We all know that Karl Marx kind of went off the deep end with his Hegelian stages of history and system building. But we all should also know that Karl Marx was one of the most incisive critics of capitalism who ever lived. Indeed, I was a bit shocked this Sunday morning to come across the following passage from volume one of Das Kapital:
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 nationalized and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.
It suddenly occurred to me on this cold February morning that perhaps we're in the first stage of some type of takeover by a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the form of Sarah Palin and the Tea Bagger Movement.
Some very thoughtful writers have seen this coming in recent years. One of the best is Chris Hedges, long time foreign correspondent of the New York Times. In 2007 he wrote American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America. He wrote:
We must attend to growing social and economic inequities in order to stop the most dangerous mass movement in American history -- or face a future of fascism under the guise of Christian values.
That was three years ago. Have we "attended" to these growing social and economic inequities since Hedges wrote those words? What do you think about the strange intersection of Karl Marx and Chris Hedges?