[P2P-F] Time for revolution?

Fri Mar 18 05:08:39 CET 2011

  Sent to you by Kevin Carson via Google Reader: Time for revolution?
via Stumbling and Mumbling by chris dillow on 3/13/11

To what extent are the conditions in place for a Marxian revolution?
I’m prompted to ask by Miljenko:

Whilst the rich lever evermore power for themselves, the rest of us who
were looking to do all sorts of open source-type things in both virtual
and offline communities…suddenly find ourselves back in an awful
rat-race of laboratory rodent-like relationships.

This echoes the standard Marxian view of how capitalism will be
supplanted by socialism. This will happen, Marx said, when capitalist
relations of production, instead of stimulating growth, actually retard
technical progress, and when discontent with living standards creates a
revolutionary working class. As Jon Elster put it in the standard
interpretation of Marx*:

The capitalist relations of production become suboptimal for the
development of the productive forces at the very moment when they also
become increasingly suboptimal with respect to their human use. The
former guarantees the viability of communism, the latter provides the
motivation for the communist revolution. (Making Sense of Marx, p294).

In some respects, as Miljenko points out, this is happening. On the one
hand, hierarchical profit-oriented capitalism is incapable of
maximizing the development and use of IT, as its opportunities cannot
easily be monetized; for this reason, the “IT revolution“ has not
significantly altered GDP growth. And yet on the other hand, ordinary
workers in the UK face not only lower real wages as they bear the cost
of the financial crisis, but also (for those who keep their jobs**) a
reversal of the long-term reduction in life-time working hours; the
debt bondage imposed upon future graduates, plus the “pensions crisis”
threaten to lengthen the working lifetimes of millions of workers.
These worsening working conditions, however, co-exist alongside the
increasing enrichment of a small minority.
So far, so Marxist.
There are, though, some unMarxian features of our current predicament.
I don’t mean that the tendency for the rate of profit to fall hasn’t
operated. The low rate of business investment suggests that there has
been a decline in profitable opportunities - a fact related to
capitalism’s inability to monetize and therefore develop the new
technologies.
Instead, I’m thinking of a lack of class consciousness. One
manifestation of this is an ignorance of the source of inequality.
Bankers' bonuses are routinely ascribed to greed. Such moralizing
misses the point - that they arise from power. Whilst anti-Marxists
sometimes like to snark that it is workers rather than shareholders who
are appropriating wealth, this exemplifies Marx’s more general point -
that the powerful exploit the powerless, and that the capitalist
economy is only superficially “a very Eden of the innate rights of man.”
Related to this, there is almost no thinking on the mainstream left
about what an alternative to capitalism would look like. All we get are
campaigns for banks and companies to pay more tax - oblivious to the
fact that they have the power not only to resist such demands, but to
shift the burden of such taxes onto other even in the unlikely event of
such demands being met.
What’s not being asked is: what (if any) forms of economic organization
would both develop productive forces/technology and at least ameliorate
“the awful rat-race of laboratory rodent-like relationships“?
Herein, though, lies an awkward question. Could it be that there is (so
far) no answer to this - because two of the things that compel us to
work longer are not artefacts of capitalism and thus remediable by
revolution, but an inevitable fact of any form of economic organization?
Take pensions. The fact is that if we are living longer then we must
either save more, or work longer, or suffer a fall in living standards
in our old age. This is a problem of fact, unrelated to the capitalist
mode of production or mere conjunctural facts such as the budget
deficit and low gilt yields which are contributing to low annuity rates.
Or take the cost of education. This would rise over time simply because
of Baumol’s cost disease; the productivity of teaching doesn’t grow
much and so its relative cost would increase. Someone must pay for this.
My point here is not to argue for or against revolution. Instead, it is
to ask what could and could not be achieved by alternative forms of
economic organization. My problem is that this question is not even
being asked. And I for one lament Marx’s lack of influence in this
sense.
* Standard in my house anyway.
** As Joan Robinson said, in capitalism, the only thing worse than
being exploited is being not exploited.

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