Your correspondent was hoping to avoid the 200th birthday of Karl Marx. The centenary of the Bolshevik revolution appeared to describe an arc through history. Two hundred? Meh.

But it doesn’t seem we can duck it, and that’s quite interesting. In 1998, when the sesquicentenary of the 1848 publication of The Communist Manifesto came around, there was a flurry of interest around its marvellous rhetoric, its prescience on market concentration etc etc. There was general agreement that it was otherwise archaic, and that was why it could be celebrated for its marvellous etc etc.

What a difference two decades make! Now, after the utter failure and discrediting of the neocon-neolib double act — Clinton in the White House, Blair newly installed in Number Ten at the time — there’s a new set of articles on Marx, and what a dangerous thinker he is, and shouldn’t be heeded. The IPA’s apparent best argument against Marx is that he once fucked his wife’s companion/maid. But then the IPA is all chinos and pearls and lives never really lived.

What sort of guide is Marx to the 21st century? Well, let’s leave his general theory of history and humanity until tomorrow. His particular theory of capitalism is that it is both another stage in human development, and a very special one — one in which the capacity to exchange things in terms of general quantitative value, and the ownership of the means to produce the things for exchange — produces a system which has the capacity to transform every aspect of life.

Capitalism arises in the 18th century, when merchant capital, agricultural change — clearances, creating a landless class — steady technical innovation (and a set of state and legal changes), lets this process off the leash. Capitalism is a “real abstraction” machine. Everything held to be particular and fenced off is eventually consumed.

For Marx, this autonomous power of capitalism — no one actually directing it — has the capacity to create a vast, global working class; people whose only commodity for sale is their own labour. Within capitalism we thus glimpse the possibility of human deliverance; productive forces developed to such a degree that we can collectively free ourselves from the brute rule of nature, and an opposition to capitalism’s brutalities that makes a world of co-operation, mutual respect and free development of all, actually visible, and then achievable.

The process of capital accumulation in this vast abstracting machine, Marx argued, would follow a course. Early competitive industry would be replaced by monopolies and the concentration of capital; wages, whatever specific rises might occur, would be suppressed and equalised over a general economy; capitalism’s increased composition by machine production would reduce cost and fill out existing demand leading to a fall in profits (which could be stayed, perhaps indefinitely, by state redistribution, manufacture of new desires, destructive production such as military spending, and periodic actual destruction such as war to reset profit ratios (a very limited account of that idea). As these contradictions tightened, the working class would become increasingly aware of themselves as a class, and not Presbyterians, whites, tradespeople, loyal residents of Bendigo, etc. They would see where the value in the system really came from and take it over.

That argument is presented as discredited because of a very singular event in 20th century history: the World Wars of 1914-1945, the collapse of the European Marxist movement into national patriotism, and the triumph of Russia’s Bolsheviks (who stabilised themselves as a directed, planned economy with no legal market). Marxist parties that had advanced more complex ideas of capitalist-socialist transition became nationally based social democracies. Marxism ceased to be a critique of capitalism, and became a program of political-economic implementation under all conditions, from the 1920s-1980s.

Now that’s swept away, we can see the critique again. Marx forecast monopoly capital, increased inequality, downward pressure, and accumulation untameable even when it threatens the viability of all life. He forecast the manufacture of new scarcities when the old ones were saturated, a decline in profits and economic development when capitalism left its “high” phase of predominantly industrial production, and the rise of forms of “barbarism” as a response to this if a genuinely socialist opposition is defeated or scattered.

Liberalism, with its notion of catallactic spontaneous order suggests a world that recomposes itself periodically, with market clearing, new opportunities, the non-coagulation of monopoly, the triumph of dialogue and interest over “atavistic” ideas of nation and blood, and the spread of rationality as the base political form, with the spread of the market.

When you look at the West, from Putin across to Trump, which approach gives us a better picture?

So where’s the revolution? In part two tomorrow.