A Fake Marx Quote Is Making the Rounds. Ignore It.

Gary North

March 5, 2009

This is all over the Web:

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 no option than to take the road which will eventually lead to communism. -- Das Kapital, 1867

I have read all three volumes of Capital. I did so in preparation for my book, Marx's Religion of Revolution (1968). You can get a free copy here:

//www.garynorth.com/freebooks/docs/212a_47e.htm

The quotation is a hoax -- and a really dim-witted one at that.

First, there was no consumer credit industry in 1867. There was not even Sears & Roebuck. Banks did not make consumer loans. There were only pawnshops. Marx spent most of his adult life in hock to pawnshops.

Second, he believed in the steady impoverishment of the working class, due to capitalist exploitation. He did not believe they could ever buy luxuries. The consumer credit market constitutes perhaps the most powerful practical refutation of Marx that we have.

Third, "technology" was not used in 1867 as a synonym for consumer goods. It was a rarely used word for systematic procedures.

This is as fake as the Tocqueville quote about America being great because America is good. But it makes less sense. Tocqueville might have said it. There is no way that Marx could have said this.

Conservatives are like sitting ducks. They get scared by just about anything with "Communism" in it, despite the fact that Communism died in 1991. It's a dead horse.

It's just incredible. Why would an anti-Communist take seriously anything that Marx, a Germanic, over-educated fool, ever wrote? His predictions rarely came true.

I don't know who invents this stuff, but I wish they would stop.