And I wouldn’t say Marx didn’t care about society or people in it; his entire goal was to explain capitalism so that working people could figure out how to fight against it and ultimately overthrow it. To the extent that he saw classes that formerly enjoyed a fairly privileged status as no longer socially relevant and incapable of pushing society further in a revolutionary direction, yes, his only concern with the middle classes were their historical origins and their historical demise. But his arguments are for all workers, regardless of whether they’re born into the class or they ended up down there because they lost their previous social status.
No. First of all the middle class is not dying, it has suffered due to the recession but consider that will recovered from all previous economic crisis. Indeed since Marx’s time the middle class both numerically and proportionally have grown massively.
I would subtly re-do the OP and ask the question…did Mark et al get ANYTHING right? I’m biased, obviously, so I can’t think of anything. I’d be interested in seeing someone with perhaps the bias in the other direction come up with a list of things he and the other early Communist thinkers were on target with.
(Obviously, my answer to the OP is ‘no’…he didn’t get it right).
-XT
With due respect, you cannot “note” this. You can predict it, or claim it, but you can’t honestly state it as if it is a proven fact.
As it hasn’t happened for a century and a half, I remain skeptical.
So, we’re screwed then.
Not really. In the United States in my lifetime, the truly small business/family shop seems to have been in a constant state of instability & loss. Not that there aren’t entrants all the time, but a petit-bourgeois status is hard to maintain in the post-1970 economy.
Now, middle income earners are still important, despite the attitudes of weirdo politicians like Rand Paul. But that’s not the middle class as such. An indentured servant paid $200 000 a year would still be an indentured servant.
nm
Throw in a parking spot and some stock options and…well, where do I sign up??
-XT
Any day now… any day.
I don’t know tons about it, but my impression were his predictions revolved around how society naturally consisted of the haves and have nots, and that after enough abuse the have nots would rise up against the haves.
I believe Marx also wrote about how the levers of power (politics, religion, military, media, etc) are co-opted by the haves to encourage the have nots to be obedient. Dictators declare themselves gods so religious follwers won’t disobey them, books that make a dictator look bad are banned, the military suppresses dissent, etc. Even today you can arguably see that. Politicians are to the right of the public when it comes to economic issues as an example.
I have no idea how he accounted for human history which was chock full of those exact abuses w/o anyone really rising up. Then again, I could be wrong about what marx stood for.
If anything the middle class is what killed marxism (as I understand marxism). One of the benefits of a strong labor union is that non-unionized employers are forced to give better wages and perks to their employees so that they will not form a union. A middle class is arguably just a way for people to get a higher standard of living w/o turning to communism.
So the creation of a middle class is what placated the proletariat enough to abandon a proletariat revolution and marxism the same way employers offering higher wages and better benefits is what causes their employees to not form a union.
Now that the middle class is dying (education is becoming unaffordable, health care unreliable, jobs scarce, wages decline as expenses go up, etc) who knows.
You need to go back and re-read some US and world history. There have been plenty of instances of the outbreak of class struggle since Marx sat down and wrote the Manifesto and Capital. In roughly chronological order:
[ul]
[li]The Paris Commune (France, 1871)[/li][li]The Great Railroad Strike (US, 1877)[/li][li]The Pullman Strike (US, 1894)[/li][li]1905 (Russia)[/li][li]The Russian Revolution, 1917 - followed by a wave of revolts across Europe, and an (unfortunately) near-revolution in Germany[/li][li]The Seattle general strike, 1919[/li][li]Strikes like the Teamsters in Minneapolis (1934) and GM in Flint (1936-37)[/li][li]The anti-war movement, and radical or revolutionary activity in US unions in the 1960s and 1970s[/li][li]Europe in 1968[/li][li]Chile, 1973[/li][li]Portugal, 1974[/li][li]Iran, 1979[/li][li]Poland, 1980[/li][li]Greece, 2010[/li][/ul]
And this is just off the top of my head. Your skepticism, based as it is in ignorance, is ill-founded.
Wesley Clark: People did rise up. Repeatedly. We can go as far back as Rome and the Spartacist rebellion, and that was hardly the first example. Marx accounted for that, pretty much by saying the history of all societies up to now is the history of class struggle.
So? Look around you. Neither has happened – not in any country where a Communist revolution happened (unless you think Stalinism counts as reconstitution of a society “on a revolutionary basis”), nor in any country where it didn’t.
Thanks for reading my later responses to just that very objection from MichaelEMouse, BG.
Well, Marx was perhaps the first systematic thinker to identify, correctly, technological change as a causal factor in all other forms of historical change. Which seems a commonplace now, hardly worth mentioning; but so does practically every then-schocking thing Voltaire said.
OTOH, the history of any long-lived society also includes many periods, decades or centuries in length, free of any visible sign of class struggle. So how can it be true that “the history of all societies up to now is the history of class struggle”?
But that isn’t what you just said. What you said was that class struggle would break out on an even LARGER scale. By “larger” I assume you meant “even more large than has previously occurred.”
What Marx predicted - that class struggle would result in an overturning of the existing social order, with a transition into communism - has not happened. What has happened is, in fact, something he did not predict would happen; occasional localized revolutions, followed by dictatorships of the proletariat, which then die off due to their own weakness and are replaced by more liberal democracies with capitalism, or not-very-liberal places with capitalism.
150 years now. Still waiting for the big communist upheaval. We’ll always be waiting, I suspect. Neither you or I will ever see it happen. Our grandchildren won’t see it happen. It’s not happening. It’s long, long past time to accept that Marx did not accurately predict the future.
Move the goalposts all you want; call things like Greece and the Pullman strike “revolutions,” and accuse Scotsmen of not being Scotsmen. Communism hasn’t happened; it flared up, became all about the dictatorship and not at all about the proletarians, and died. The world’s no more Communist now than it was in 1850 and there is no sign it’s about to get really Communist. It’s way, way part the time when people should have come to terms with these facts.
The funny thing is that this obsession over Communism shields Marx’s work from serious analysis, because he did have interesting things to say aside from his erroneous prognostications, and had a major role in shaping political thought.
(And characterizing what’s happening in Greece - people rioting over their unaffordable government benefits - as a revolution is rather hopelessly premature.)
Because that is how society changes. Every society has been marked at one time or another by class struggles, from the slave uprisings in Rome and Egypt to the numberless peasant uprisings under feudalism and the Renaissance, to the bourgeois revolutions in Europe of the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s, and the workers’ struggles under capitalism. As you said, it’s not always at the level of barricades in the streets, but as long as there have been classes in society, there has been struggle between them.
Marx didn’t predict a thing. What he did was analyze how previous societies changed, and tried to identify the agent for further socioeconomic and political change as capitalism was developing. Again, his statement about either a revolutionary reconstitution of society or the common ruin of the contending classes is a clear argument that a revolutionary outcome is by no means inevitable. He made no statements about when or how quickly. Given the fact that Egyptian society lasted for millennia and Roman society lasted for over a thousand years, Marx knew better than to try to put a time limit on capitalism’s existence. All he argued was for the necessity of capitalism’s overthrow and which class was best suited to do it.
And why should I accept that you can? Because that’s what you’re doing, with a lot less serious analysis supporting you than Marx had.
Didn’t call 'em that. They’re examples of the class struggle, each of which in their time were larger and sharper than what went before. Seeing as how capitalism can’t keep itself out of crisis, there is a strong likelihood that we will see something like that again, even larger and sharper.
Go back and show me where I did. Matter of fact I explicitly said in that post that everything I listed was examples of the outbreak of class struggle - not a revolution. Every revolution is class struggle, but not every incidence of class struggle is a revolution. I doubt that’ll dissuade you from putting words in my mouth, but clarity is always worth the effort.
Problem is you cannot separate Marx’ economic analysis from his political arguments. Marx analyzed capitalism specifically as a logical foundation for his arguments of the necessity of its overthrow by the working class. And it’s pretty ridiculous to point to an ‘obsession over Communism’ as being the problem when Marx himself firmly embraced the idea - to the point where his first major work had the word in the title and had a chapter on its goals and aims.
I wonder what he would say about our modern information age knowledge based economy. Where people like Mark Zukkerburg can become billionares by creating companies that produce no physical product but nevertheless create value.
And what of the role of the entrepreneur in Marx’s philosophy?
I believe Marx had great respect for captains of industry, if that is who you mean by “the entrepreneur.”
But what does this actually tell us? After all, every one of those societies were also marked by non-class struggles as well. In fact, I’d say that the non-class struggles outnumbered the class struggles in most cases. And there were plenty of inter-class struggles as well in all of those.
So, to me, this indicates that human beings are predisposed to struggle about something, and that ‘class struggle’ is just one of many things we struggle over.
So, what you seem to be saying here is that Marx couldn’t be nailed down on any specific time frame, simply that capitalism would have an inevitable breakdown and be supplanted by communism…sometime in the next thousand or so years?
To me this sounds like the same logic used by Christians to predict the second coming of Jesus sometime in the future. What good are nebulous predictions that could stretch out so far into the future?
At least he’s making a solid prediction, instead of some nebulous psudo-prediction that eventually capitalism will fail and communism will take over. Considering that I know of no serious economics expert who is predicting today that capitalism is on the cusp of collapse and that we’re likely to see a rise in communism (from the ash heap of history, to use a catchy phrase), I’d say that Rick’s analysis is closer to reality than Karl’s…and better supported by the facts.
It’s likely we will see more crisis and struggle in the future. Of course, since that seems to be our nature, I’d say that this is a no brainer. Periodically humans and human societies (regardless of the type) have periods of strife, conflict and struggle. I’m sure that all the old broken communist countries of the last century are examples of no one being Scottish, but they had plenty of struggle and strife as well.
-XT