Did Marx underestimate the power of the middle class ?

[limpyhobbler]

So I was just thinking how important the middle class has been in protecting capitalism.

My idea of Marx has been that he thought capitalism would lead to a polarization of society where most people belonged to the Proletariat and they would eventually take over from the capitalist Bourgeoisie.

But countries like the US and UK instead saw the development of highly stratified societies with large middle classes. The middle class included administrators and protection for the state and the capitalists. But also capitalists made some limited accommodation with parts of the working class to blunt more radical proletarian impulses. So in the mid 20th century the middle class included industrial workers like coal miners, steel workers, auto workers, etc.

In other times and places the middle class has played a pivotal role in stamping out proletarian movements all together, and enabled the rise of fascism or nationalist militarism.

Marx had a very good analysis of capitalism but I wonder if he underestimated the role of the middle class as defenders of the capitalist system.

Or that could be wrong. Anybody have any ideas on this? Suggestions for further reading also welcome.

[Proud Public Servant]

1. In a word, yes.

Marx completely failed to account for the role of the professional/managerial class. He also failed to account for the rise of economies that were consumer- rather than producer-driven (and thus for Ford's observation that his workers had to be paid well enough to buy his products). Finally -- remember that he was writing in a Europe that was still largely monarchist and certainly class-bound -- he didn't anticipate societies in which the promise of class mobility might be real and regular (thus giving workers a reason to support the status quo). His take on industrial capitalism was that it was basically feudalism, only with owners and workers instead of nobles and serfs. Small wonder, then, that the most extended experiments with Marxism occurred not it industrial capitalists societies, but instead in countries that were basically still feudal (like Russia and China).

[ChairmanAgnostic]

2. In a word, no.

What he may have underestimated was the willingness of countries with relatively large middle classes (something exceedingly rare when he studied and wrote), turn tail and pursue ignorant policies that would re-concentrate wealth among a small percentage of the population, especially after years, even decades of improvement and growing social support structures.

People should spend some time reading his works. There are some farseeing truths there, some which have immediate application to our current state of affairs.

[TBF]

3. Perhaps.

Marx opined that the petty bourgeoisie were a class that would eventually lose its separate status and become part of the proletariat. I think he may have underestimated how the ruling class/capitalists would use religion of all things to keep this class compliant.

See Chapter 3 of the Manifesto for some discussion: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch03.htm

[limpyhobbler]

7. hmmm pretty interesting

In this chapter it seems like Marx intends to deliver an exposé on various competing socialistic movements and offers his analysis of them.

There is one in the list that seems particularly relevant to our modern situation, and to this question of the role of the middle class, is in Chapter 3 Part 2

Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism

The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.

Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.

Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism.

So I think he's talking about a capitalist tendency that offers hope, and limited material improvement, to some workers, while at the same time maintaining the the basic relationships of production and organization.

In that last bit he seems to get snarky, when he says how in this tendency every capitalist maneuver is sold to the working class as being for the good of the working class.


Very interesting. Thanks for the link. Haven't had a chance to look at the others yet.

[Starry Messenger]

4. Marx and Engels wrote each other letters talking about the problem.

There's some bits here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/england/unionism.htm

I think Lenin took up the subject in more detail, since by his time, the problem had become more developed. Hobsbawm has a good introduction on this.

http://monthlyreview.org/2012/12/01/lenin-and-the-aristocracy-of-labor

<snip>

But if the argument is in principle more general, there can be no doubt that what was in Lenin’s mind when he used it was the aristocracy of labor. Time and again we find him using phrases such as the following: “the petty bourgeois craft spirit which prevails among this aristocracy of labor” (“The Session of the International Socialist Bureau,” 1908); “the English trade unions, insular, aristocratic, philistinely selfish”; “the English pride themselves on their ‘practicalness’ and their dislike of general principles; this is an expression of the craft spirit in the labor movement” (“English Debates on a Liberal Workers’ Policy,” 1912); and “this aristocracy of labor…isolated itself from the mass of the proletariat in close, selfish, craft unions” (“Harry Quelch,” 1913). Moreover, much later, and in a carefully considered programmatic statement—in fact, in his “Preliminary Draft Theses on the Agrarian Question for the Second Congress of the Communist International” (1920)—the connection is made with the greatest clarity:

The industrial workers cannot fulfill their world-historical mission of emancipating mankind from the yoke of capital and from wars if these workers concern themselves exclusively with their narrow craft, narrow trade interests, and smugly confine themselves to care and concern for improving their own, sometimes tolerable, petty bourgeois conditions. This is exactly what happens in many advanced countries to the “labor aristocracy” which serves as the base of the alleged Socialist parties of the Second International.

<snip>

Which brings us to Lenin's Imperialism: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/

For the US, Foster's chapter on class collaboration in union leaders before the Great Crash is interesting.
http://williamzfoster.blogspot.com/2013/01/chapter-seventeen-af-of-l-class.html

<snip>

The erstwhile "progressive" or center group in the labor movement vied with the right-wing labor leadership in its enthusiasm for union-management co-operation. The Socialists, too, grabbed it hook, line, and sinker. In fact, in no unions in this country was the speed-up system so highly developed as in the supposedly socialistic needle trades unions. They had complete sets of efficiency engineers, standards of production, and all the rest of the speed-up plans. Leo Wolman, research director of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, thus explained the role of labor unions in this period: "The primary aim of the labor union is to co-operate with the manufacturer to produce more efficient conditions of production that will be of mutual advantage. In some cases labor unions will even lend money to worthy manufacturers to tide them over periods of distress."

FORD VERSUS MARX

In order to drive ahead with the speed-up, "rationalization" plans and to demoralize the labor movement still further, blatant American imperialism put forth during the Coolidge period a whole series of "prosperity illusions" designed to befuddle and confuse the workers. Never in the whole history of American capitalism did the bosses give birth to so many glowingly Utopian ideas of social progress as in the hectic boom times of the 1920's.

<snip>

Ruling class illusions permeate the working classes unless they are forcefully counteracted, no where near as badly as in the most imperialist countries in the world. It's no coincidence that at the same time the capitalists were selling the middle class on this bill of goods, reds and radical trade unionists were being scoured and persecuted out of the unions.

[limpyhobbler]

11. Thanks for the links

Starry Messenger I will surely get around to reading these things later.

Your last paragraph makes me think how important the battle of ideas is. But not just ideas, also emotions and images. The capitalists use ideas, material incentives, emotional appeals to basic values like family and patriotism, all that stuff in their propaganda. So it is important for a left movement to, as you say, forcefully counteract the capitalist deceits. I think a successful left movement will need a good presentation, and be able to make similarly powerful appeals to win people's hearts and minds. Thanks again.

[Jackpine Radical]

5. In a word, maybe.

Or, if you were to allow me more than one word, yes and no.

There wasn't much of a middle class in continental Europe or in England when he wrote (think Dickens!), and he couldn't have anticipated its development and elaborations in the 20th century.

But that middle class may turn out to have been a transient phenomenon largely due to the New Deal (sure looks that way these days), in which case it may turn out that, as the oligarchs grab it all, they will succeed in putting Marx's predictions back on track.

Our particular set of oligarchs seem to be a special breed, unlike anything the world has seen before. In medieval times, the crowned heads were also pretty greedy, and had to contend with Jacqueries every now and then, but they eventually wised up enough to heed the wisdom of Macchiavelli and leave the peasants enough crumbs so they had something to lose if they rebelled.

What's "special" about the modern variety is the perversity with which they pursue their own short-term interests, heedless of what they are doing to the world.

Their own children will have to live with the environmental consequences of their actions (climate change, destruction of the aquifers, poisoning of the atmosphere and the oceans, etc.), and even if they are planning to retreat into some sort of bubble communities, the resulting quality of life, even for them, will have to be bleak.

They are dooming their own progeny to a life that is likely to be, at best, comparable to living in a domed city on Mars.

[limpyhobbler]

8. So the middle class in some places may turn out to have been sort of temporary.

Like here in the US. So look at Detroit, and other places. It's sad to see the trend that its happening, but it could open some possibilities for socialism as people are searching for a solution that hasn't been tried yet.


Some cities are talking about using eminent domain to take houses off the market, because of the foreclosure crisis.

There are also some Mondragon-style cooperatives that people are doing. There are some in Cleveland that seem to be doing pretty well.

[socialist_n_TN]

9. Well to me that's the crux of this question......

The "middle" class for Marx, in general, was the petit bourgeoisie which could swing either way in a revolutionary situation. The economic term "middle class" didn't mean a lot to Marx or Engels because there weren't that many of them. Of course there weren't that many of the petit bourgeoisie either.

As to underestimating them, when you looking at time scales of centuries for socio/economic/political systems to be born, grow, and die, the last 60 or so years of economic "middle class" are just a blip. And it's all going away as would be expected with a Marxist outlook. It WAS just a blip, not a lasting trend. Capitalism always will strive to outdo any limits placed on it and break any regulatory chains. And it will succeed because it has the economic power to stack the deck. That's why it needs to be destroyed rather than regulated.

[limpyhobbler]

10. Yeah it really seems that way.

Regulating doesn't seem to be working out so good. We ought to just put the workers in control of production, put people in charge of their own communities.

Some people say we should push for regulation and redistribution, as a tactic, to build movements. But then as it becomes clear that regulation is impossible, then we take other solutions as once people are prepared to push for bigger real changes. But we have to build up some kind of power first.

Sometimes that seems sensible, but I'm kind of divided on that question. Seems like people sometimes get trapped in endless, fruitless battles over small piecemeal reforms that aren't worth much at all. It just doesn't seem to have been very successful lately.

[socialist_n_TN]

12. There's a lot of history behind ALL of these reform/revolution arguments....

IOW, this is NOT a new argument. My Workers' Power group holds monthly "extra" meetings on educational topics, in addition to regular discussion on picked topics of socialist historic and present day interest during our regular meetings. One thing I'm always struck by is how an argument from a century ago has SO much relevance to today's struggles. IMO, the reason(s) for the relevance is that capitalism hasn't changed, consequently, neither has the overall strategy for battling it. Now tactics are different. They of necessity change, but the strategies? Not so much.

It's also easy to relate to the reform arguments though, ESPECIALLY when you only have what your eyes see during the span of a single lifetime. When I was a kid in the 50s/60s it was the heyday of "regulated" capitalism and it seemed like Marx and Engels WERE wrong, at least on some points. But as I said in the previous post, that era was just a mirage.

One point to make is that capitalism IS the established system, so it doesn't have to rely on sudden changes. it can take the long perspective if it so chooses. And this is the tack it took after the New Deal reforms of the 30s. It was also the tack that it HAD to take because of the revolutionary fervor of the working class at that time. It's not a stretch to say that FDR saved capitalism from itself. If the PTBs had tried to immediately (within a decade or so) have tried to repeal the New Deal, they would have faced the revolution they delayed with the enactment OF the New Deal.

As to building a movement, there's nothing in Trotskyist thought that says you can't make a common cause with reformists on individual ISSUES or even a whole group of issues. The actual point of a United Front is twofold in strategy. To attempt to make gains for the workers by putting yourself in the vanguard (there's that word again) of the day-to-day struggles, but it's also to show the bankruptcy OF these incremental reforms as a way out of the problems of the working class under capitalism. That's why it's a basic tenet of a UF to keep your own freedom to agitate, propagandize, and yes, even criticize your front partners. Because history teaches that, at some point in the struggle, the reformists will make the mistake of trusting the capitalists and will betray the workers. At that point the movement or a sizable portion of it, even though it might be reformist in nature, will be subject to further radicalization IF your tendency has been proven correct in it's analyses of the situations that have arisen.

[limpyhobbler]

13. Yeah this is

pretty close to the way I think too. Despite changing my mind alot.

Also the working class should get more power by organizing and getting control of tangible stuff. Like workplaces, farms, hospitals, and stuff like that. Easier said than done, but there are some inklings of things happening here and there. Things sometimes change pretty quickly once they get started. But I'd say it's a lot easier when you have some allies in the government. When workers occupied and started operating some factories in Argentina a few years back, it was a major help to them that there were some sympathetic judges. The supposed owners of the factories sued to get their supposed property back but a few good judges made a big difference. I think they determined it wasn't his anymore because he wasn't using it, it had been idle for too long. So my point is yeah it is important to have those sympathetic allies, but like you said, to maintain an independence and still be able to do more creative things outside of politics.

[socialist_n_TN]

14. Well I'm not so sure that eminent domain couldn't be used....

You'd have to get around the "fair market value" aspect of it, but say, if you wanted workers to take over a shuttered Detroit plant, the "fair market value" would be relatively low.

That's also where a government OF the people would be very helpful. A government that truly had the workers best interests at heart could actually give low cost or no cost loans to cooperatives that wanted to reopen a closed and practically abandoned factory. Instead, our current government gives all the breaks, tax and otherwise, to the capitalists INSTEAD of the workers. And a capitalist won't reopen a plant unless there's a lot of profit in it. They won't open and invest just to cover costs for an unknown number of years until it becomes profitable. Those perks that only government can give are another reason you have to take political power, not just economic.

I just finished Preobrazhinski's book "The New Economics" (I hope to be able to read it again before I have to turn it in) and in it he mentioned that Lenin wrote some on cooperatives in the nascent socialist system of the USSR during the early days. I'm going to try and find those articles/writings to study next.

[limpyhobbler]

16. They should be using eminent domain for that.

Some cities have been talking about using it to save homes facing foreclosure...

A City Invokes Seizure Laws to Save Homes
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/business/in-a-shift-eminent-domain-saves-homes.html?_r=0


But if they can use it for that, then I wouldn't think anything legally stops using this to take workplaces and make them better.

If they use eminent domain in Detroit anytime soon, bet it's going to be the opposite - using it to force poor people to move out of the way for land developers. A kind of rapid gentrification by force. Forcibly pushing people out of the way to make room for something more profitable, the capitalist's oldest and favorite move.

[DonCoquixote]

28. reform vs revolution

Capitalism always will strive to outdo any limits placed on it and break any regulatory chains. And it will succeed because it has the economic power to stack the deck. That's why it needs to be destroyed rather than regulated.

Anything not held in check will become a cancer, including Communism. I understand that some want nothing but a revolution, but revolutions only survive because, after all the bodies are buried and palaces burnt, after the young killers become old, the reformers get to work and build systems that are balanced. While the current system of capitalism does need to go, I myself would prefer Sweden to the Soviet Union, simply because there, you do have people that can hold their own, and hold government to account, rather than blissfully be herded along,shining their "hero of the people, 3rd class"medals on the way to the glue factory.

[socialist_n_TN]

29. Just a quick reply as I have to go to work in a few..........

A LOT of people want to use the Scandinavian countries as some sort of "model" for "regulated capitalism". But the problem comes when you realize that the social support services in those countries ARE being attacked and undermined by capitalism. Remember, the USA had a fairly robust social support system for the oppressed at one time too and we all see what happened to it when the capitalists decided they had the power to destroy it.

Scandinavia might CURRENTLY have a fairly robust and controlled capitalism, but the question MUST be asked, for how long? Norway, et. al. could QUITE possibly look like us in 20 years.

I'll comment more on your second assertion when I have more time.

[DonCoquixote]

30. my reply

Scandinavia might CURRENTLY have a fairly robust and controlled capitalism, but the question MUST be asked, for how long? Norway, et. al. could QUITE possibly look like us in 20 years.

For the better part of the century, Scandinavia has resisted the urges to run with Anglo-Saxon Capitalism, it is not buying the "austerity"medicine that London or Berlin is trying to push. Sweden manages to even have a monarchy and the social support system that is held up as the world's exemplar, one that even makes the French jealous.

However, there is a greater point, of course the capitalists will try to destroy social support systems, and even if they call themselves communists, they still will, because when ANY group of people are held unaccountable, they will GAME the system. After all, who would have thought that the Chinese, the nation that keeps Marx's grave clean, the last nation to affirmatively hold on to Communism, would become the world's great enabler of the robber barons, the great source for cheap, disposable, union-free labor? Even the Chinese are worrying about Vietnam, because that other great hero of Communism is actively trying to undercut their labor cost, attracting people who want even CHEAPER labor.

The reason I support the Social democratic model is that no one group is really in a position to take the money and run; they have to work with each other. Communism does need to be added to the soup of ideas, but it cannot be the whole recipe, any more than Capitalism will be, because, call them Suburbans Silver Spoons, call them Soviet Nomenklatura, there will always be elitists whose main skill is learnign to rig a system to their favor, and the only defenses against that is a system that is too varied and too complex for any one group to infect.

I do look forward to your second reply.

[socialist_n_TN]

31. Well once again, I don't think that it's a guarantee that the .......

Scandinavian countries are somehow "extra" resistant to the neo-liberalism that has taken over everywhere else. It is true that there are some mitigating factors involved in this sector of the world that might make them slightly more resistant, like a more homogenous population (less chance of floating the "others are gaming the system" meme), a little bit more history of social democracy, elections that are based less on who has the most money to buy ads and votes, and, most importantly IMO, the fact that neo-liberalism has had several decades to FAIL in other parts of the globe before it's begun to be tried in Scandinavia on a more serious basis. But NONE of these factors will guarantee that Scandinavia will not be the next domino to fall to the perils of privatization, austerity, and all of the other neo-liberal claptrap. I don't see them being ultimately resistant because, under ANY sort of capitalist system, MONEY and ownership is power and that power will ALWAYS win out in the end. Sometimes it takes longer than other times, but without organized working class resistance, money will win out.

There are many different tendencies of communist and Marxist thought. Some are based more on the classic readings of Marx and Engels than others. In any system there will be people who will try to gain advantage. Trots call them opportunists. A bottom up representative system of one person, one vote using delegates that are IMMEDIATELY recallable and making an wage equivalent to the average of the workers they represent, with provisions for legal punishment for taking more than this, SHOULD take care of MOST of the opportunists. The rest of them will have to be outvoted. Capitalism hasn't worked or, more properly, I should say that capitalism no LONGER works. It's time to take the next step. Even if it's wrong, it needs to be tried because the alternative is barbarism.

Oh and don't EVEN go there with the Chinese. They are no longer even in the BALLPARK of socialism.

[joshcryer]

6. Marx didn't get industry.

Marx writes in a letter to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenko:

Thus, the economic forms in which man produces, consumes and exchanges are transitory and historical. With the acquisition of new productive faculties man changes his mode of production and with the mode of production he changes all the economic relations which were but the necessary relations of that particular mode of production.

Of course, as history has shown, in fact new production concepts did not result in "changing all the economic relations that were but necessary relations of that particular mode of production." As I have continually argued here there are two ways, two abstractions, with which industry could have formed. The hierarchical way and the egalitarian way.

The hierarchical way is the capitalist industrial methodology, where the industry is appropriated (be it by people taking it over or be it by a venture capitalist buying it out), and where the industry is controlled by a hierarchy. The mode of production changes (new advances, new technologies), but the way man handles that production economically doesn't, in any substantiative way. You have people working on a factory line each putting in the same widget for the duration of the day, the Ford Model, the true factory line, and they are effectively abstracted away from the system. They have no ownership of the industry and are mere cogs in an overarching machine.

The egalitarian way is the socialist method, in which production is not appropriated by the individual actors, and all are equals. The industry belongs to everyone and to no one. This is in direct opposition to the industrial capitalist model. Instead of putting in the same widget over and over again to get ones wage or remittance, the individual actor puts in each successive widget, and moves down the line accordingly.

This is why Proudhon does not attribute the technology itself to the process but the organization with which that overarching process exists!

Proudhon writes in the Philosophy of Misery:

Labor, we say, is being organized: that is, the process of organization has been going on from the beginning of the world, and will continue till the end. Political economy teaches us the primary elements of this organization; but socialism is right in asserting that, in its present form, the organization is inadequate and transitory.

For Proudhon it is the organization that was the problem, not the industrial technology in and of itself!

Indeed, he makes it clear to M. Dunoyer:

it is necessary to procure for all the means of competing; it is necessary to destroy or modify the predominance of capital over labor, to change the relations between employer and workman, to solve, in a word, the antinomy of division and that of machinery; it is necessary to ORGANIZE LABOR

Now, I'm not saying Marx was wrong, in his entirety, nor that Marx was against organization. It's just that I think that he placed far too much emphasis on "new productive faculties" changing the mode of production. Technology is neutral in that it can be implemented in a wide variety of ways. Marx's argument, maybe, makes sense in a post-scarce environment, but by then political economy becomes irrelevant (if you can live in your own universe, well, it doesn't matter what the fuck you decide to be your structure).

At no point in history did new productive facilities actually change the mode of production. Ever. It could have resulted in that, indeed, each new technological age could've ushered in a new way of production, but it never did. The masters always retained control over production each and every time. The age of agriculture led to warlords dominating, the stone age led to kings, the metal ages led to kings and pretend government, the industrial age led to plutocrats and oligarchs, the information age has retained the plutocrats for the most part but now we're seeing a glimmer where the information age allows mass consciousness to say, "Hey, we don't need those warlords, kings, plutocrats, and oligarchs." There was always a consciousness to those ends, but it was always buried by those with power, and they will do it again as open source and open hardware begin to dominate the way social economy moves forward!

[BOG PERSON]

20. "at no point in history did new productive facilities actually change the mode of production"

i dont know how you can justify your technological utopianism and simultaneously live in a world where the agricultural revolution never happened

[joshcryer]

21. That's a Jensen view.

Zerzan argues language was where it began.

Which was evolutionary not technological.

By then the Shaman had already taken control over tribes.

So no, agriculture didn't change the mode of production, being subservient to some leader (the hierarchical mode of production which capitalism exploits).

(There are probably exceptions of course, very few and far between, the noble savage is not the reality for most cases known and as historical record indicates. I think the post-Colonial Aka are the best example but only because their big game was eradicated and the men could no longer serve the dominate provider role.)

[BOG PERSON]

22. i appreciate the name-dropping

but this is a fundamentally anti materialist conception of history you are putting forth. based on what you say, this zerzan person is arguing that agriculture was developed as way of finding some use for the language of record-keeping, rather than the other way around

who is "the shaman"? what is the hierarchical mode of production? this all seems very (1) ahistorical and (2) eclectic to me

[joshcryer]

23. I don't reject that notion.

I think agriculture was certainly a step up, objectively. However, as a technology it allows one to use it as a tool to subjugate the masses, but it can also be used as a tool to bring about a more relaxing lifestyle.

I think Zerzan is correct as opposed to Jensen because we do see primitive tribes that have yet to adopt agriculture, but have language, so agriculture probably comes after language. Language and intent and interpretation and expression is a tool that the shaman in a tribe uses to create a hierarchical mode of production. Jensen and other primitivists don't think it's a big deal because it's one or a few people who wind up being the shaman, and so who cares, right?

However, the shaman has no useful skill outside of that of finding healing techniques, such as herbal remedies and such. This is a dangerous game because they may wind up eating poison and dying, so they try to legitimize their position by inventing reasons for why they live or die or get sick. Gods, demons, whatever. They use this as a psychological hold over the group. So once you get into agriculture you get things like Egyptian Pharaohs who think they're gods, etc.

I am not a historical materialist simply because I do not believe it to be an accurate representation of history. Maybe, once you get into the whole singularity thing, but I think that's a cop-out because in all reality every single revolution in technology should've resulted in revolution in society.

We're talking about agriculture, how about industrial agriculture. Ideally historical materialism would've said, "Once humans are able to feed themselves with minimal of effort using machines, everyone should be able to eat for free, and food should be abundant, and people can then go on to do things that they want as opposed to what they have to do." A perfect, wonderful, idea of Marxism. Except that never happened. What happened to the farmers? They went on to be industrialists, build skyscrapers, etc. They went on to be factory workers, building cars, building out infrastructure, etc.

The next age will be when the information age meets industry. Infoindustry or something like that. Where people will be able to print out computers, electronics, TVs, etc. Where they will be able to print out whole factories to make those things. Using common, and abundant, materials that are around the world (I'm not necessarily talking nanotechnology though that's not ruled out in the argument). Now it can go two ways, we can emancipate ourselves from capitalism, or capitalism will use its force to make us pay for parts that by all intents should be absolutely free.

You might say that capitalism couldn't stop people from sharing each other stuff with damn replicators! But I'd counter that they simply do that by putting patent and IP rights on things and requiring that all things be networked! If you're caught with a non-networked piece of gadgetry then you're in deep shit! And that's the trend we're already seeing with things like SOPA, and we're still a decade or two away from having the ability to replicate things.

The whole reason industrial agriculture didn't help emancipate the farmer from the drudgery of capitalist work is because technology always manages to find a void in itself, and capitalism has an impressive mechanism in order to force that void to be filled. Property. I am a farmer and I'm paying a lease and paying taxes on that property, and I'm no longer needed to tend to the fields, then I have to get a job somewhere else to pay taxes and my lease on said property. So when the big venture industrialist who buys up my neighbors property and runs the big machines next door knocks on mine, I'm eager to take his offer, because my skill has been rendered irrelevant. This shouldn't have happened. And it probably wouldn't have had the capitalists not cracked down on the industrial workers in the late 1800s and early 1900s, killing or arresting them en masse, then passing laws to prevent them from having any agency whatsoever. They should've sat down, said, "Hey, we're a farmers union, let's all band together, let's all use this new machinery to help us farm, and let's split the proceeds evenly." That's what Proudhon talks about when he talks about organization being the primary factor here, not technology.

[BOG PERSON]

24. "Ideally historical materialism would've said,

'Once humans are able to feed themselves with minimal of effort using machines, everyone should be able to eat for free, and food should be abundant, and people can then go on to do things that they want as opposed to what they have to do.' A perfect, wonderful, idea of Marxism. Except that never happened."

except historical materialism never SAID that would happen, it "ideally" never promised anything of the sort

historical materialism posited that the bourgeois state and its institutions are fundamentally a creature of the bourgeois class. UNTIL the working class passes through the political phase and becomes a class for-itself in order to abolish competition because it has been immiserated or rendered surplus, then capital reigns

read that excerpt i posted below from "socialism utopian and scientific"

[BOG PERSON]

25. it was actually utopian socialists, e.g. the saint simonians -

"the fore-runners of the technocrats" as walter benjamin described them - who promised collective self improvement under capitalism. marx & engels was the rupture w that tendency of the socialist movement - that stated clearly, no, this is not possible, the working classes have to emancipate themselves

[joshcryer]

32. I didn't say historical materialism said that.

I said that it should have.

Marx makes a case that technology drives change in the economic relations of a given mode of production. Which is objectively false. The mode of production is completely dependent upon the agency of the producers, the technology has absolutely nothing to do with it whatsoever. What Marx failed to realize is that the hierarchical mode of producing technology is intrinsically capitalist and impossible to emancipate by the workers without actively changing how that technology is produced.

It's one thing to take over a factory and run it like a capitalist industrialist while having workers committees handling the overarching power structure.

It's another thing entirely to free a factory and allow individuals to come and go as they please and work at their leisure whenever they wanted to.

It's the difference between sitting on a factory line putting the widget in a gadget over and over again all day long and then at the end of the day not having the gadget, or being a free agent, walking into a factory, following instructions to make a gadget, it may take all day to make just one of them, but by the end of the day you have your gadget. One mode is hierarchical, capitalist, one mode is non-hierarchical, socialist.

[BOG PERSON]

33. i'm sorry historical materialism didnt say what you wanted it to say

i dont know where you're coming up with this stuff about historical materialism being technologically deterministic, everybody knows the marxist conception of history is that class struggle drives technological change

it states it right there in the first page of the communist manifesto, have you read it?

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

[joshcryer]

34. What do you think "new productive faculties" are?

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm

He doesn't discuss changing the way production works in relation to the worker and the industry. I already quoted him being wrong in that "new productive faculties" did not result in "changing all the economic relations that were but necessary relations of that particular mode of production."

For Marx, production relations are literally tied to a given technology, he doesn't see technology as an emancipating force.

M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen, or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist. The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations. Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. (...) The production relations of every society form a whole.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02.htm

I say that is completely wrong and utterly ludicrous, completely unsupportable. A hand mill is merely an advancement on the mortar and pestle, reducing labor and allowing one to make grain more efficiently. It doesn't magically enable feudal society.

[BOG PERSON]

35. you remain wrong about the "new productive faculties"

remember earlier up thread where we were talking about written language and the agricultural revolution ?and which came first? that is the classic exxample of new productive faculties changing the mode of production: the transition from hunting/gathering societies to slavery

why do you insist on technology being liberatory? how can you say that in the year 2013 when automation has only thrown people out of productive work and the only leisure time people can get anymore is unemployment? under capitalism technology is the ultimate scab. do smart phones and free wi-fi somehow mitigate this? is participating in the spectacle a sufficient consolation prize for the liquidation of organized labor in the imperial core? don't you know twitter and facebook and the entire internet is company property ?

your main criticism of marx appears to be that he doesn't share your techno-optimism. it's true taht marxism doesnt look at technology as an emancipating force under capital and it's absolutely 100% correct on this. this is non-negotiable. i will not budge on this point. technocrats will not lead us to the promised land. under capital technology is chiefly a weapon to be deployed against labor. it s a way of robbing of the worker control over the pace of work, as well as countervailing wage raises and limitations imposed by labor on the length of teh work day. but the ultimate aim of technology under capital is to make the worker superfluous to the production process - this is the real meaning of *efficiency*, the real purpose of labor saving innovations - and this will ultimately be capital's undoing. the working class will inevitably be forced to abolish work, for the sake of its own survival. he who does not eat, shall not work.

i dont know what you find so intensely disagreeable in that quote from Poverty of Philosophy, maybe you have an allergy. because it makes perfect sense. capital IS a social relation, or else its just in your head, OR we are stripped of our agency as human beings. all marx means about the hand mill versus the steam mill is that capitalism accelerates the development of the forces of production in a way feudalism never could - due to pressures of capitalist competition and labor recalcitrance (unionizing, demanding wage raises, better working conditions, etc)

"The production relations of every society form a whole." this is integral to marxist understading of the capitalist mode of production. it is part and parcel of an understanding of the commodity-form.

the commodity-form contains within it the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, between exchange value and use value - the separation of production and consumption that is imposed under capital (alienation). all the contradictions of capitalist society - poverty; unemployment; the intermediate classes that vacillate b/w bourgeois and proletarian poles depending on the balance of forces domestically and internationally; crises of overproduction; financial skulduggery; etc - emerge from this point of separation, and it is the historical task of the working class to take this separation to its logical conclusion, to finalize this divorce - "from each according to their ability to each according to their need". but as David__77 posted below, that is something way off in the future

tbh i think youre pushing this "hierarchical mode of production" junk because it lets capitalism off the hook and diverts attention to the modern state - specifically postcolonial bourgeois nationalist states that ahvent fully succumbed to neoliberalism and imperial belligerence or they block their citizens access to ostensibly "horizontalist" social media or they just generally get in our way

i wonder if you think capitalism is even a thing? is it just a recent articulation of the age old hierarchical mode of production? famine, war and pestilence - all that stuff is parenthetical to hierarchy.

[joshcryer]

37. Capitalism is inherently hierarchical.

But I don't know how what I said can be considered "a recent articulation of the age old hierarchical mode of production," perhaps from a totally reductive position where all non-possessive property relationships are see as capitalist, but I would rather reduce that to authoritarianism. Capitalism, sure, is but one manifestation of authoritarianism. I don't suggest that all forms of non-possessive property relationships are capitalist.

I don't suggest that technology is an emancipating force, because I explicitly state that organization is necessary to use a technology that way. This is in contrast to Marx who thinks that "new productive faculties" (this is called technology) will "change the economic relations." Objectively false, as proven by history. Technology can be emancipating, that's all.

My criticism of Marx is that he didn't write out a fundamental reason why capitalist production relations within the workplace are damaging to revolutionary action. Indeed, had he did that (after plagiarizing huge chunks of Proudhon including surplus value, which Proudhon was first to recognize), it would've rendered his entire critique one of authoritarianism and not capitalism, directly. All anti-authoritarians are anti-capitalist (capitalism is inherently hierarchical and authoritarian), but not all anti-capitalists are anti-authoritarian (some anti-capitalists are just after the productive faculties and not in fact for changing the way they operate to any substantial degree). Note: Marx did later back off his "steam mill = industrial capitalism" rhetoric, but it was never explicitly defined from what I've read of him.

The closest you get is Marx's critique of workplace alienation, which btw, he also copied from Proudhon. What he does is argue that the bourgeois class runs the work place and workers are alienated, but if the workers ran the work place, they wouldn't be alienated (this is a very generalized overview, you'll forgive me if it's not up to your standards). However, he doesn't say how those workers should manage the workplace. In fact, the implication, is that the workplace should be managed, due to the central production rhetoric in the Communist Manifesto, centrally, directly through capitalist-style management processes. Or, as a term I'm coining right now, the authoritarian mode of production. Where within the workplace there is a class system in and of itself because managers form cliques, cronyism is rampant, and those who want to better themselves are unable to do so without themselves being alienated. And guess what? Almost all implemented forms of Marxist Communism followed this model to one extent or another. The work place effectively became a state owned corporation which was ran by crony elites.

Proudhon spends a huge chunk of his writings explaining how the non-possessive workshop works, and Marx only mocked him, nevermind that workplace alienation was the entire reason Proudhon felt that workers should, as he mocked Proudhon, "make not only the twelfth part of a pin, but successively all twelve parts of it." To rid ones self of workplace alienation you must be involved in the totality of the process. Workers committees only go so far in that, if they don't allow individuals to be involved in the totality of the process, they are inviting the possibility for workplace alienation and inner-workplace cliques and quasi-class systems.

[BOG PERSON]

38. what is workplace alienation?

like a mental state?

i'm starting to think i've been trolled

[joshcryer]

39. Eh. Disengagement commenced.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation

Once you start making shit personal, calling me a troll and shit, why bother.

[Taverner]

15. Three things changed since Marx that were firsts in history

1 - The Green Revolution. With this, economists had the huberis to toss out Malthus. Of course, the green revolution is totally dependent on fossil fuels - so expect them to dust off Principle of Population again when we run out.

2 - The Rise of the Middle Class. Again, this is due to fossil fuels.

3 - International Travel affordable and fast. Once again, fossil fuels.

Right now the capitalists know the heady days of oil will come to an end, and they are preparing for it.

[limpyhobbler]

17. Coal, oil and gas certainly did fuel the development of modern society.

There still seems to be a lot of it in the ground. I wish we were running out of it, but they keep finding more. But it's harder to get to.

That and climate change will force some changes. I guess it's probably going to be pretty ugly, and draws sharp lines between people who can afford to protect themselves and those who can't.

[Taverner]

18. The Peak Oil Hypothesis still holds

It is getting more and more expensive to reach - and dangerous.

There will be a point where it ceases to be profitable - and that's when things start changing

Of course, if we focus on renewables - and evolve enough to make that shift, and we may have bought more time, but the cloud still exists

[BOG PERSON]

19. no

marx & engels understood that imperialism was creating a labor aristocracy in england, that the english working class could never be free as long as other nations were colonized by the english bourgeoisie and gave their full support to anticolonial struggles. marx & engels foresaw the era of monopoly capital, and after marx died engels predicted the 20th century world wars . their only error was they didnt predict the Marshall Plan

In the trusts, freedom of competition changes into its very opposite — into monopoly; and the production without any definite plan of capitalistic society capitulates to the production upon a definite plan of the invading socialistic society. Certainly, this is so far still to the benefit and advantage of the capitalists. But, in this case, the exploitation is so palpable, that it must break down. No nation will put up with production conducted by trusts, with so barefaced an exploitation of the community by a small band of dividend-mongers.

In any case, with trusts or without, the official representative of capitalist society — the state — will ultimately have to undertake the direction of production. [4] This necessity for conversion into State property is felt first in the great institutions for intercourse and communication — the post office, the telegraphs, the railways.

If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock companies, trusts, and State property, show how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first, the capitalistic mode of production forces out the workers. Now, it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus-population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.

But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm

[Warpy]

26. Yes he did, for a couple of reasons

First, there was relatively little middle class in his day. It was made up of upper managers, a few sought after people like doctors and barristers, and little else. Everyone else trudged through life, working long hours so everybody in the family could eat, with few higher aspirations than that.

Second, the type of middle class the US enjoyed after WWII was an artificial creation of the New Deal and unprecedented in the history of the world. Marx didn't consider that government intervention would scrape money off the top and recirculate it at the bottom and that it would create a large stable middle class of skilled craftsmen, small business owners, and middle managers.

Third, the large and stable middle class did act as a buffer between labor and owner and probably saved capitalism while it was allowed to flourish simply by its stability and promise of comfort for anyone who played by the rule book of college followed by corporate career.

Now there is no buffer at all between the hoarding class and the relatively poor and more poor every day are starting to notice what has been done to them and by whom.

[David__77]

27. Not at all.

I think perhaps he underestimated the material requirements of classless society. We may be millennia and not centuries away from such a radical transformation. Until then, capitalism is lawfully the progressive social system.