Maybe Marx didn't have a very sharp eye for the flexibility of capitalism as a new socioeconomic formation. Marx had never dreamed that capitalism could be so elastic, that it could adapt so easily to new circumstances and create solutions for all those obstacles that he had so expertly described. If capitalism threatens to be undermined by the poor health of the members of the working class, well, then it will save itself by developing an efficient, new system of health care. Capitalism never is rigid, stiff, adverse to change. It is constantly moving and adapting to new challenges. And the strange thing here is that Marx knew perfectly well that is one of the most formidable assets of modern capitalism. He wrote about it. And yet it is an element that he may have underestimated. It's also possible to look at the problem of Marx's predictions in a completely different way. You could defend the idea that Marx is still important today but only when you transpose his theory to the scale of the entire world. If you accept the idea that capitalism has transformed from the level of the nation-state to the level of the world, that it has globalized, then you can still defend the idea that today, we witnessed a culmination, and possibly also, the eventual collapse of capitalism. Capitalism, some sociologists will say, has stretched its life span beyond anything that Marx ever expected, because it was very good at broadening it's playing field until it encompassed the whole globe. Some of the raw materials for our cellphones, for example, are harvested in mines in Africa. Those beautiful little computers are assembled by people in Asia, who receive wages that nobody in the United States or Europe would accept. And, the finished products are sold to the rich people living in Western societies. But today we see that capitalism has become so successful that also, for example, in Japan or in South Korea and also in China, new layers of the society have purchasing power to buy those expensive luxury products that everybody seems to love. The division of labor within capitalism has now enveloped, so to say, the whole world. If you want to see real parliamentarian poverty don't look for it in Germany or in England or in Japan. But go search for it in Sub-Sahara Africa. The mechanisms that Marx described can still be found, but you have to take the entire planet as your study object. The American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein has been explaining to his students and colleagues over the last 40 years or so that the biggest error of sociology has been to stick to the level of the nation state and to not take the interdependent world system as its object of study. And the same social scientists look at problem in this way, also tend to predict that a revolutionary change Is imminent. By globalizing, the capitalist system could stretch its lifetime. But for all its elasticity, it has now reached its final stage, where stretching it even further has become impossible. In the zones where the very rich and the very poor live close to each other, as is the case in the Near East, think of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, or Egypt, we see that revolutionary energy is heaved up in a frightening way. And nobody can foresee where this process will lead us. But, not many people shared the optimistic expectations that Marx had entertained about a post capitalist society. His prediction that, once capitalism has disappeared, we will all become the happy members of a very friendly communist world. Where we can devote ourselves to fishing in the morning and hunting in the afternoon and reading Shakespeare in the evening hours. That fantasy is today met with a wry smile. We have become too cynical to believe that. And strangely enough, that kind of cynicism was brought into the world by some hard-nosed social theorists like Karl Marx himself, who looked at human society from a disillusioned materialist perspective. It is Marx who told us to stop believing in fairytales. Today many of us see his dream of a friendly post-capitalist Communism as the kind of fairytale that is not very helpful if you want to understand your own social world.
