Interview by Paul Manson
Karl Marx, in London for a book signing, stumbles off the Eurostar and straight into an interview with Paul Mason at a café in King’s Cross. How does the credit crunch fit with the guru’s theory of crisis?
I chose St Pancras to impress him, but he is not impressed. Stumbling off the Eurostar, he barely notices the architecture and thumbs his BlackBerry when I point out the champagne bar.
I’ve prepared this whole historical decompression briefing for him: the match girls’ strike, the petrol engine, cinema, Lenin, the Warsaw Pact, the John Betjeman statue. But he stops me short: “I know, I know all about it. You think we don’t have Wikipedia up there?”
“You see everything?”
“Better than you! We see it without sensuous historical experience. It’s like watching a slow-motion car crash. Just wait till you get there: it will restore your faith in the objective forces of history.”
I explain that I want to ask about the credit crunch, how it fits with his theory of crisis –
“I’ve got an hour and then I’m doing a book signing . . .”
“Which book?” I joke.
He laughs: as we all learned in the 1980s, there is more than one volume of Marx’s Capital, and more than one theory of crisis therein. So which one fits the events since the Lehman Brothers crash?
“OK. Crisis 101,” he begins. We’ve grabbed a table at a Starbucks on Euston Road and he’s let me buy him a double espresso.
“In the book, what I say is that the possibility of crisis is there right from the moment you separate sale from purchase. Once you’ve got a society based on money and commodities you can have a situation where there’s enough produce to go around – enough Fairtrade coffee, iPods, Prada overcoats” (he is wearing a Prada overcoat) – “but not enough money for people to buy it.”
“So the commodity is the root of all evil?”
“It makes crisis possible, is all.”
So what has caused this one?
“In the book I never actually got around…
more on: www.nsdev.com/ideas/2011/01/8220-crisis-interview-theory
