As the anti-capitalist protesters cluster in their encampments across the western world, one pictures the ghost of Karl Marx wandering among the tents and nodding approvingly. It would be interesting to know what he made of it: for while Marx was wrong about practically everything, he could be productively wrong.
That is, while he drew the wrong conclusions from his premises, those premises could be suggestive. Take his notion that capitalism would be swept away because it would become “a fetter on the mode of production”.
Why that was wrong need not detain us. But the phrase was echoed in a recent speech by Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England (on which I touched last week) to the effect that most of the harmful developments in finance in the last century came from the banks’ desire “to break their balance sheet chains”.