There are almost 1,000 web pages to “quote” the following text that Karl Marx has never written, nor said, not in 1867, not ever!

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 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.

Yeah, the Internet is the best way to spread faux information. Soon we’ll learn that Obama said somewhere “I’ll die, but on the third day I’ll rise again”, eh?

Personally, I believe that the consumerism is exactly the phenomenon that Marx didn’t quite fully anticipate! AFAIK, Marx has analyzed the notion of commodity fetishism only a state of social and economic alienation in capitalist market systems, where the commodity is given a power which in a sense it lacks, while the individual is separated from the products of his labor, so this might be seen as a specific kind of repression, but otherwise he had no idea of what the obscene consumerism could lead to!

Colporteurs de tous les pays, unissez-vous !

UPDATE: Snopes.com: Failing Marx.

The story posted by Just Whatever has now propagated to dozens and dozens of sites, in English or in translations (Spanish, Dutch, some Central European languages, etc.): Paid To Do It 72 Times.

Since the story is supposed to have happened in Stuttgart, have you ever thought of using a web search engine to look for pages in German that contain the original version of the story that refers to Demetrius Soupolos, Traute, and Frank Maus?

I have found exactly ZERO stories in German!

Therefore, no matter from what newspaper has Just Whatever taken the story, I’m 99% sure it’s a hoax! (Or it happened before the Internet age.)