And for his next trick, Marx will predict the Super Lotto Winner for next week!
I’ve gotten a couple of emails recently (though apparently this has been circulating around for a while) touting this too-accurate-to-be-true Karl Marx quote:
Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks which will have to be nationalized and State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.
— Karl Marx (1867)
Apparently this quote is all over the Net, spurring furious commentary from those who either (a) think Marx was correct, and, see, here’s the proof, or (b) think Obama is leading us to socialism and communism.
Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that just too good to be true?
Um … well, yes, it is.
Snopes hasn’t weighed in on it officially (except discussion in forums), but plenty of folks have done some searching of Das Kapital (what Marx wrote in that year), and, well, haven’t found anything.
Whether this is a hoax from the Right or the Left, it’s not a real Marx quote.
The first thing I noticed in the quote? Assuming it’s not typo problems, it is written as though it were to be read with a Russian accent! I’ve never read any English translations of Marx that sounded this dumb, comrade.
Yeah, there seems to be a dearth of articles in that quote that isn’t quite right (among other things).