Post with 2 notes
In several posts over the years I have argued that history has not proved Marx “wrong” (nor has history proved Marx “right”) and that we cannot judge of Marx’s predictions until the world entire is industrialized and the condition of the proletariat is thereby made universal. I have tried to make these points in the following posts, inter alia:
Of course, Marx himself wanted the revolution to come about in his lifetime, and the sooner the better. To read the works of Marx and Engels is to see them grasping at straws, so that any and every strike is heralded as the beginning of the revolution that is going to bring down capitalism. No one every says that Marx died a broken and embittered man because he did not live to see the revolution he predicted; by all accounts, Marx remained a true believer to the end.
Lenin was an impatient revolutionary (even more impatient for the revolution than Marx and Engels) and wanted to foment revolution in Russia during his lifetime, so he formulated an interpretation of Marxism that served his purposes, calling Russia the “weakest link” of capitalism and thereby identifying it as the point where communist revolution would happen first. This was a convenient doctrine for Lenin, but as an interpretation of Marx it is rather weak. A Paleolithic revolutionary might have argued that those regions of the world in which hunting and gathering was still predominant constituted the weakest link of emergent agrarian-ecclesiastical civilization, and might consequently claim that the real agricultural revolution would happen here. This would not be very convincing.
Almost 150 years after the publication of Das Kapital, and after several nation-states attempted to put Marxist principles into practice and failed miserably to make it work, the intellectual legacy of Marx continues to be a source of conflict. There are those who uncritically dismiss Marx as irrelevant, and there are those who uncritically accept Marx, and find countless excuses and patches for his doctrines even where they have manifestly fallen short.
Five years ago when I started writing about Marx on my blog I had hopes that a more critical and objective assessment of Marx would become possible in the post-Cold War period, but I have since come to doubt this; the spectre of Marx still hangs over Europe and the world. (And I realize even as I write this present post that those few who bother to read it will almost certainly say that it is I who have gotten Marx completely wrong – as indeed a recent writer commented on Tumblr – either because I have been insufficiently critical or insufficiently appreciative.)
Despite the absence of a tradition of scholarship that would, in my view, take up what is essential in Marx’s work and re-formulate it within the theoretical context of contemporary economic theory, I think that it is still possible to shed contemporary light on Marx, and one way to do this is to consider core Marxian ideas in the light of the looming possibility of technological unemployment, which is much discussed today.
In recent discussions of technological unemployment (which I have discussed in many posts, including Automation and the Human Future, Addendum on Automation and the Human Future, and “…a temporary phase of maladjustment…”, inter alia) I have emphasized that, while employment opportunities are changing, we are not seeing a social response on the part of contemporary society to these changed conditions of unemployment. Our attitude to the unemployed is largely punitive rather than supportive. This seems to suggest that, as industrialized economies develop into their mature form, they create the “reserve army of the unemployed” that Marx predicted. This is an obvious interpretation of contemporary economics in Marxian terms. But it is not the only possibility for a Marxian interpretation.
Often we hear that the solution to unemployment and underemployment is education, and as a consequence we have seen a boom in higher education and competition among prospective employees in the number and prestige of credentials that they can offer to potential employers. These prospective employees supposedly belong Richard Florida’s so-called “creative class,” who contribute to the “information economy."
But the information economy is as much in crisis as many traditional sectors of the economy. Everyone who (and every industry that) has hitherto made a living from the enforcement of intellectual property rights is today in crisis. The near impossibility of enforcing intellectual property rights given the ease with which creative work can be copied and redistributed means that new revenue streams must be found, or, if they are not found, some traditional businesses will simply disappear as their revenue stream dwindles to nothing. In the Information Age, information is too cheap to meter and those who would seek to make a living from information must recast themselves as impresarios of information rather than mere brokers of information.
Taking the considerations of technological unemployment together with Matthew B. Crawford’s recent book on Shop class as Soulcraft (which I discussed in Back to shop class! and Some Thoughts for Labor Day), which argues for a restoration of the trades as a viable way of life, not least because many of the trades will be not only difficult to outsource but also difficult to automate, we can imagine the unemployed becoming a jack of all trades and master of none, as in a labor market of chronic underemployment one moves from one trade to another in the attempt to maintain oneself above the most abject measure of poverty.
There is a famous and oft-quoted passage from Marx where Marx imagines the worker’s paradise of a communist society in dilettantish terms:
“…nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” (Karl Marx, The German Ideology, Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook, A. Idealism and Materialism)
Perhaps not voluntarily, but purely in response to the need to make a living, we may mostly end up doing whatever we can, which may well eventually include the contemporary equivalents of hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, and rearing cattle in the evening, saving criticism for after supper because no one (except celebrities who have hit the jackpot in a winner-take-all economy) can make a living from criticism.
The story of Marx is far from over, and the reckoning that Marx imagined as an historical necessity – the expropriation of the expropriators – if it must come about as a result of the total industrialization of the world, has not come about yet, and may not come about at all if our civilization expands beyond Earth before it reaches a point of total industrialization.
But even in this event Marx will have a future in outer space, as what is perennial in Marx’s thought will be extracted and reformulated in the context of changed conditions. To slavishly follow Marx’s own formulations of his ideas is as limiting as the claim that Marxism is a defunct idea with nothing to contribute to the future.