“The Battle of Ideas” Economic Brain Waves of the Centuries: Influences on Public Policy thoughts of State Effectiveness & Transformation - Part IV (original) (raw)

The history of economic thought is a juggernaut of blueprints penned by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Lenin, Keynes, Hayek, Ricardo, Mill and many pundits who developed unparalleled thoughts throughout the centuries. The forces of the market-state chemistry and capital-labour relations have been the dominant focus of research that inform the vicissitudes witnessed in the inability of economic principles to explain the global crises witnessed in the 21st Century. Adam Smith's vision is a blueprint for a completely new mode of social organisation, whose laws of the market -- the drive of individual self-interest in an environment of similarly motivated individuals will result in competition: the provision of goods in the quantities that society desires and at the prices it is prepared to pay. This regulator is competition. Karl Marx’s final contribution lies elsewhere: in his dialectical materialist theory of history, analysed in Das Kapital with fury, but with cold logic. Finally, the drama ends. Marx's picture of it has all the eloquence of a description of Damnation: Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation. With this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, united by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.... Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument, it bursts asunder, the knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. Adam Smith’s capitalist escalator climbed upward, Ricardo’s upward motion was stalled by in-sufficient cropland, which brought a stalemate to progress and a windfall to the fortunate proprietor, Mill’s society could distribute its product as it saw fit, regardless of what economic laws seemed to dictate. Nonetheless, for Marx even that saving possibility was untenable, for the materialist view of history told him that the state was only the political ruling organ of the economic rulers; the thought that it might act as a third force balancing the claims of its conflicting members, would have seemed sheer wishful thinking.