Saturday, October 18, 2008

"Marx stressed the battle for democracy as essential for the Communists to support as a necessary condition to the eventual establishment of socialism. He also saw the attempts by capitalists to save the capitalist system from its chronic crisis, the crisis of overproduction, leading to depressions, as not only hopeless but self-defeating. In their centralization of credit, their creation of bigger and bigger monopolies, their search for foreign markets to dump surplus goods and gain access to greater and cheaper quantities of raw materials and pools of labor, the capitalists were digging their own grave. Marx believed that they were literally setting the stage for bigger crises in the future, breaking down the distinctions between workers in various countries and regions of the world by putting more and more of them, from Beijing to Brooklyn, from Calcutta to Cleveland, in the same boat so to speak."