A simple question:
When Marx predicted the death of the middle class and the division of society into haves and have-nots, was he perhaps on to something?
I think he was right about a lot of things. I don’t know if he was right about the solutions, though.
What’s this about Marx predicting the death of the middle class? Such a thing hardly existed in his time (he called it the petit bourgeoisie, I believe), and after his time it grew and grew.
When did Marx predict the death of the “middle class”?
To expand on my simple question, what exactly do you mean by middle class?
Marx didn’t care about the “middle class”. He thought there were two classes that mattered–proletarians who don’t own the means of production and therefore have nothing to sell but their labor, and the bourgeoisie (or capitalists) who owned the means of production. Sure, Marx recognized the existence of the self-employed petite bourgeoisie, but they were irrelevant in his estimation.
The modern American notion that a typical worker is “middle class” would have been absurd to Marx.
From what I have read of and about Marx, he was very good at observing and describing the current situation and the problems and instabilities inherent in the economic system of his time. He was very bad (or at least had a poor track record) of predicting future trends. IMHO it came down to him romanticizing the class structure, but that is neither here nor there.
So to answer the title (since I don’t think he ever made the prediction in the OP) I would use this guideline:
Was Marx right?:
[ul]
[li]Concerning factual analysis of contemporary or historical economics, probably.[/li][li]Concerning sweeping predictions of future trends, probably not.[/li][li]Concerning suggested solution for global issues, almost certainly not.[/li][/ul]
It’s difficult to pin down in an SDMB post all the things Karl Marx said, and the OP succeeds in actually sort of getting it wrong, so this is a hard questions to answer, because if you ask “did Marx get it right” the question is, get what right?
In general, no, he didn’t. Marx was not just saying “Hey, here’s a better way of organizing a society” - he was essentially redefining an examination of all of human history, redefining how human civilization should be viewed.
Marx’s central argument was that all of human history AND future was defined by struggle between classes; that all types of human organization were inevitably destroyed by that struggle; and that the followup to capitalism would be a dictatorship of the proletariat, followed by pure, struggle-free communism. It’s a very important distinction to make: Marx was not saying Communism should happen, he was saying that it WOULD happen, that it was absolutely inevitable. (He thought it should, too.)
So on his central thesis he was, obviously, quite wrong. We should have transitioned into pure communism a long time ago, had he been right, but he obviously was not; the dictatorship part came and went in a few places and now we’ve got a type of capitalism Marx assumed would never happen.
We could now get into a really, really long discussion of Marx’s examination of the Labour Theory of Value but that would be really boring. Suffice to say that Marx’s error with regards to his predictions for the future was, and is, a very common one; the assumption that whatever is happening right now will continue forever. At the time Marx wrote Das Kapital, class distinction damn well WAS the major organizing force of the day; it would be hard to explain to someone today just how much more class-based society was back then. Marx’s assumption was that that couldn’t go away, or even be ameliorated, through any method other than revolution; he was wrong.
Marx did have a lot of interesting observations, though; he was not an imbecile, he was not a Stalinist, and he wasn’t Fidel Castro. It’s been said that he is universally misunderstood by both Marxists and non-Marxists.
Marx’s most important contribution to thought, in my opinion, is the concept of historial materialism, which states (I am super duper ultra simplifying) that the course of human history is centrally determined by the fact that humans must produce and manipulate material goods to survive and succeed. That he got his predictions wrong doesn’t change the fact that historial materialsm was, at the time, actually quite an original idea, and provided some of the foundation for economics and a scientific examination of history.
I think **Strassia **and **RickJay **are on the money.
I would add that one item that I think it is forgotten often, capitalists were also aware of what Marx was saying and it is clear to me that even though many reformers were accused of being marxist (Roosevelt was accused of this) what they actually did was to make changes that minimized or removed the reasons that would had turn the predictions that Marx did into real ones.
IMHO my fear now is that many of those reforms are still being maligned and I see constant efforts to eliminate them, specially now that one of the reasons they were allowed to be is no longer around. There are no more examples of barely successful proletariat dictatorships (The USSR laughed out the depression, that was not ignored by many on the extreme left, what they ignored was the prize the USSR paid for that feat) what I see now that many Capitalists are not caring for the well being of the developed nations where they made their fortune, now they have the world to move about and setting shop in places that have less reforms in place that benefit workers.
Even so, I do not think Marx could have the last laugh, I do think that the reforms that many developed nations employed to prevent the fall of Capitalism will eventually be global in nature.
Was he right about shooting that elephant in his pajamas? And how DID the elephant get into his pajamas?
The Marx brothers (Chico Marx, Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx) and Karl Marx T-shirt saying:
Sure, I’m a Marxist!
From the abstract of a John Cassidy article on Marx:
For the full article (subscription required):
http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1997-10-20#folio=248
No, no, and again no.
Marx was not a determinist - he never said communism was inevitable. He said there was the potential for society to progress at any given point in history, but whether it did or not depended on the balance of class forces. It’s all rather neatly summed up right in the Communist Manifesto - written even before he started getting down to analyzing the system we live under in Capital - depending on who got the upper hand, society would either reconstitute itself on a revolutionary basis or end in the common ruin of the contending classes. This wasn’t just in the phase of proletariat vs. capitalist, but at any potential turning point in society - the culmination of slave vs. patrician at the end of the Roman Empire cast Europe into the Dark Ages, for instance.
Marx did predict the death of the middle classes, but what he meant by ‘middle class’ has been horribly perverted by a century of obtuse philosophy. What he meant by ‘middle class’ were those people who could make a living without having to hire mass quantities of human labor in order to make a profit - at the dawn of the capitalist era, the guildsmen and independent merchants who could make do on their own, or get by with a small handful of apprentices and journeymen to keep their business going.
As capitalism advanced and developed, however, the profits that could be realized from organizing production on a mass scale quickly outpaced the profits that could be made from a small workshop, and those producers who could not afford to expand went under and for the most part became workers themselves. (This in addition to throwing peasants off the common land, as was done in England, so as to deprive them of any independent means of income.) So, as Marx wrote in the Manifesto, the world increasingly became divided into those who needed to work for a living in order to eat, be housed, etc. and those who reaped the profits off of the labor of others organized on a mass scale. The middle classes, or petit bourgeoisie, became socially irrelevant over time. Instead, the term has been distorted to mean those who still have to work for a living but aren’t doing too shabby and have a lifestyle similar to those who used to be the actual middle class. In other words, it’s now come to mean how much you make at your job, and how much you can buy with your paycheck, rather than what the social nature of your job actually is. Which is an entirely un-Marxist concept. Because the world is now more than ever divided into those who must work to live and those who profit off the work of others, class distinctions have (whether we wish to acknowledge it or not) become sharper and more divisive than ever.
Marx was, through and through, a materialist. Which meant that he saw social change as coming from human action, and therefore only a potential, rather than from outside, and therefore inevitable (as if some spirit were moving us). While he did not see communism itself as inevitable, he did see the struggle against injustice and inequality as inevitable, simply because people getting the shit end of the stick under class society do have breaking points and will, sooner or later, start pushing back. Recent cases in point: Republic Doors and Windows. Greece.
“There is a Nobel Prize waiting for the economist who resurrects Marx and puts it all together in a coherent model,”
Good luck with that!
While I do think that the writer of the piece is into something I agree, I think now that Marx had the trouble of missing what psychologists have found recently of what motivates humans.
(This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink’s talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace.)
In a nutshel, it seems that socialism/communism would be understood and applied properly by well educated/wealthy white collar workers, and capitalism works well for (Or I think I should say, it is understood better by) blue collar workers that typically perform manual labor and earns an hourly wage.
No wonder all those “size fits all” solutions are bound to failure.
In a curious related item, I think it is interesting to notice that many critics of the American way say that there is defacto socialism for the well to do (Bailouts if you are too big to fail) and almost scrooge like deals to blue collar workers.
What did Marx have to say about engineers? After all, there was no ignoring their importance during the height of the Industrial Revolution. Marx had plenty to say about the people who owned the machines and about the people who worked the machines, but what about the people who designed the machines?
Well, Marxism predicts that the continual reinvention of the means of production would eventually destroy the petit bourgeoisie, degrading them from the middle class to the proletariat. I’m too lazy to find a quote, but it’s common knowledge.
Of course, the 19th century concept of the petit bourgeoisie isn’t an exact fit for the current concept of the middle classes, a term used somewhat carelessly. In this day and age, the definition of working class is “anybody who makes less than you”, the definition of middle class being “you, dear reader, as well as your lovely wife”. The “upper classes” are never mentioned, because using the term makes you sound like a freshman after a couple of bong hits and a sixpack of Bud Light.
Basically, Marx figured that the logic of capitalism required an ever greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich entrepreneurs who controlled companies and an ever increasing misery for the workers, whose wages would be held down at the minimum possible level. Basically, that we would all at some unspecified point in the future - it could be decades or it could be centuries - be either minimum wage workers or trust fund kids.
Now, I don’t know if Groucho’s distant and less funny relative was right - for the longest time, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction, at least in the West and Japan. Now, I’m not so sure. As long as the super-rich don’t completely control the media, the political system and the courts, things will probably be alright.
Ah, make fun of Karl all you want. He’s still funnier than Zeppo.
I can’t remember anything of Marx’s I’ve read off hand that would answer this. What I do know is that in reading economics/early political science/early sociological works from the 18th-19th centuries I’ve found that thinkers of that time all be ignored the existence of creativity and technological innovation as any sort of factor in the economy.
They mostly seemed to be stuck on the concept that all wealth came from the ground or grew in the ground, and everything was determined by the people who controlled the ground, the extraction of stuff from it, the refining of stuff that came out of it, or the growing and processing of stuff on the ground.
Namely, they had a good grip on the fact that someone who ran a steel mill was creating wealth because they were taking raw materials and turning it into a finished product. Not many people of that era seemed to recognize that the guy who made that process more efficient and ever more consistent was also creating wealth, that was just not seen as very important.
However looking backwards through history you’ll note that steel mills today are vastly more productive and efficient than the ones in the past. Those changes were because of the engineers and the value added of their contributions is obvious.
Olentzero: “depending on who got the upper hand, society would either reconstitute itself on a revolutionary basis or end in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
North American and European countries have not reconstituted themselves on a revolutionary basis. So they have ended in common ruin of the contending classes. They’re worse off then they were in the 19th century. Is this accurate?
As Olentzero points out, you’re using a thoroughly unMarxist conception of the “middle class”. You think of the “middle class” as working-class people who make good wages and have a decent living. But that’s not a Marxist definition.
According to Marx, to be middle class you must not be employed by someone else, nor do you employ large numbers of others. Instead you work for yourself, with perhaps a few assistants, family members, or apprentices. The canonical example is the small shopkeeper, who owns his own shop, but most of the work at his shop is done by himself.
This is contrasted to the proletarian, who owns nothing and therefore must work at whatever job he can find, and the capitalist, who owns the means of production and employs (and appropriates the excess value from) others.
Marx didn’t care that the middle class would eventually be proletarianized, because he thought the middle class was socially insignificant. Some might be upwardly mobile and enter the capitalist class, others might be proletarianized. But it didn’t matter, because the real power was held by the capitalists, by owning the means of production, and the proletariat, because they provided all the actual work.
It wasn’t like Marx was concerned that eventually in the far off future of 2010 factory workers would be paid crap wages by the ruthless factory owners. He could see in his own time that factory workers got paid starvation wages.
No. To be more specific, Marx is describing the possible outcomes when class struggle breaks out in the open. Which isn’t going on right now, though there are numerous smaller historical examples throughout the capitalist era, dating from the Chartists in the 1840s to the Greek strikes this year. As I noted previously, however, class struggle will break out on a much larger scale sooner or later because people can only take getting the shit end of the stick for so long. That is the point where either the revolutionary reconstitution or the common ruin becomes the potential result. The more organized and political the working class is at that point, the less likely the potential for common ruin.