This book is built on the idea of division in the thought of Marx between the Communist Manifesto written in 1848 when he was 30 and Capital, the result of 20 years of research into the political economy of capitalism with the first volume published in 1867 and the second and third volumes tidied up by Engels and published after Marx’s death in 1883.
Desai’s theory is that the fire-and-brimstone denunciations of the imminent collapse of capitalism belong to the younger Marx. By 1867 an older and wiser Marx’s economic thinking suggests in fact that capitalism could continue to reproduce itself almost indefinitely, while remaining subject to cyclical instability. Desai considers it unfortunate that subsequent socialist thinking was he believes more influenced by the younger Marx’s description of the inevitable death of capitalism than by his more sober analysis.
There is support for this idea that the later Marx believed capitalism was not at risk of imminent collapse in particular in the second volume of Capital and Marx’s “reproduction schema” which suggest a stable capitalism able to grow continuously. While this is true I am more persauded (following Harvey) by the idea that what Marx in fact demonstrates is the improbability of the conditions for these schema remaining true over the long term, in particular the time taken to realise commodities during circulation. Coupled with some oddities in Desai’s presentation (especially in the different implications of use and exchange value) make this interesting but not convincing.
Having outlined this proposition, for most of the rest of the book Desai follows the story of economic thought from Marx until the early 2000’s when the book was written through marginalism, the Keynesians, Soviet communism, and on to the triumph of neoliberalism and the collapse of state socialism. This is an interesting summary, describing the development of economic thought from a left-leaning although not necessarily Marxist perspective. Desai assumes three essential approaches – capitalism, socialism ‘within’ capitalism (ie. reformist socialist parties), and socialism ‘outside’ capitalism (ie. Soviet state socialism).
The book ends with the the collapse of Soviet state socialism and the final disillusionment of western socialist parties and the victory of neoliberalism seeming to suggest that capitalism can indeed continue essentially forever, thereby validating the older Marx’s analysis and disproving the theory of its inevitable collapse which had inspired Soviet communism. Desai doesn’t foresee the financial crash, and while it is harsh to criticise him for that it is interesting to speculate whether his conclusion would have been different if the book had been written afterwards. In fact it seems that capitalism hasn’t found the key to its revival in the return of globalism and the bypassing of the nation state as Desai suggests. The financial crisis has challenged all that, and while Marx’s idea that capitalism would collapse hasn’t been realised it certainly seems that it is set on a path that is a good deal less stable than proposed here.
Desai, Meghnad Marx’s Revenge (Verso, London, 2004)
A Very Marx Adventure 