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<div style="padding: 4px; background-color: #c3d9ff;"><h3 style="margin:0px 3px;font-family:sans-serif">Sent to you by Kevin Carson via Google Reader:</h3></div>
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<div style="font-family:sans-serif;overflow:auto;width:100%;margin: 0px 10px"><h2 style="margin: 0.25em 0 0 0"><div class=""><a href="http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2011/03/time-for-revolution.html">Time for revolution?</a></div></h2>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0.5em">via <a href="http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/" class="f">Stumbling and Mumbling</a> by chris dillow on 3/13/11</div><br style="display:none">
<div><p style="text-align:justify">To what extent are the conditions in place for a Marxian revolution? I’m prompted to ask by <a href="http://www.21stcenturyfix.org/2011/03/object-lesson-in-how-to-destroy.html">Miljenko</a>:</p>
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<p style="text-align:justify">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.</p>
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<p style="text-align:justify">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 <a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm">retard </a>technical progress, and when discontent with living standards creates a revolutionary working class. As Jon Elster put it in the standard interpretation of Marx*:</p>
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<p style="text-align:justify">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. (<em>Making Sense of Marx</em>, p294).</p>
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<p style="text-align:justify">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 <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2287531/">not significantly</a> 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.<br>So far, so Marxist.<br>There are, though, some unMarxian features of our current predicament. <br>I don’t mean that the tendency for the rate of profit to fall <a href="http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=196&Pos=&ColRank=1&Rank=390">hasn’t</a> operated. The low rate of business investment suggests that there has been a decline in profitable <a href="http://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/MarketsAndSectors/Markets/article/20100105/b3b05bce-f5f5-11de-b4b3-00144f2af8e8/The-dark-side-of-the-savings-glut.jsp">opportunities </a>- a fact related to capitalism’s inability to monetize and therefore develop the new technologies.<br>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 <a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm">superficially </a>“a very Eden of the innate rights of man.” <br>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 <a href="http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2010/04/corporate-tax-incidence-some-evidence.html">shift </a>the burden of such taxes onto other even in the unlikely event of such demands being met.<br>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“? <br>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?<br>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.<br>Or take the cost of education. This would rise over time simply because of Baumol’s cost <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease">disease</a>; the productivity of teaching doesn’t grow much and so its relative cost would increase. Someone must pay for this. <br>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. <br><em>* Standard in my house anyway.</em><br><em>** As Joan Robinson said, in capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited is being not exploited.</em></p></div></div>
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