So, what was that about Marx, Dr Pod?

I am a radical humanist, libertarian Marxist and anti-imperialist through and through, and yet I recognise that today's 'anti-capitalist' and environmentalist movements are backward ideological expressions of production in retreat ("Stop the World! I Wanna Get Off!"). On close inspection, the current world recession reveals the subjective retreat of the capitalist class from industrial growth*. It is therefore essential today to emphasise the need for continued economic growth, while holding to neither the sectionalism of capitalism nor the relativism of the left.

While I'm of 'Marxist extraction' I consider it a disservice to Marxism to call oneself a 'communist' or a 'socialist' today. It's axiomatic in the revolutionary Marxist tradition that communists cannot create a working class movement of their own volition. Rather it was their role was to give it conscious direction. At the present conjuncture, where the working class exists sociologically, but not politically, there is no concrete movement in society that can give expression to the abstract idea of 'social revolution' (indeed the very idea invites blank incomprehension).

Marx sought to liberate capitalism's progressive trends towards economic growth from the restrictions it places on that growth. It is because 'left', 'right' and 'centre' today are preoccupied with the destructiveness of capitalism that production (the well-spring of our humanity) and progress have been demonised, pushing social change off the agenda. The goal of surpassing capitalism has been passed over for retreating from it. Thus, to be 'radical' today is to believe that capitalism has gone 'too far', when, in reality, capitalism is unable to go 'far enough'.

The world needs development, not 'sustainable development'. The former is the pre-condition for human liberation, the latter a recipe for ensuring that majority of the world's population remains 'closer to nature' (i.e closer to death).

http://www.metamute.org/en/print/13124

(James Heartfield, 'A crisis of under-accumulation')*