Capitalism Wants Marxism to Save Capitalism

We are living in strange times, the Financial Times:

Marx analysed and explained insightfully how and why capitalism would succumb to recurrent crises, and especially big ones after a credit bust. He also placed this, as his peer predecessors had, in the context of political economy, and what we’d now call feedback loops. Keynes was no slouch in these areas either, and articulated how capitalism could sidestep Marx’s crises and controversial endgame.
How regrettable then that economists and bankers substituted the delusion of the “new economy” for the rigours of political economy, and still maintain that if only government and regulation would get out the way, there would be a spontaneous revival in private spending and lending.

Well and good. But here is another important idea that Marx expressed in Grundrisse, the book (or collection of notes) that’s at the center of Marxist thinking in Italy: Capitalism functions by transforming limits into barriers. Meaning, when ever it hits an actual limit, an end to things, it does not go in a new direction, but attempts to change the limit into a barrier. Why? Because you can climb over a barrier and continue as before. A limit, on the other hand, is a limit. There is no going beyond it.

An example of transforming a limit into a barrier? Turning wages into debt (the Italian economist Christian Marazzi calls this “the becoming of rent” of wages). This happened in the 70s. Capitalism was confronted with a limit, high wages for mostly whites in industrialized nations, and transformed this limit into debt. No increase in wages but an increase in debt—you must rent your wage increase. The new limit? People are not getting paid (wages have been flat or declining since the 70s) and are stuck with houses (the worker’s ATM) whose value has dropped or stagnated. We seem to have hit a limit in this business of transforming limits to barriers.