Tuesday, 3rd February 2009

Karl Marx and Gordon Brown

Karm Farrugia, Madliena

Unfortunately, I cannot provide Joseph Anthony Debono (February 2) with the precise source of my quote from Karl Marx, except to say that it featured in one of his many editorials in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, eventually suppressed like its predecessor.

To John Aquilina-St John (Gordon Brown Leading Britain Into Bankruptcy, also February 2) I say that my praise for Mr Brown is not inspired merely by his UK policies but, in a global sense, he is showing rare leadership qualities desperately needed to shorten the duration of the current widespread recession.

Perhaps one needs reminding that it was an American Democratic President who upheld and implemented Keynsian thinking in similar/worse circumstances, and not the UK Conservative government who derided "socialist" Keynes and only, later and indirectly, tackled the economic crisis from the demand side because of Hitler's war threats.

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Article © Allied Newspapers Ltd., printed on Saturday, November 21, 2009. This article is for personal use only, and should not be distributed.

Comments

Abel Abela (on 3/2/09)

This fake "quotation" from Marx is actually made up - readers of the Times do well to treat it skeptically. It's being cited repeatedly ad nauseam, but it's an invention! It claims prophetic wisdom for Karl Marx in forecasting today's credit crunch, but he would have been the first one to object to it. The so-called quotation from Das Kapital goes like this: "Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867" But Karl Marx never wrote these words.
He would have immediately objected to this statement, surely pointing out that falling wages achieved unbearable poverty for the working class long before they will have had a chance to have bank overdrafts!

Charles DeMicoli (on 3/2/09)

It wasn't just Franklin Delano Roosevelt who implemented Keynsian theories to get the US out of the Depression, helped of course by the onset of WWII to help boost the economy. Later presidents would inject Keynesian elements into the economy as needed. President Obama, in his almost $900 billion rescue package, seems to be going full throttle implementing Keynes' theories. In the middle of December, last year, the federal interest rate was brought down to a historic 0%, but this did not achieve the results expected on the economy. So, the next couple of years will be be an interesting test for Keynes' theory once more. President Obama keeps telling us consumers to have confidence and spend, in order to get the sputtering economy going, or crawling back, I should say. Meanwhile, the banks, even though they recieved billions in last year's bailout, are still being tightfisted with their money and not lending it out as fast as they should be doing by now, furthur holding back consumer spending, which in turn doesn't 'unstagnate' the present economical situation.