This is really unwittingly silly stuff from the august BBC where John Gray writes an editorial concluding that while Marx was wrong about communism he was right about capitalism — it's failing.

All I can say is: Duh.

The MSM  has always treated socialism (or anti-capitalism) as some sort of aberration and tinker-toy affliction and maybe it would be better if it continued to do so because pieces like this one are actually embarrassing.

The entire piece is devoted to the same single point that capitalism has failed because in Europe and the U.S. it can no longer provide job stability let alone upward mobility.  This is, of course, true.  It's also been true for most of the last 35 years. It's just a little more evident nowadays.

What makes me laugh about this piece is its rather off-putting myopia.  The most dramatic failure of global capitalism is certainly not because Spanish workers will see their pensions cut or even that effective unemployment in the U.S. might be 15 percent.

Much more importantly (and perhaps the subject of a sequel piece by the Beeb) is that capitalism has utterly failed to provide a humane standard of living for way more more than half the global population.  Something like half the world lives on a dollar a day and last time I checked 60 percent … that's right 3 out of 5 human beings– have never even made a telephone call.

Since the advent of Marxism a century and a half ago, about 20 countries, (give or take) have at some point or another self-identified as "Communist." No question they all failed as viable alternatives to capitalism (Let's not get too deep in the weeds but by Marx's actual criteria, and contrary to Mr. Gray's ignorant assertions, none would really be considered socialist let alone communist by the Old Lion. Marx envisioned socialism as a global system built on top of societies of capitalist abundance — not as backward, isolated Third World outposts).

Nevertheless, no self-proclaimed Communist country has prospered as such.

Subtract the 20 that called themselves such and that leaves (give or take) another 175-200 countries in the world, especially if u want to start counting Palau and Grenada.

So, a simple question?

How many of THESE capitalist societies have prospered and functioned to some reasonable degree? Well, there's the G8 — as in eight!  And let's be very, very generous here and toss in the BRIC countries. the Asian tigers, and, just to be be diplomatic, we can marginally add in another handful or two.  Let's really be nice and round it off to, say, 35 countries. That still leaves about 150 or so unaccounted for.  What do folks in Malawi, Mongolia, Haiti, Botswana, Burma and Tunisia and so on and so on think about the efficacy of capitalism to meet their basic needs?

None of this even takes into account the gross inequalities that exist inside the most successful capitalist societies. Didn't Ayn Rand teach us that capitalism is all about getting the other guy before he gets you?  Is there anyone who actually believes that great wealth can be generated without extracting it from the work of others? (Yes, there are tens of millions all around me who partake in this civic religion — as bogus as any other religion).

I cracked up reading Gray's concluding lines which I am sure he thinks were ever so clever:

Capitalism has led to a revolution but not the one that Marx expected. The fiery German thinker hated the bourgeois life and looked to communism to destroy it. And just as he predicted, the bourgeois world has been destroyed.

But it wasn't communism that did the deed. It's capitalism that has killed off the bourgeoisie.

Um, actually, no. Marx never predicted that something called "communism" would rise up to destroy capitalist society. All of his writing and theorizing is based on the postulate that the inherent contradictions of capitalism itself would eventually make it obsolete and would produce its own collapse. The old world is pregnant with the new and all that stuff, you know.

Coming next from the BBC: Poor people are not rich. A five part series.