Three Things Marx Got Wrong
1.) The rise of the Office Space class. Marx may have referred to this contingent of the Bourgeoisie as the "petty" Bourgeoisie. These were the managers, accountants, etc. who helped the Bourgeoisie manage their industrial peasants. They could be the strong arm or the "guy behind the scenes" doing the administrative work. Either way, this was a much smaller portion of the working population in the 19th century. Now, this class is the majority of the middle class and what comprises "business". Cubes are the new factories. This is probably the biggest miscalculation.
2.) The almost complete movement of mass production to the global East and South. Yes there is still a manufacturing/mining base in America and Europe but due to higher demands for living wages, benefits, and prices overall, much manufacturing is not able to remain in modern Westernized countries. Thus, it is shifted to cheaper countries that allow for low real wages (even relative to inflation), more tolerance for dangerous working conditions, and general work exploitation (longer working hours, no benefits, etc.). Where in the 19th century, industrialization in the East and South was very small and very large in Europe and America, by the 1980's it had shifted greatly.
3.) A democratization of science and technology- Where the benefits of technology were costly or non-existent in Marx's time, only to be afforded by a minority of people, the scope and scale of mass production has lowered the costs of advanced technologies to the point that many working class people can afford it. Thus no real restlessness is taking place as far as fairness to access to basic technology (healthcare aside).
What Marxism (or similar socialist views) may have gotten right- This is not necessarily Marxist, but in the same vein, it is difficult for people born to a certain class to get out of that class. Also, people in the lower income/standard of living stratums, in Westernized countries, tend not to go on austere lifestyle changes where they will spend little and save much of their income. This rarely happens- which is what many capitalist economic models would assume is the "rational" choice. People just don't lie down and play pauper very easily when they are surrounded by others who have access to desired resources. People do not want to live below a certain standard no matter what their current economic situation.
2.) The almost complete movement of mass production to the global East and South. Yes there is still a manufacturing/mining base in America and Europe but due to higher demands for living wages, benefits, and prices overall, much manufacturing is not able to remain in modern Westernized countries. Thus, it is shifted to cheaper countries that allow for low real wages (even relative to inflation), more tolerance for dangerous working conditions, and general work exploitation (longer working hours, no benefits, etc.). Where in the 19th century, industrialization in the East and South was very small and very large in Europe and America, by the 1980's it had shifted greatly.
3.) A democratization of science and technology- Where the benefits of technology were costly or non-existent in Marx's time, only to be afforded by a minority of people, the scope and scale of mass production has lowered the costs of advanced technologies to the point that many working class people can afford it. Thus no real restlessness is taking place as far as fairness to access to basic technology (healthcare aside).
What Marxism (or similar socialist views) may have gotten right- This is not necessarily Marxist, but in the same vein, it is difficult for people born to a certain class to get out of that class. Also, people in the lower income/standard of living stratums, in Westernized countries, tend not to go on austere lifestyle changes where they will spend little and save much of their income. This rarely happens- which is what many capitalist economic models would assume is the "rational" choice. People just don't lie down and play pauper very easily when they are surrounded by others who have access to desired resources. People do not want to live below a certain standard no matter what their current economic situation.
Comments (42)
Quoting schopenhauer1
Marx lived between 1818 and 1883. Office work was perhaps more skilled in his time, but clerks and bookkeepers were working class. They were not partners in business. When you think of office work in Marx's time, think of Bob Cratchit (A Christmas Carol)--as exploited and poorly treated as a factory worker, just not quite as dirty and injured as often. By the time of his death, the volume of business had expanded enough to require more types of paper and data processors.
During the 50 years between 1870 and 1920, industrial (and business) activity would expand greatly. More production, more production workers, more warehousing, more shipping, more sales -- all increasing the amount of clerical work. Some of the white collar work was "managerial" but not managerial enough to raise the worker into the petite bourgeois class. They were still working class (and still are).
Quoting schopenhauer1
The movement of of mass production to the global east and south required the advances in science, industry, production, and consumption that took place between 1920 and 1970. By 1970, the boom of the previous century was spent. The potential of the industrial had been fully exploited in all of the basic manufacturing areas, but in the production of information and entertainment technology as well.
Marx would have had to have been a very far-seeing prophet of the future to predict television, radio, computers, hundreds of millions of automobiles, the Autobahn or the Interstate Highway System, airplanes, and space travel.
He probably would have understood the movement of manufacturing from England, Europe, or North America to South America or Asia, were he alive now, but he probably couldn't predict it.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I think he would have understood this development especially well. The democratization of science and technology is an outgrowth of the manufacturing that put more knowledge and technology into the hands of working people. First, they used this technology on the job (computers, scientific equipment, etc.) and they could afford to buy it for use at home. If one watched all of the science programming on educational television (and some of it was even on the radio at one time) that one could find, and read general science magazines, in time one would become much more sophisticated about science and technology.
The bourgeoisie consists of large capitalists -- owners of factories, warehouses, office towers, rental buildings, railroads, banks, brokerages, and so on The petite bourgeoisie consists of small farmers that own their own land, small store owners, some professionals (lawyers, doctors, dentists), etc. and a few others. The difference between the bourgeois and the working class is that the bourgeoisie earns its income from the labor of others. The working class person is dependent on his ability to work to get paid. Working class people earn a wage; they are paid for time on the job. The bourgeoisie are paid by returns on investment.
Almost everyone is working class. The relatively small number of people who own high-value production properties are bourgeoisie.
You could be. Do you have a reason for the distinction?
Good point. Maybe categorizing the bulk of white collar work as "petite bourgeoisie" is incorrect. The working class makes a wage but not returns on investment, true. I guess the point is that are all these things a fatal blow to his ideas? Whether wage workers are not getting enough investments or not, if there is not enough agitation for the working class to feel exploited, then Marx was essentially wrong. What do people care if capital is owned by individuals or by the state if they have their basics met? The Democrats would say that with a tweaking of healthcare, and some other social programs, some of those basic needs can be expanded, but that's about as much sympathy as you're going to get in the American system. That doesn't change things structurally.
Marx's mature work (i.e. the Contribution, the Grundrisse, and Capital) gives us a different picture of what the "pauperization" of the proletariat will consist in. It's true that hard industry moved eastward, but that's not the only reason why there is now less industrial labor in the west. The major contributing factor -- and Marx saw this -- is the ever-increasing automation of industry, which allows the capitalist to extract ever larger sums of surplus value from every hour of labor.
One effect of this process is that, given the growth-structure of capitalism, it becomes impossible for capitalists to employ non-machine-mediated labor power save at exceedingly low wages (if, that is, they want to stay afloat). This is why we see the bulk of the ugly industrial work move over to the cheapest labor markets. (It should be noted, too, that Marx did predict the globalist stage in the development of capitalism; he just understood it strictly in terms of the need for new markets).
Another effect is that, as less and less of the labor process involves human beings at all, the worker is slowly pushed out of the equation altogether -- a trend which evidences itself in the slow expansion of what Marx calls the "industrial reserve army" (i.e. those members of the working class who are either unemployed or underemployed to the point that they cannot meet their basic needs). We've seen the growth of this group temporarily interrupted by the need for bureaucratic labor, but as automation spreads into this field, we'll see the soft labor jobs start to dissolve as well.
In his later work, at least, Marx's substantive prediction was not that the working class will become so irritated by distribution-side inequality that they'll revolt and install a worker's state. Rather, it was that technological development, on a long enough timeline, will progress to the point that less and less human labor is required in the process, and yet our ability to consume the goods produced thereby will still depend (because of the structure of the economy) on our ability to sell our labor power for wages -- a constraint on consumption which was once necessary to facilitate production, but will be, at that time, no longer so. The transition to a mode of production not organized around the exploitation of human labor will then follow as a matter of course. It will be obvious to the industrial reserve army what must be done (i.e. it will not take any political cajoling by mustache men with nationalist credos).
By the way, Marx did forecast that the average person would come in time to expect ("need") more and more from life (e.g. WiFi and smartphones, rather than bread and water), and saw this as a good thing. He also predicted the democratization of scientific knowledge. Here's a nice passage from the Grundrisse where he sums up some of these points. (Note that "the development of the productive powers of labor" refers here to the intensification of labor through the use of machines. This relates to the category of "relative surplus value" in Capital):
-Marx, Grundrisse, 324-25.
Traditional socialists like to stick with the three classes - working class (wage workers), middle class (professionals like doctors... and small business proprietors), and upper class (wealthy owners of the means of production -- factories, farms, mines, railroads, etc.) Almost no one sticks to this system.
The ruling class is till at the top (the wealthiest 5-10% of the population, at most). Most people think they are middle class, which now describes the consumption behavior of maybe 50%-60% of the population: They own or are buying a home; they have at least 1 car; both partners in a couple are working; about a third of this group is college educated. They have white collar or service jobs such as teaching. Many of the "middle class" work in businesses. Almost all of this so-called middle class depends on at least 2 regular wage jobs for income. The working class, which most people don't want to think of themselves as, occupy the bottom of the economic distribution, and the term describes their consumption behavior too: it's fairly restricted because they don't make much income at their jobs.
Personally, I think people call themselves "middle class" as a face-saving maneuver. They are not poor, but they do not have much security. They usually have quite a bit of debt. They often have little decision making authority at work, and their wages are inadequate to support the lifestyle they aspire to (which as far as I can tell, is often fairly modest).
The working class that thinks they are middle class really started to slip beginning after 1973 (the year of the Arab oil boycott). The boycott didn't cause--it just marked the beginning--of the economic decline we have seen, like the enormous transfer of low-cost manufacturing to Asia; the decline in workers incomes and actual purchasing power; the high rate of automation in factories and offices; and so on. Why has consumer debt gone up so much? Because people are trying to maintain a certain quality of life with credit.
For the people on the bottom, life is much less pleasant.
I kinda feel like this is focused on European countries + USA. If you widen the scope of your evidence, which Marxist analysis would require given its global perspective (due to capital's global aims), then I'd say you're off the mark. The office space class rose in industrial nations which exploit 3rd world nations -- but that doesn't mean the proletariat has been annihilated, only broadened (as one would predict from the global nature of capital).
2 fits into my reply above. Capital is global, and the proletariat is a global class, not a national one. Communism, at least, is anti-nationalist. Marxism can be pro-nationalist in various circumstances, but the end-goal qua Marx is the elimination of nations. Even where nations exist, the proletariat is international regardless.
3 is questionable. if you mean that people lower on the rung of income in the United States can afford DVD players, then sure. But that's not really a strike against Marx, I'd say. Who gives a fuck about DVD players vs. healthcare, for instance? As you mention... I am most sure that the majority of people would be happy to trade in their Sony-whatever for regular and reliable healtchare when needed. Basic needs trump luxury goods -- and all capital has to offer are luxury goods, because this is what generates profits.
I'm not against luxury, by any means., but it's just silly to say that Marx got this wrong. It ignores the international character of communism, and it ignores why lower-class peeps in rich countries would buy luxury goods (both socially speaking, i.e. capital, and personally speaking, i.e. looking for a reason to live)
How do you see that actually playing out in our modern economic system? If anything, the post-WWII social safety nets would prevent people from moving to a system that depends on something besides working for a wage. They allow for some sustainability while looking for more wage work rather than complete destitution and seeking radicalism. These social safety nets were missing in 19th century Europe. It acts as a release mechanism to allow for the general system to be sustained without people clamoring for drastic shifts to new modes of economic production- let alone any full scale commie revolution.
Also, from what I've stated before, the new wage work is white collar jobs- office spaces. It's programming software, managing financial widgets, operational administrative work, health care, sales, social services, and the rest. Some blue collar work will always remain- construction (prefabrication or on site), plumbers, electricians, etc. are needed. Don't forget the more technical jobs- lawyers, doctors, engineers, researchers, scientists. These are all wage earners of varying degrees of wage- most being considered "working class" or "lower middle class". I don't see these being phased out any time soon. Wage work does not seem to go away, no matter how many futuristic articles come out. The jobs may shift to work from home, but that is more setting and cosmetic changes. If anything the Silicon Valleys and Office Space workforce proves the long term viability of wage work and even possible worse exploitation- hustling for odd jobs (i.e. Uber, online one-off jobs).
What might change in the future is pseudo-entrepreneurship - Air BNB, Uber, etc. Companies that allow for flexibility in time management. This would also slow any radical changes if more service work switches to this mode.
What would your ideal socialist society look like? You have to take into account certain aspects of human tendencies. Studies have been done saying people generally prefer equitability in the abstract, but closer studies reveal that people care more about fairness, competition, and reward. Thus, people like to know they get rewarded with such and such compensation for being "better" at their job than the next guy. They like competing and then being rewarded for their accomplishments. Would a full communist society foster this? I am not sure, but we know that the capitalist one does. Promotion, rank, opportunities to move up and get more seem to be something that motivate people. It may fall in line with Aristotle's ideas that man is a political animal. Political not just in governance over the state, but over work and other activities involving coordinated social interaction.
The Office Space society won't be starting revolutions any time soon. Even if the industrial cheap labor has moved to the East and South, Marx's communism was to be successful in the most industrialized of countries, which really never transpired anywhere and does not look to be happening anytime soon in America or Europe- the most industrial of industrialized regions. If anything, Russia and China set themselves back according to Marxian theory because they never fully developed into highly industrialized countries FIRST but jumped the gun due to contingent historical circumstances. As history has shown, Russia ditched its communism for oligarchic capitalism- just office space culture with little room for free markets. China has essentially been state run capitalism since the late 70s. In due time, if history bears out, China will also be a mainly Office Space nation, though where the cheap industrial base will move to next might be something that prevents this from fully happening. The West moved it East and South. Where are they going to shift it to?
Yes. He wrote lots of other things, and it's a very varied body of work. The Communist Manifesto is a political pamphlet written at a very specific time for specific practical purposes.
There's some work on "Young Marx" as opposed to "Mature Marx". The author I read on this simply states there's no such things as "Marxism" as a finished theory with real world application. There is a body of thought and ideas of course.
According to him, at some point Marx abandoned the idea that the communist revolution was to happen in an industrialised country. He also abandoned the idea of revolution in the violent/distorting sense but more of a "coming about". Unfortunately, despite a few attempts at Das Kapital I never finished that and my knowledge of Marx is spotty at best. I just thought it might be interesting to be aware there's a lot of positions that are associated with Marx that he has at some point seem to have abandoned (at least, according to this particular book). I can look up the author if you're interested.
It seems to me that the Frankfurt School, and the New Left that was inspired by them, are quite current right now. In the US they're getting the blame for the bugbear of "Cultural Marxism" by the Right. This is certainly an exaggeration and caricature, but I think they did have a big influence on the development of the American Left. The rejection of class politics in favour of identity politics, the critique of consumer culture and Western culture in general, and the suspicion of free speech, can, it can be argued, be traced back to the Frankfurt School and Marcuse especially.
[quote=Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance]The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and 'philosophies' can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the 'marketplace of ideas' is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the 'end of ideology', the false consciousness has become the general consciousness--from the government down to its last objects. The small and powerless minorities which struggle against the false consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped: their continued existence is more important than the preservation of abused rights and liberties which grant constitutional powers to those who oppress these minorities. It should be evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don't have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise, and that liberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.[/quote]
It reads like a founding document for the identity politics and political correctness now common in the American universities.
The reason for the distinction is that Marxism is not a political ideal, as most people believe, but a process of dialectical materialism. Marx himself was ambivalent overall about many things in the process, and mostly left the more pragmatic details of communist theory to Engels.
But Marx did manage to make a short concise statement in the manifesto. These days, it's about as much as anyone wants to read except in reply to their own thought, so that's became substituted in the mass mind as 'Marxism.'
Marx also contradicted himself on virtually everything at one point or another, so if you are really determined, you can almost invariably find a Marx quote somewhere to prove he thought anything you want, as long as you keep the extent of you statement about Marx thought somewhere around the length of a Tweet. This would be my own explanation of his widespread fame, whether people want to say he is right or wrong, whatever you want. there'll be a Tweetable comment on it.
Unfortunately this is more than 140 characters:
[quote=Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts]The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.[/quote]
In fact this does neatly encapsulate what I like about Marx.
Thereby instantly curing my nascent interest.....
I got this summary from the Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-Dimensional_Man
What a hyperbole, lol. I did meet a feminist psychoanalyst who used Marcuse t6 argue for the ontological power of men over women, other than that I never heard him seriously discussed, but then I am one of those fringe people who only enjoys mainstream philosophers now. When I was a teenager I might have been drunkenly singing something like Marcuse from the top of the mast of my sinking sailboat in a French harbor, but that was a long time ago.
Both @jamalrob and @Benkei have anticipated what I would say in response. It's a varied body of work. So while Marx is wrong about x, y, and z when we interpret it as a, b, or c, I don't think it's damning of Marx's body of work. (I'd note that insofar that we read Marx like this then I'd agree with anyone who believes it to be false, too)
Also Marxism is broader than Marx too -- you can't just ignore the various revolutions which put the theoretical ideas into practice. Consider the Theses on Feurbach (it's short! no worries :D ) -- I'd say it points that the practical, in-the-world action is just as if not more important than the understanding of ideas.
It's the document where the famous statement of Marx's comes from:
Anyway, I'd say that Marx's work predicts the way capital moved and has moved up to today -- by global expansion. I don't think that nationalist petit bourgeois people are objectively motivated to enact communist revolution. I'm not arguing that point. Only that what you cite as things against Marxism could also reasonably be read as predictions of Marxism, given the characterization of capital.
Certainly, there are differences in Marx theory over time. Even so, the inevitability of an end communist state did not occur nor does it seem it will ever happen, and I just gave some ideas of why it does not even look possible in the near future, baring a post-apocalyptic scenario, in which case who knows what that might look like.
I think my reply to Jamalrob applies here as well:
Certainly, there are differences in Marx theory over time. Even so, the inevitability of an end communist state did not occur nor does it seem it will ever happen, and I just gave some ideas of why it does not even look possible in the near future, baring a post-apocalyptic scenario, in which case who knows what that might look like
So you think that based on these movements of capital to global East and West, and mechanization of production will produce some sort of communist state- one described by Marx in whichever stage of his writing you prefer to draw from? I think you indicated it would not. I am not saying he was completely wrong which I also indicated in the last part of the OP. I just think there were things that he did not consider would happen. Perhaps he did predict more than I thought, but certainly what he thought- even if predicted, did not lead to what he thought would happen as a result.
Quoting Moliere
I do not consider the Soviet Union or China a successful example of Marxism, Communism, or the like. I see it as dictators and or cadres of dictators (politburo, etc.) taking control of a country and running it like a police state and then easing up on restrictions when it became economically necessary to allow for more free trade elements and accumulation of wealth. It was all top down. Dictatorship of the Proletariat not being a metaphor but literally a dictatorship. People "needed" to programmed to be Marxist through gulags, workforce programs, and stifling of free speech. If man was supposed to be free and self-actualized because they weren't exploited or worried about accumulation of wealth, that never really worked out. They may not have accumulated much wealth, bu they were certainly exploited by whatever the state mechanisms dictated to them. There was never a good way to implement the transition of the modes of production and accumulation of wealth without mass death and total control of people's movements and lives. More democratic socialism is just capitalism with safety nets. I do not think that as Marxist or Communist.
I think that capital moving from the west to the east is a reasonable prediction of Marx's work, yes. The production of a communist state, no. I don't believe in historical necessity, and certainly not one which will produce communism. I see it as a possibility, but not a necessity resulting from capital.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I do. I'd say that both the Soviet Union and China, along with other states, are reasonable end-points for Marxist thought. I'd highlight here that I don't believe they are necessary, but they fit the program.
They weren't utopian communist societies, but they were reasonable extrapolations of Marxist thought. And they accomplished good things as well as bad, just like most states. Literal dictatorship isn't opposed to Marxist thought -- the seeds for authoritarian politics are certainly in even Marx's work. You don't need to follow him on these points in your own political practice, but that doesn't mean that the Soviet Union or China weren't actual or real examples of Marxist politics, either. They certainly were.
And you can even judge just how good Marxist thought is or isn't based upon what they brought to the world.
I wouldn't believe the depictions of the Soviet Union casually on offer. They tend to highlight what is evil, because it's propaganda. The Soviet Union, and other communist states, do this to the west as well. They create propaganda which focuses on our evils to persuade others that their state is the better one.
But in reality, it was a mixed bag, just like western Democracy. Both good and evil.
I value what are often termed "bourgeois freedoms", such as freedom of speech, if not property. So I suppose I would just say that Marxism has this double-edge to it -- it strives for liberation, but there are authoritarian seeds in the thought as well. And, if one is not libertarian in their orientation, then these wouldn't even be seen as a negative. But if we are, then perhaps we should view Marxism in a partially negative light after all. Not one born out of ignorance of this possibility for greater liberty in Marxist thought, but rather out of familiarity and reflection -- being able to qualify which aspect of Marxist thought is preferable and which isn't.
Also, while I do not like authoritarian politics, I will say that the reason they work is because people are more comfortable with authority than they'd like to admit. People express the desire for liberty, but authoritarian tactics work to organize people precisely because they bring comfort and stability. There's something about us, as humans, that is susceptible to this way of doing things. I'm not sure what, precisely. But this is just to say that even if Marxism is authoritarian, this isn't something that qualifies it as particularly evil. Authoritarian tactics are used the world over, regardless of ideology.
Yes, that is very much what appealed to me. I have read parts of it over the years, also Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectics of Enlightenment and Horkheimer's The Eclipse of Reason. The problem to me is the underlying materialism of their worldview. It has to be that way, because there's no way they could go back, so to speak, and resurrect (sorry for the irony) elements of the Christian worldview. So ultimately, humans are simply social animals and/or natural phenomena. I don't think any of the principals of the New Left had any kind of affinity for the mystical, with the possible exception of Eric Fromm:
Eric Fromm with D T Suzuki, (whilst engaged in writing Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis.)
The New Left is more or less the death of the religious myth (at least until is reforms in the illusion that practicing identity politics creates utopia), be it the traditional notion of God as saviour, notions of the technological, Communist utopia or the classical liberal myth of the free man. It turns attention to description of society and it relationship to our understanding of individuals.
Metaphysics turns from the constraint which defines us, to an expression of the world itself, where logical significance is a being of every state itself. Identity is recognised as hyperreal-- for any given state, there is no "original" which defines its meaning. Every atom, rock, very speck of dirt, every person, even experience, is its own. No matter how similar any states might be, they are all unique. "Final cause," essentialism, "human nature" are gradually abandoned (some contexts take longer than others, depending on the particular mythical prejudices of a thinker) in an understanding that meaning is an expression of the world itself.
It's also why The New Left inspires a lot of consternation amongst various people-- they literally tell there is no world to make perfect. In taking description seriously, they reveal all the stories of ideological salvation are false.
The problem you have is that Marxist theory did not predict what would happen after communism raised the standard of living of the proletariat to such an extent that the class no longer exists. According to the classical definition in the time of Marx, the proletariat is too poor to change its own status and too uneducated to read and write.
The real problem with Marxist theory of social evolution is that it succeeded at a rate beyond the wildest dreams of its original proponents. So they did not state what should happen AFTER the proletariat elevated itself, which has been, in lack of other better theory, a cycling backwards in political evolution, rather than an evolution to the kind of minimal state proposed by Nozick, which arrived on the scene rather too late to make a difference.
Meanwhile, the old bastions of capitalism are rapidly regressing, as evidenced for example that one third of all Americans now believe Trump was stating undisputable fact when he claimed that Clinton was a criminal and that Obama wiretapped his phones, because they do not have the discretion to recognize that Trump is exactly the kind of con-artist that Marx was warning against. So the descent into military totalitarianism continues in all but name.
Didn't Marx say that it was through the bourgeoisie that the proletariat would ascend? Not that the bourgeoisie would do this as a favor to the proles. Rather, by working in the organizations put together by the bourgeoisie (factories, offices, banks, etc.) the proletariat would acquire the skills needed to manage society themselves, and in throwing off the yoke of the bourgeoisie would acquire the means to raise their standard of living.
Communism comes after the proletariat is ready (through inadvertent preparation by the bourgeoisie) to seize the means of production--to dispossess the dispossessors. The proles were not ready to throw off the yoke of the bourgeoisie in Russia -- there was hardly such classes yet in czarist Russia. China wasn't a mature capitalist state either, and as in the case of Russia, communism was installed at the point of a gun.
Nowhere has the working class -- proles -- completed the process of acquiring the level of skills needed to run society, though in Europe and North America, and in several other locations, they are getting significantly closer. (remember, "worker" includes managers who are just hired hands.) Many workers engage in many of the complex tasks of management.
Exactly. China and the Soviet Union were not communist at all. The USSR was essentially a state-owned capitalist economy. There was one owner: the state. Everybody worked for the state. This might have been tolerable had it not been for Stalin who shared the Nobel Prize for nastiness with Adolf Hitler. After Stalin finally died in 1953, things gradually loosened up a bit. At least there weren't any more extensive purges and mass deportations to Siberia.
China was operated as a state owned corporation too, except there were some rather wild swings in policy--like the Cultural Revolution and the disastrous Great Leap Forward. After that they decided that getting rich was glorious. Now you have a mostly capitalist country under tight control by the "communist" party, with the party being one of the most aggressive firms.
Both the USSR and China did manage, at times, to put together a half-ways stable society where life could go on normally without radical disruption. But these were episodes, not the rule.
In time, workers in China and Russia may be in a position to develop the skills needed to manage society, to expropriate the expropriators, but it won't be soon. Both countries have significant problems (quite different ones) to overcome.
That's not entirely fair. Many of those now running the Chinese Communist party and some of the Russian oil oligarchs can cite extremely poor families in the past. And there is limited space at the top, so it only takes the fact that a clear number have succeeded in doing that to demonstrate that the communist regimes far exceeded the original expectations, and had served their purpose in elevating national well being to the level where people can now choose their own lives, and moreover, can read and write better to higher levels than countries with a purely capitalist past now demonstrate. And more recently, Russia and China's economic growth has far outstripped that of the USA for decades.
I'll grant that under the CCP, GDP has been high (it had to be high to maintain social goals and stability) and in the many businesses spawned in China, lots of more or less bourgeois operations are teaching people how to operate a complex society. That's all to the good.
But Russian Oil Oligarchs? They are mostly just plain liars, thieves, swindlers, and scoundrels. I don't care how humble their origins were.
I wouldn't call Russia a healthy state, yet anyway. It's GDP growth hasn't been super. It's rate of population growth was very poor -- even negative -- for a time. I'm all for less than ZPG, but Russia's population was doing poorly because of a case of collective depression, alcoholism, anomie, economic stagnation (or shrinkage), and so forth--following the collapse of the USSR. That's now 27 years in the past, and sure, they are recovering. I wish them well.
This is true. The US economy and society completed what in retrospect was a century long cycle in 1970. We had tremendous growth in population, output, innovation, invention, development, etc. between 1870 and 1920, and then a reprise of growth, but with mature technologies from 1920 to 1970. From 1970 to the present, we have seen all sorts of changes in the economy -- particularly the shift of mass-production from our country to places like China.
One of the reasons we stopped growing (more than our piddling 2%) was that all of the growth gains that could be extracted from the technological innovations of the previous century had been extracted. Steam power, gasoline power, electrical power, atomic power, telephone, radio, television, computers, automation, aviation, infrastructure construction, etc. were done. Certainly there were innovations: the smartphone, the personal computer, the internet, the microwave, and all that. But these were not huge-industry spawning innovations like railroads in 1890, telephone and telegraph, and electrical generation; like autos were in 1920, or television was in 1950, or aviation. Nothing like them has appeared in the last 50 years. And, many analysts think, won't in the foreseeable future, either.
So we are going to be surpassed in growth by other nations: China, hopefully India (for their sake), Africa, and maybe Russia. They have a lot of catching up to do -- lots of growth potential.
(Just to wet blanket all this, Some countries will see delightful growth, unless climate change creates so many problems that everybody will be racing to stay afloat economically, let alone soar.)
Right. But that's ONLY true if you interpret 'growth' as the American rich and power mongers want you to define it. What America COULD have done was expand its idealism by accepting more other nations as states, and export education and science instead of weapons and war.
Last month a Russian company demonstrated a giant 3D printer that can extrude concrete to make an entire 4-room house in <24 hours, at a cost of total $10,000. Estimated lifespan of the house is >150 years, and all it needs is a coat of paint. They are using the in Siberia now.
If the USA did that, it would still be growing. But it was more to benefit of the USA's own oil oligarchs, such as the Bush family for example, to sell and export war, which only diminishes growth. So everyone turns a blind eye to Venezuela now, it hardly even gets mentioned in the news, when in the 1960s they were even asking if it could become another state in the USA. But no, the USA oil drew the lines instead. Not even Puerto Rico managed to cross that line.
I agree with you 110% that the American oligarchy has a wretched record in just about every respect. They are, as far as I am concerned, scum, filth, and dirt. So, you won't get any argument from me about how bad they are.
I wasn't aware that Venezuela was interested in joining the union as a state.
While I am impressed by a concrete extruder that can 'print' a 4 room house in 24 hours, I'm not sure how much of an advantage such a device is. Whatever has been keeping 4 room concrete houses from being built isn't the lack of a 3D printer. Still, if the printer can do it and in the process use less energy, less material, and still produce a strong wall, that is a worthwhile advance.
Just an aside, did you know the world may have passed "peak sand"? [Quelles horreurs!] The kind of sand that is required to make excellent concrete isn't all that common, and zillions of tons of it have already been dug up and used. Most sand doesn't work well in concrete--the particles are either too big, too small, are laced with salt, or have some other problem. So, maybe the concrete extruder solves that problem in some way.
Now, getting back to growth.
Quoting ernestm
Whether we exported education and science or weapons of war wouldn't have made any difference in the analysis I was drawing from. (It would have made all the difference in the world MORALLY.) All the industrialized nations experienced a tremendous boost from steam power, railroads, internal combustion, electrical generation, lighting, radio, telecommunication, airplanes, and so on. They all followed a similar trajectory of benefits, and eventually, diminishing returns (in terms of economic growth).
What we (and others) didn't do was distribute these good technologies to less developed economies. East Africa, for instance (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania...) had very little telephone service in 1995, especially outside of a handful of large cities (like Nairobi), and most people in the cities didn't have telephone service either. The arrival of the cell phone (relatively inexpensive and needing radio transmission towers rather than extensive wiring) solved that problem, but that wasn't America's doing, for the most part. Africans developed sophisticated services for the (now primitive) hand sets they were holding--like financial services, crop price information, and (of course) just plain communication.
Solar panels are bringing electricity, and some electrical devices, to places that were using kerosine lamps in 1995. That means children, for instance, can read in the evening, or curl up next to the radio and list to the BBC World Service. Again, that wasn't our doing.
Mostly what some countries like Nigeria or Venezuela got was oil drilling and oil pumping technology which didn't help them all that much. The people there are mostly getting ripped off by everybody (locals and outsiders) in a position to do so.
http://quillette.com/2017/04/20/crucible-application-process/
And the applicant woefully misunderstood the level of cynicism such a hyperbolic statement would cause in the ivory towers, which first is totally disinterested in pathos as a mode of rhetorical persuasion in academics; and secondly, and for more significantly, maintains a profound objection to the USA's consideration of money as some absolute gauge and method to fix all woes. Just because society places a fiscal value now on the commodities you cite does not imply that they necessarily have any greater fiscal value on the services I cite. Consider for example, what would have happened in history Ford automobiles not changed the entire nation to believe that factory work to make travel easier was the way to go forward. In alternative history lines, cars could have been considered nothing more than a necessary evil, and had it been discovered how to make plastics from corn before they were made from oil refinement, we would be surrounded by crop fields and canalboats instead of roads And maybe Europe would even never have let the railroad companies buy up all the canal locks then fill them with concrete to render them unusable, which started the whole modern race to force all alternatives to the current preferred mode of transport into oblivion by buying the patents and burying them. .
So maybe that's just because I was cursed with an international education. But on this issue, I really do have to side with the British. Academically speaking, that is.
I don't know -- are Americans really any more pre-programmed to think about value in fiscal terms than others? Thinking in fiscal terms about value isn't second nature to me. My moral compass was pre- and re- programmed by Christian (both Protestant and Catholic) theology, even if I am no longer a paid up subscriber to its formal creed.
Yes, Ford really was a watershed. I just started reading a book about Janesville, Wisconsin and the closure of the GM assembly plant there--it operated from around 1920 to 2010. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan grew up in, and represents, Janesville as part of his district. In the late '60s the plant was given the honor of making the auto that would bring GM's total up to 100 million -- and that's just GM. Ford, American Motors, Chrysler, Studebaker, and Packard add how many million more.
It would be very difficult to over-estimate the social, moral, psychological, demographic, geographic, and economic consequences of the automobile industry. We did have an alternative to the 300 million+, more than the 1-car-per-person, approach. Pretty good Intra-urban, inter-urban, and trans-continental ground transportation was in place at the time the auto industry was hatched and reared. This is all familiar news.
Well... I have a big medical appointment in 2 hours and all sorts of things to do before I leave, that I should have been doing now, but this is more interesting.