[Vmysobfi]

The Groucho joke was quite funny the first time I heard it 30 years ago. Over the course of the 500 times I've heard it since it has become tediously dull and predictable.

Another predictable thing is the regular, recurring crisis of capitalism that Marx quite correctly observed. It's odd how many 'classical' economists happily ignore this until a really big and scary crisis punches them in the face and raises the spectre of an economy so seriously broken that prospects for recovery seem faint and remote.

However, as The Man said - Philosophers seek to understand the world. The point is to change it. Where should that change come from? Certainly not above, for when the ruling elite act to control capitalism in serious crisis the outcome can tend towards fascism rather than social democracy. Marx's solution saw the agency of the wealth-creators (workers, not capitalists) as the driving force. Few such organisations exist today, because of the failures of stalinism and the western labour movements of the past.

I'm also wary of 'plastic communists' - nihilistic, petty-bourgeois youth who think that an anti-capitalism of throwing objects through the windows of starbucks is the way forward, rather than a coherent, rational advancement of productive forces.