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dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East

on the West.”

Think of Disneyfication, blue jeans, Hollywood. Marx’s next argument is more
questionable, that capitalism also creates the modern nation-state:

“The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but
loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems
of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code

of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.”

Not all, economists and historians would agree with this. Surely both capitalism and
nationalism are more complex than that. In the next paragraph he returns to the
“hymn to capitalism” theme:

“The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more

massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations
together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to
industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of
whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured
out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such
productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?”

Marx’s words can be read as a brilliantly-written description of the “rise of the west”.

But then he seizes on a crucial contradiction of modern capitalism:

“There breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an
absurdity – the epidemic of overproduction. There is too much civilisation, 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, The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth
created by them.”

The picture Marx paints here, of capitalism destroyed by its own sheer explosive
power, carries immense force. Literally bursting at the seams! Crises and crashes
caused by overproduction occurred in the 1840’s, 1880’s 1930’s and 2010’s. The
drive for continual “economic growth” dominates our politics, yet threatens to
exhaust natural resources, destroy the natural environment and destabilise the

climate. Marx' identifies it as a central contradiction: is capitalism’s insatiable need