What Would Marx Do? WWMD?

The cover of this month's Foreign Policy portrays Karl Marx's bust consisting of bread, crackers, possibly a potato for a nose, and a few other bits that I can't distinguish. Leo Panitch, a political economist and the editor of the Socialist Register, writes on Marx's foretelling of this crisis and his solutions to today's economic contraction in Thoroughly Modern Marx. At two web pages, it's a brief read. Panitch asserts that one of Marx's primary solutions would center on the organization of the working-class (everyone from a San Jacinto pizza delivery man to an person working the line in Peoria's Caterpillar plant) to reduce the neoliberal by-product of disaster capitalism that forces rich and poor alike--at disparate, disproportionate levels--to suffer the fate of market volatility in their daily lives.

In his last sentence, Panitch reminds us that Marx was, above all, a realist that distrusted dreams of grandeur where the market resolves all class and social issues. Marx's prescription would require the socialization of finance capital in a way that would alleviate the harsh peaks and valleys that benefit, above all else, the capitalist class to the detriment of a shrinking middle-class down the destitute poor. Utopian visions of a beneficent hidden hand and rational market actors crumble time and time again as they capitalism reels from shock to shock as all attention obsesses on the health of the market rather than the health of the society as a whole.