Global crisis returns Marx to fashion

13 Apr, 2009 06:09 / Updated 15 years ago

The world's leading Marxist scholar has exposed passages by Karl Marx that predict the global financial crash and its outcome. Giorgy Bagaturiya claims the world is now shifting to China’s economic model.

This is how Karl Marx predicted bank greed will self-destruct. "With adequate profit, capital is very bold. 20 per cent will produce eagerness. 300% and there's not a risk it won't run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged."

Karl Marx also foretold taxpayers will foot the bill for blue chip fiascos. "The losses of private capitalists are compensated at the expense of all society."

Now a Professor Giorgy Bagaturiya from Moscow State University says China's come the closest of any state to Marx's end game of "wealth for all". And the world's first global economic crisis is pushing the West the same way.

“China continues to increase the wealth of its people, even in a global recession. The takeover of the world's economies by their governments will follow Beijing's model."

In a year, German sales of Das Kapital are up seven-fold. Shanghai last month announced a Das Kapital musical to quote "help people understand why the financial crisis is happening." Klaus Rohland, Russia director at the World Bank dismisses Marx's modern relevance.

“Karl Marx was a great thinker of his time, and it's not surprising that at a time of uncertainty people look back to other thinkers. His recipes for economic development have turned out to be a disaster.”

Bagaturiya is publishing all 15,000 letters penned to and from Marx in his lifetime. The Moscow-based academic claims China and the world can learn from the mistakes that ruined the Soviet Union. The USSR failed to get rid of the class system, private property or corporate hierarchy, he says.