Lest We Forget
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past, the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
Karl Marx & Frederick Engels – The Communist Manifesto (1848)
March 25th, 2009 at 1:09 am
It is true my friend. We have reached a stage of OVER production – look at the amount of stuff we waste. Walk into the shopping center, the hundreds of type of every item you can get.
I used to go and ask for jibneh 3akkawi and I got The One Type, now there are many 3akkawi, many also imported, and in the end it is cheese!
There are too many IT specialists, too many architects, too many BUSINESSMEN, too many of this and that.. but how many intellectuals are there? How many philosophers? How many thinkers?
Most people who steer themselves to the “usual” professions find themselves depressed and disposable pretty much like the canned foods they consume. Why? The overabundance. Am told to do MBA, and I say, why? Millions are doing it, it won’t distinguish me from the next Joe.
And most businesses steer themselves to the usual business. There is nothing new – just mockery, more loans, more lies, more trickery to the consumer. We all fall into this jumble, roll around in this washing machine and our monetary resources have been extinguished, and we can’t get any more because we’re as disposable as the items we own and the information in our heads.