Björn Ingi Hrafnsson has had a pretty adventurous life so far. He went from being a Reykjavík city councilperson for the Progressive Party to starting his own media company, Vefpressan ehf., which proceeded to swallow up numerous media outlets. He seemed to be on an unstoppable trajectory.
However, this expansion soon began to fall apart. He bit off more than he could chew, and it was not long before his company started operating at a loss, and the debts piled up. It was almost as if he deliberately set out to prove that Marx was right about the infinite expansionist model of capitalism being unsustainable.
You have nothing to lose but your steaks
Most details of Björn Ingi’s communist tendencies began to emerge when he filed fraud charges against another company, Dalurinn ehf. In response, Dalurinn representative Árni Harðarsson revealed that Björn Ingi offered to pay off 6 million ISK of his debts not in the form of actual money, but with steaks from a restaurant he also owns: Argentina Steakhouse.
The more mundane and cynical amongst us might contend that Björn Ingi was simply trying to save himself some cash. We contend that this is all too simple.
Björn Ingi’s rapid rise and spectacular fall is really just a ploy to prove capitalism’s failures. The fact that he tried to introduce the direct exchange of commodities without the use of money only underlines the fact. The only thing we don’t know is whether Björn Ingi is a Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, or some other flavour of communist. But a communist he most definitely is.
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