Since the beginning of the global recession everyone from the literary critic Terry Eagleton to former IMF economist Nouriel Roubini has been declaring "Karl Marx was right". The irony wouldn't have escaped the "master" of contradiction. Despite the increasingly popular view that Marx is a neglected prophet whose work can help guide us through capitalism in crisis (so disquieting that even the FT devotes a series to it), the question of what Marx was "right" about, or the practical implications of what he wrote, are less widely known.

In the growing shadow of what Naomi Klein calls "disaster capitalism", few today would argue that Marx wasn't on to something in believing capitalism would, eventually, destroy itself. But is it possible that in accepting how "right" Marx was in his convictions, we risk underestimating the precise nature of what he said?

We're all used to hearing that old dinner-party refrain about how, despite it being a great idea in theory, communism would be impossible to implement in practice. In his Radio 4 series last year the philosopher John Gray argued something similar, observing that, although Marx was right in predicting that capitalism would eventually undermine the middle-class lifestyle, thus descending ever more of us ("the 99%") into wage slavery, he was "wrong about communism".

This is typical of the liberal-conservative view of Marx. For reformers such as Roubini, Marx was right – just not completely right. His stark truth that "history is class struggle" is deemed sufficiently provocative to make us stare down into the abyss of a precarious future with no steady income and zero social security. But having stared, we should have the good sense to step back and retrace our path somewhere else, toward a more "responsible capitalism", or toward what David Cameron calls "capitalism with a conscience". Or even (in the words of Bill Gates, another capitalist "reformer") toward a more "creative capitalism". In any case, so the opinion goes, we should take Marx seriously, not by advocating proletarian revolution, but by heeding the doom-laden warnings of the Communist Manifesto in which, "all that is solid melts into air". In this sense Marx is like the Ghost of Christmas Future, conjuring up nightmarish visions of what society will become if we don't mend our ways.

This commonsense interpretation may sound morally convincing. However, it is at odds with everything Marx actually wrote.

In Marx's early writings in particular, communism is not capitalism's evil twin. Nor is it the utopian promise of a brighter tomorrow. "Communism", writes a young Marx in 1845 "is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things."

In other words Marx regarded communism as inseparable from the present. The communist society that supposedly threatens us like a disembodied spectre is in actual fact already deeply ingrained in capitalist society. Contrary to popular opinion, Marx was no enemy of capitalism as such. How could he be when it contained the seeds of its own destruction?

The real enemy holding back the revolutionary movement was private property whereby profit and rent accumulate in the hands of capitalists and landlords – "unproductive labour" – who do nothing useful to earn it. If we consider that today's multinational corporations earn billions of dollars a year through licensing products – effectively collecting rent – which in many cases were first produced decades ago, then we realise just how far we have to go before the social bonds of inherited wealth and unearned privilege are finally broken.

Today there is clearly a growing popular sentiment that the economic exploitation of ourselves and of natural resources is approaching a limit. We simply cannot go on like this. It's time we stepped back from the abyss and began to put people before profit. It's an obvious sentiment that few people today – or even Marx himself – would try to deny. But Marx equally saw social progress as a long and painful struggle. And rather than lamenting the crises of capitalism for their socially divisive effects, Marx hailed them, since each new crisis meant another nail in the coffin of a system which extracts "surplus value" in the form of profit from the people who actually produce it.

Read the Communist Manifesto, originally published on the eve of the 1848 revolutions, and Marx's grudging admiration for the socially destructive power of capitalism is unmistakable: "The bourgeoisie," writes Marx and his lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels, "has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation."

Should such admiration alter how we view capitalism? Should we learn to love the system which pitilessly breaks the social bond time and again in the quiet satisfaction that such destruction brings the egalitarian society ever closer? This would only be to lapse into a kind of fatalism at odds with Marx's politically motivated ideas. But nor should we be under any illusions about the difficulty in building such a society.

In reality, Marx never promised a magic formula for changing the world. Nor does his work offer a way of averting catastrophe through "corporate responsibility": a kind of textbook of dos and don'ts for capitalists. This is the liberal-conservative mistake of reading Marx as a benign saviour, or a moral guardian (or even, perhaps, as a therapy for bankers?).

Marx's lesson is a difficult one. He teaches us that there is no limit that capitalism won't cross, no social bond it won't break, and no bounds to its "ingenuity" in making a buck from other peoples' misfortune. But in the age of rising austerity it's a lesson we would all do well to keep in mind.

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