Re-arming Marxism

The Unfolding Crisis and the Relevance of Marx
Lecture written for a meeting held in Conway Hall, London, on 21^st October 2008

By István Mészáros

SOME of you may have been present at our meeting in May this year in this building, when I recalled what I said to Lucien Goldman in Paris a few months before the French historic MAY 1968. In contrast to the then prevailing perspective of “organized capitalism”, which was supposed to have successfully left behind the stage of “crisis capitalism” – a view prominently asserted by Marcuse and shared also by my dear friend Lucien Goldman – I insisted that, compared to the crisis we are actually heading for, “the Great World Economic Crisis of 1929-1933” would look like “the Vicar's tea party”.

In the few last weeks you had a foretaste of what I had in mind. But no more than a foretaste, because the structured crisis of the capital system as a whole, which we are experiencing in our time on an epochal scale, is bound to get considerably worse. It will become in due course much deeper, in the sense of invading not only the world of more or less parasitical global finance but every single domain of our social, economic and cultural life.

The obvious question we must now address concerns the nature of the globally unfolding crisis and the conditions required for its feasible resolution.

Read full text here. Well worth it.