughter. What they lack in technology and tactics, they make up for it by a willingness to sacrifice large numbers of lives.
Posted Oct-7-2009 by "RebelYell2007" (R)
Like babysitting a kindergarten class here on liveleak at times.
Pro Tip:
Communism FAILED.
yes communisom failed, but not before it killed about 200 million people around the world first, Stalin killed 40 million of his own people Mao killed another 70 million of his, then there was Viet Nam, you may well know the rest of the story.
Posted Oct-7-2009 by "OBgenerik" (R)