Evaluating The Writings Of Stephanie Flanders And The British Broadcasting Corporation

Evaluating the writings of legendary German political economist Karl Marx, and Marxism at large, in the context of twenty-first century developments can be a Sisyphean task. In the third episode of “Masters of Money,” Stephanie Flanders and the British Broadcasting Corporation tackle his legacy in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008. Flanders does well to establish the core tenets of Marxism in this documentary but loses sight of some of the finer points. The basics of commodity ownership are discussed but only briefly, and rather shoddily. The creation of surplus-value is ignored entirely, which would help to frame the decline in wages experienced globally by many. Flanders misunderstands a key dimension of wages: that they enable the

The “Masters of Money” program devotes a considerable portion of its runtime to analyzing the recession, a major event in the era of global capitalism, through the lens of Marxism. This is unquestionably a difficult task, given the rise of central banking and other economic phenomena unknown to Marx at the time of his writings. Stephanie Flanders surmises that wages falling were the “root cause” of the Great Recession, then subsequently posits that bank policy was to blame for this decline in wages. While Flanders does succeed in conveying that capital is infinitely adaptable and thus credit cards came to exist to fill the gap in consumption, she does not dig deeper and adequately support that view with Marx’s words. Credit card debt weighing people down fits rather snugly in Marx’s perspective on capitalism and workers. In accumulating debt, the worker would ostensibly have to stretch his labor-power thin and work more to alleviate the debt. Thus even more surplus-value is created for the capitalist while the worker races against their creditors; capital, and capitalists as well, perpetually come out on top in this way. Readers of Marx understand well that “capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value…[to] absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labor” (Marx 342). This driving force was terminal in the case of the Great Recession. Capital valorized itself so greatly, it valorized capital that did not concretely exist. Falling wages have generated working-class resentment for quite a while, but did not constitute the main reason for this particular crisis. Capital striving to valorize itself no matter the circumstances is a far more reasonable “root cause” of the Great