Ezra wrote a post awhile ago I’ve been meaning to link and address but couldn’t find the hook to do it. Well, now I’ve got it. The post was on how the Federal Reserve is monkeying with the interest rates in such a way as to keep wages down while increasing worker productivity, which is to say to forcibly reduce your wages compared to the amount of work you do. Unsurprisingly, the result of this is that wages stay stagnant or go down in real dollars while corporate profits soar. The excuse the Fed uses to force people to work harder for less money is that this is about slowing inflation. Ezra is skeptical that this is a good idea.
The Fed’s abject terror of wage growth is a rather unhelpful hangover from the stagflation era. But, in the same way that economists kept trying to deal with the problems of yesteryear then, they’re missing the relevant economic issues now. This society is in no danger of paying its workers too much, or seeing their salaries increase too rapidly. Quite the opposite, in fact. We’re facing down unheralded inequality, and the Federal Reserve can’t pull its head out of 1978 for long enough to realize the middle class is evaporating, profits are amassing in a grotesquely disproportionate fashion, and America’s workers — particularly in a labor market this tight — need a serious raise that isn’t cut apart by rate hikes.
Overall a great post and I understand that Ezra’s urge is to be generous and assume that the Fed under BushCo means well. But I have to say that I don’t think the stalling of wages and the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us is a nasty side effect of the policy. I think increasing that gap is the plan. In other words, the redistribution of wealth upwards and the accompanying spread of poverty is a feature, not a bug.
Republican policies are so consistent with trying to redistribute wealth from the working class to the rich that it’s at the point that it’s no use pretending it’s not deliberate. For instance, on Bush’s watch, the oil companies have used their oligopoly to raise and raise gasoline prices without having a bit of fear of the federal government interfering. All the oil companies continue to post record profits under this system, and your average American is spending more money that could go to savings on gasoline.
In other words, the BushCo policies have been aimed at channeling money from working people to the rich through the control of gasoline prices. At this point, they might as well give Exxon the right to directly draft your checking account. Call it the corporate whore welfare tax.
The Social Security privatization scheme was about taking money from working people and giving it directly to the rich in the form of inflating their stock prices so they could cash out with double their wealth while the rest of us lose our retirement savings.
And now Ken Blackwell has come up with another brilliant scheme to take our money and give it to the already rich—he’s proposing making health insurance mandatory for all citizens of Ohio. This isn’t automatically insuring all citizens, of course. This is actually forcing people who already don’t have money to pay health insurance to pay for it, even if it means (as it almost certainly will) that to pay the insurance company, many people will have to go hungry.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell unveiled a proposal Thursday that would require the approximately 1.3 million Ohioans without health coverage to enroll in an insurance plan and pay for a portion of the premiums themselves.
Modeled after a program in Massachusetts, Blackwell’s “Buckeye Health Plan” would match uninsured people with private insurance plans.
The cost of the coverage would be split among the individual, his or her employer, and in some cases the federal government.
Blackwell said that by forcing individuals to contribute, they will “have some skin in the game” and possibly take better care of themselves.
That’s right, Blackwell is saying that people don’t have health insurance due to being lazy and not caring about themselves. Many of us would just love to die of cancer, I guess.
Scrape away the victim-blaming and what you have here is an unvarnished tax on the poor that will be handed directly to the rich. When I didn’t have health coverage, it was because I was unemployed and, surprise surprise, that means I also wasn’t able to empty the bank account of money I needed for food to buy some rich insurance company CEO a new car. Let it never be said that the Republicans support the right of people to keep what’s theirs. They are perfectly happy to tax you at gunpoint and give it to someone else, as long as the person being taxed will be impoverished by it and the person getting the extra cash bonanza has so much money he could light his cigarettes with $100 bills.
The full proposal is available at Blackwell’s website. There’s some stuff in there to make it less blatantly odious, but it’s still a dreadful idea. Since I doubt very much that Blackwell is going to win, I’m thinking that he’s been saddled to float this idea of mandating that people write big checks to insurance companies every month whether they can afford it or not.
63 Responses to “Poverty is a feature, not a bug”
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Every time I hear eco-pundits talking about how “oh, no, labor costs are increasing, and we need to rein those costs in so the economy will grow”, I just want to scream. The focus on corporate profits and stockholder dividends as the only useful barometer of the economy is completely brainless.
When you get past the irrational warmongering, and the basic devaluation of human life in almost every aspect, the Republican push to eliminate the middle class in favor of a few very rich and many very poor will be the biggest “legacy” they leave behind.
The sooner they’re run out of town on a rail, the sooner we can begin to undo all the evil…
The biggest question is what the end game is for the Republicans…
Why do they want a few rich people and a lot of poor people?
So everyone rich has many servants? Lots of cheap labor to use to bring back Baroque decoration? Eliminate machinery in favor of hand labor for that personal?
Or, as I fear, is this just the first step in a plan to eliminate large segments of the population? Instead of the Nazi’s “Jewish Problemâ€?, they feel they are faced with a “Poor Problemâ€??
In that light, some of the stuff Babs Bush said after Katrina is extra creepy…
Hmm, Kevin Drum did some excellent coverage on this basic topic (and closely related).
But , poverty is neither a bug nor a feature, but a requirement.
You can’t really attribute Fed policy to the Bush administration. The Fed is institutionally independent, and while the President can certainly try to stack the deck in his appointments, this is the one place that Bush hasn’t (to my surprise) appointed hacks. It probably goes to show you who is master and who is servant in the Wall Street/Republican party relationship.
Bernanke’s policies may be completely wrong, but they are his own.
MikeEss — I’ve been thinking along those lines now for a while. The idea that the Repugs want a society in which the wealth is increasingly concentrated amongst a few dovetailed with their opposition to birth control and abortion means a lot of really poor people–a perfect combo to bring back domestic service and all those delightful perks of the gilded age (if you were rich, that is).
I suppose having just re-watched Manor House didn’t help those suspicions.
If it’s the same one that Massachusetts just put in, then it was literally concocted by the Heritage Foundation, the same people who claim the credit for bringing you not only Simone Ledeen and sundry other green interns making foreign policy in the Green zone, but for the wondrous success that has been Welfare Reform, whose praisers on NPR burbling about how being forced to take minimum wage jobs and leave their children home all day unattended minding themselves and each other, if they didn’t want to leave them with coke-addicted state daycare workers gave these women such opportunity and self esteem - admitted that none of their test cases, of all the dozens and dozens who had yes been working ever since, had gotten out of poverty or even been able to move out of the blighted neighborhoods they had been in at the beginning.
Like George Carlin once said, “The upper class have all of the money and pay no taxes. The middle class does all of the work and pays all of the taxes. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class”.
The only problem with this statement nowadays is that the middle & lower class are becoming one.
Mighty Ponygirl, thanks for reminding me about “Manor House”. That was magnificent TV…!
I watched that a few years back and was absolutely fascinated and appalled by the whole thing. The rigid British class structure clarified the stark divisions between the different sets of servants and “the family�. The father really turned into a complete asshole, but all of them were affected…
I know stuff like that goes on here right now, but it’s much harder to see how arbitrary and unfair the divisions are here because everything is so fluid. People may be completely locked into a certain class, but because they can move and change jobs, it’s harder to tell what’s going on…
Stupid conservatives — confirming the validity of Marxism and making it a reality!
If they get to return us to the economic conditions of Dickensian England, when the poor were kept working in order to “reproduce their material conditions of existence” (i.e. keep from starving), the working classes ought to revive Marxism.
Americans have absorbed the message that “socialism is evil” for far too long.
My partner has private health insurance because she’s self-employed. She had back surgery a few months ago, and the amount the insurance company would pay vs. the amount the surgery actually cost was mind-boggling. She ended up paying more to her surgeons than her insurance company did. For one $15000 procedure, her insurance company was willing to reimburse about $2500, leaving her to cover the excess.
In contrast, I don’t have health insurance because I’m also self-employed, and I’m told I’m “uninsurable”. I therefore have to pay cash for everything, and I pay less than my partner does. The cash price I can negotiate for things like surgery is far, far less than the insurance company would be billed, mainly because I pay upfront and the doctors know what they’ll be getting. They don’t have to spend months and months doing paperwork and fighting insurance companies for payment.
My point is, with forced health insurance, poor people will still end up being screwed. They’ll be forced to pay premiums, then forced to pay costs insurance won’t pay, and the only people making money will be the insurance companies. I guess that insurance lobby is pretty powerful.
My son and his wife can barely cover their bills right now. How on earth does Mr Blackwell expect them and other families like them to pay for this?
Zorya - “My son and his wife can barely cover their bills right now. How on earth does Mr Blackwell expect them and other families like them to pay for this?”
He doesn’t…
“Your Majesty, the people have no bread!”
“Let them eat cake!”
My son and his wife can barely cover their bills right now. How on earth does Mr Blackwell expect them and other families like them to pay for this?
Well, clearly it’s because your son and his wife are irresponsible bums. If only the state forced them to pay their way, they’d start saving and open up a successful business and become just like our beloved president George W. Bush. It’s really just the state’s fault for coddling those poor people by having tax exemptions and no taxes on food and letting them go to health clinics.
As I recall, there was some obscure British author who wrote some rather sensational (but probably greatly exaggerated) novels about poor folks in Britain. What was his name? It was like Dickens or something.
He had characters that went through all kinds of problems because they were not rich (as if!). Caused a lot of problems. Sounds to me like some kind of goddamned communist…
Disgraceful. People should be damn glad they aren’t executed for stealing food or something…
In Blackwell’s defense, it’s much easier to profit from a pig-in-a-poke scam (e.g., the private health insurance industry) if you can legislatively force people to participate in it.
So he may be a morally and ethically destitute fascist, but at least he doesn’t half-ass it.
What form is enforcement of this supposed to take? Because fines would seem rather pointless and self-defeating, which leaves only the other mainstay of modern US punishment, the prison. (I hope it’s safe to ignore the death penalty for purposes of this discussion!) Which brings to mind the good ol’ days of the “debtors’ prison”, and, much like Mike, got me thinking, “Are there no prisons? And the Union workhouses, are they still in operation? The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?”
I’m pretty sure that if we don’t redistribute wealth from working people to the wealthy, the terrorists will win and, quite likely, a child will be left behind.
Americahater - “the terrorists will win and, quite likely, a child will be left behind”
Yes! A child like Paris Hilton, or Jenna and NotJenna…
I suspect the enforcing punishment will be a rescinding of hospitals’ requirement to treat anyone in the ER.
Samantha, you may well be correct, in which case the AMA will have something strong to say about it…
What an asshole…
Well, the logical response to this economic problem is to bring back indentured servitude as a legal option for people overburdened by debt!
Raincitygirl, why stop at “indentured servitude”?
Why not pull all the stops and support the return of slavery. After all, that seems to be what many idiots who are now in the Rethug party have wanted for the last 50-years anyway…
Just imagine what it’ll do for sheet sales…
Reading this and other threads, it is painfully obvious to me that even here at Pandagon, most of us don’t understand that “Marxism” is not a political program, to be picked up and put down with the fluctuations of social politics, but an analytical approach to understanding those fluctuations. In other words, if we “put aside” Marxism–and lord knows, here and elsewhere I’ve seen plenty pieties about how it would be “unthinkable” to risk going down the road where Stalin lurks–we’ve put aside clear understanding of what the capitalist economy is, of how capitalist society works, of who the players are and what options they have.
I submit, that our national decision many generations ago to declare socialism taboo and in particular to reject and deny any idea that stinks of Marx, was a great victory for the right. Indeed it may have been _the_ great victory, which rendered irrelevant, in the long run, all the concessions the ruling class had to make in the short run to get us to take the deal. Because we see now, that every one of those concessions are revokable, and if strong unions were sacrificed yesterday, the welfare state is being chopped up now, and Social Security, already bled and gutted, could be next–at some point what is to stop it being the right of women to vote, or for that matter of all of us?
Anyway, I urge people to take a look at Marx, not as some guru of revolution or scary secular ayatollah, but as a scientist who proposed to do for social science what Darwin did for biology or Newton for physics.
Indentured servitude is hardly different from slavery - it was just given a posh name so that the white slaves would feel superior to the black ones. Classic divide and conque tactics.
That’s why class politics permeate everything. It makes it much easier to rule.
We already are indentured servants. We HAVE to pay income tax? Does anyone know that your not to pay one? There isn’t a law in the constitution that requires you to pay one. It’s never been ratified or validated. There is an entire grassroots movement to make the government address the public’s request for redress.
I say again, we already ARE indentured servants. Why do you suppose people are taken to the pokie when they don’t or can’t pay their income tax?
Republic of Palau–actually, under whatever name, indentured servitude preceded outright slavery in the British North American colonies. It made a practical difference, because not only were indentures for fixed (if long) terms, after which the former servant would be legally free again, but the fact that indentured servants were brought over from Europe meant that any such person could slip away from their employer and, if they made tracks far and fast enough, blend in with other, free, European colonists.
In view of the fact that people here seem to be waking up to the idea that yeah, it can come down to outright enslavement again if the currently ruling crew gets its way, it may be worthwhile to reflecft on these distinctions. The major reason the British largely gave up on indentures was that African slaves could always be quickly identified as _somebody’s_ property by mere skin color; it would only remain to establish whose. Whereas runaway indentured servants could probably expect the sympathy and active help of other poor white colonists, the white colonists would have been lobbied in many ways to regard the Africans as their rivals and as threats, and know they’d be well rewarded for turning in escapees that their society would eagerly assure them were not of their own kind, and therefore such a profitable transaction would not be treachery. It is a good thing that despite these incentives some whites helped runaway slaves anyway, but this cynical system remains the original foundation of Anglo North America to this day, at the root of white entitlement and white guilt.
So no, I don’t think indenturing was just the Cadillac version of your basic GM slavery. The two “peculiar institutions” worked out to perform distinct social functions.
One purpose you might be overlooking for indenturing, other than to serve as a labor source in labor-poor, resource-rich colonies, was that it was a punitive institution–troublesome or potentially troublesome people might be “persuaded,” under the threat of even more horrific punishments, to sign indentures, or perhaps just be remanded to service by a judge without even the pretence of agreement. From that side the idea was to get rid of the people, and getting useful work out of them or not would be the indenture-holder’s problem.
Slavery generally was not imposed with a direct view to committing genocide, though it did sometimes have that effect. The more spectactularly genocidal forms of servitude were generally billed as kinder and gentler than outright slavery–the Spanish/Mexican “missions” in California for instance, which supposedly were established to bring the Natives into Catholicism (oh and by the way, under the Spanish crown, as a way of keeping them out of possible British or Russian hands). But in fact the missions mainly killed Indians off faster than they were born there, and a century of raiding Native settlements to refill them was finished off by Anglo vigilante groups who didn’t bother with the missions, just auctioned off the services of captured people who survived the raids directly to farmers at county courts; such work also killed off most of those impressed. Whereas the idea with taking African slaves was not to kill them off so whites could use the lands thus vacated, but to use their labor.
What should be clear to anyone who takes an honest look at the foundation of our modern American system is, that if the rich have ever _stopped_ systematically exploiting and otherwise bedevilling poor people, that would have been a marvelous and drastic change, and you’d think it would have made a huge blip on the historic radar if it happened.
Another thing is that social systems are complex, meaning that there is more than one way to exploit people (and many creative reactions to the attempt, too) and different forms of exploitation have different purposes.
I do believe that the agenda of the modern ruling class is increasingly exterminationist, though perhaps few of them face that squarely. The nature of the modern crisis is on one hand a resources crunch versus rising general demand, and on another the apparent redundancy of working people in the face of ever more sophisticated automation. One strategy for cynical rulers to follow is to divert people into a fighting, warrior mode–as with shipping indentured servants overseas, whether or not they accomplish anything in that role is secondary to the primary goal of uprooting them from mainstream competition. Another, closely related, is to demonize some populations so as to enable direct genocide–this in effect turns the victims into freelance anti-regime warriors, but as long as they are doomed to lose that doesn’t threaten the system.
Walt, I know about the Fed. Believe me. I also know they are generally conservative but under pressure from the administration. I suspect this is all the more so under BushCo, who tries to exert pressure—as we saw with the FDA thing—on people they’re not technically the bosses of.
It’s naive to rely on institutional separation of powers to deny what’s going on in DC.
Thank you, Mark Foxwell, for your comments on Marx. Thanks not only to the ruling classes who have an interest in suppressing class consciousness, but also to the 20th century revolutionaries who partially justified their movements on their belief in Marxist historical analysis, the term “Marxism” has indeed become blurred. It’s easy to forget that “Marxism” is an economic, social, and historical worldview. Calling yourself a Marxist is kind of like calling yourself a Hegelian, only the latter doesn’t get your phone tapped.
On that note, what would you call a school of political thought that consciously embraces the Marxian view of history and class struggle, but does not come down on the side of the working class? Ie, that accepts his theory but does not pursue its implications? (I’m no political scientist, but it’s often seemed to me that starting a revolution on the basis that Marxist theory demands it is like performing crop selections and claiming it’s a Darwinist activity.)
Amanda: Is there clear pressure from the administration on the Fed? I haven’t heard of any, but I just might have missed it.
From the first moment this administration was selected by SCOTUS, they have been pressuring the Fed to do its bidding.
Greenspan, who had a mixed relationship with Clinton, immediately began to say good things about insane tax cuts and interest rate cuts, despite decrying those very ideas before the Bushites took office.
I couldn’t explain in detail how the mechanism works, but it is quite obvious there are ways to get the Fed to work the way certain people want it to, regardless of the effects those things might have on the rest of the population…
I don’t imagine they like broadcasting their under the table pressure.
Cris,
I’d say that unlike biology or astrophyics, social science necessarily has a political/moral content. If Marx is _scientifically_ correct, then a decision not to counteract the tendency for the bourgeoisie to be driven to worse and worse exploitation in various forms is a decision to side with the ruling class against the majority of humanity. I think people have enough of a tendency to conscience that those students of Marx who decide to do this (origin of many neocons) or those who independently rediscover Marx’s insights but refuse to come to his moral conclusions suffer so much crisis of conscience that they wind up falsifying their science to convince themselves they are OK, much like astronomers who know that Kepler’s Laws work but also don’t want the Inquisition to come after them if they say that planets don’t orbit Earth or that orbits aren’t made of circles would invent more and more wonky epicycle theories. And every now and then someone would make a name for himself by pointing out how Copernican or even, God forbid, _Keplerian_ some of these wonky theories look, and everyone would scatter.
And because of the moral and political content of history and sociology and poli sci and economics, this epicyclic bad faith irritates people’s consciences and stirs up unrest and derision among the less-educated masses. Everyone may “know” Marx can’t be right, because look, look, _STALIN!_ (Not to mention the unspeakable evil of Pol Pot and of course, worst of all, Castro!) But where is our more useful alternative approach?
I happen to doubt that anyone can _plan_ the revolution, but I think the proletarian revolution Marx predicted may well still be in the cards, indeed it may have been premature to expect it any generation earlier than our own, when capitalism at last rules the world unchallenged and can develop fully according to its own logic.
Amanda: I guess I think the Fed would have acted this way of its own accord, no matter who was President. Bush appointed Bernanke to make the bond markets happy. If he wants someone who would take orders, he would have nominated some Republican party hack. Bernanke wanted to establish he was tough on inflation to impress the bond markets. The bond markets hate wage increases. The bond markets are king here, not Bush.
Mark: While I can tell that you find Marx personally inspiring, I think it’s time that we move beyond him. “Scientifically” is the standard by which Marxism fails most dramatically. Marx made many predictions about the future, most of which have failed to come true. In many important respects he was wrong, not because of any particular failure of reasoning on his part, but simply because there is no way a person living in 1870 could forsee the future in the way that Marx imagined he could. Many of the analytical categories Marx worked with (such as proletariat versus bourgeosie) fit the modern world awkwardly.
And Stalin, while a convenient rhetorical trope for the right, really did exist.
Walt, I have to disagree. I think Mark bringing up Marx is perfectly appropriate…
I’ve read a fair amount of Marx and Engels, and I have to say that much of what they are describing is remarkably similar to stuff that happens right now.
While their solutions to problems don’t always hold up, they hold a unique place in recognizing that capitalism (as actually practiced, not some idealized fantasy) has had, and continues to have huge problems, especially when it comes to fairness and morality.
The fact the wingnuts have been trying so hard to throw off the minimal government controls we have, some of which have been in place for the last 100-years, is greatly increasing the potential for damage inherent in capitalist economics.
The current pricing of oil-based products, and the obscene profits being made by the oil companies, and the scamming of the energy markets by firms like Enron are just a small taste of what’s to come…
How do Marx and Engels hold a unique place in recognizing that capitalism had, and continues to have huge problems, especially when it comes to fairness and morality? Capitalism had critics before them; even socialism predated them. What makes Marx’ thought unique is the notion that history is the history of class struggle, and that capitalism is inevitably doomed.
The actual content of Marxism is much more specific than “capitalism is bad”, or that there are elites who manipulate government policies for their own benefit. It sounds to me like Mark is trying to resurrect the whole edifice, otherwise he wouldn’t emphasized Marxism’s “scientific” aspects.
Speaking of Marxism, the title of this post is apt. But as a friend of mine was reminding me, Marx didn’t discover class analysis. Everyone knew about it already. What Marx had to explain was the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat, in order to destroy the capitalist class.
Greenspan was pursuing the very same policies throughout the Clinton administration. The US ruling class is completely united on enforcing poverty. Trying to claim that this it’s just the Republicans behind it is absurd.
MikeEss: I have a reply for you, but if you’re not seeing it, it’s awaiting moderation. Probably not enough curse-words.
Foolish Owl: Do you actually believe in the necessity of a dictatorship of the proletariat?
FoolishOwl, I definitely agree that Clinton was the best Republican president we’ve had since Eisenhower. That he was labeled a Democrat says much about the state of politics in this country…
Walt, I still don’t see your reply…
Nothing nasty I hope. You shouldn’t take anything I said (yet) personally…
MikeEss, I accused you of eating babies. And using Heinz ketchup to do it, which is the height of tackiness.
I also put mustard. Does that make it less tacky?
I have a naive take on Marx’s works, not having actually read any of them, just being familiar with the “Cliff Notes” version, but I was wondering whether any of those more familiar with them would agree with this statement:
Karl Marx was asking some very good, necessary questions, but didn’t necessarily come up with the right/best answers.
Would that be reasonable?
John, I would agree in general…
Marx and Engels do get into a lot of weird language to describe the situation of labor in the 19th century. But the essence of what they observed and remarked on seems true seems true. (Since they were commenting primarily on industrial England, which the Right seems to want to bring back here, it seems especially appropriate…)
I would even argue that the terms “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie” are still reasonable to apply with some understanding that the definitions of those terms must be modified.
Overall, I look at Marx/Engels similar to the way many psychologists might look at Freud. Some of the details might be off, many of the solutions are probably unrealistic, but they were people who attempted to apply logic and science to sociologically difficult problems. That should be recognized, and the valuable ideas (of which there are quite a few) should be taken seriously…
Definitely. The alternative is perpetuating the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which is what we’ve got, including in so-called socialist countries. The dictatorship of the proletariat means the working class organizing itself as a class and taking power directly.
Mike, Walt, et al,
I eventually read Marx after some years attempting to become a physicist and when what practical, useful work I had ever done had been in engineering. So when I read Capital, I didn’t see a lot of mumbo-jumbo, I saw a systematic attempt to define working conceptual models of the realities of capitalist production and the society that system demands to operate in. And those models _work_.
What people who haven’t actually _read_ Marx, or who read him mainly with the intent of proving where he went wrong (for it is a prior assumption he _must_ be wrong and anyone who says otherwise is naive, sick, evil or stupid, I think Walt is demonstrating that social imperative clearly enough) think is that _Capital_ is a cookbook for revolution. Sorry, it isn’t. It has no roadmap to socialist utopia. What is is is an attempt to model _capitalism_. You can indeed draw your own conclusions about “What Is To Be Done?” But as far as I have ever seen, assertions that Marx has been “proven” wrong boil down to 2 things–
1) He _must_ be mistaken because it has been a century and more since he published.
2) The evils of actually existing socialism speak for themselves.
As for 1), well, go read Capital and then pick up a more analytical member of the media species–an issue of the Economist, for instance–and see if you don’t get an eeire sense of deja vu. I know I did. If you have correctly analyzed the core logic of capitalism, you can expect logically sound deductions from the core axioms to hold indefinitely. Indeed the world has come to approach the model of capitalism Marx laid out more and more closely as time has passed, because capitalism, if we haven’t noticed, has been triumphing.
2)Well, Marx was clearly wrong about one thing–the political strength of working-class movements and the ability of working-class people to overcome manipulation from outside and from within their own movements. He very confidently predicted that conditions for proletarian revolution _within the leading capitalist powers_ would ripen if not in his lifetime, shortly after his death.
I’d say that bourgeois Europe had a very close call in the immediate aftermath of WWI, but since then, there has been no prospect of proletarian revolution in the developed world of the ruling capitalist powers.
This may be changing today, perhaps because only now has capital been able to set aside all rivals and is at last free to develop society according to its own logic. We see that this leads straight to further class polarization, increased turbulence at all social levels, the undermining of all the moral pretensions of the ruling classes, and withal spectacular failures of competence even on their own terms. In the past, it was possible to enlist the working classes of powerful capitalist nations into national solidarity, in part by what might be called social bribery (higher wages, moderate socialism) largely at the expense of Third World economies, and in part because, I think, First World elites were held to a standard of statesmanlike competence by the competitive threat of the Soviet alternative and the possibility that Third World peoples might elect to go down the Leninist or some third route, under the shelter of the superpower conflict to more or less protect them from First World retaliation and manipulation. The fact is, we (and other First World goverments and private interests) did a lot of retaliating and manipulating, but a certain standard of diplomacy and general competence was necessary to enable it and give cover for it. With that “threat” gone, does capitalist society produce, on its own, competent leadership, even on its own terms? You decide.
But Marx would have said “no,” and not only did he say it, he showed the mechanisms at work. Assume if you like that these mechanisms can’t possibly be the ones actually operating. Fine. How would _you_ describe them, in ways that give a better sense of what has happened, is happening, and is likely to happen next?
I’ve come back to 1) without fully addressing 2). Well, on one hand we have _not_ had the proletarian revolution Marx sketchily described as the being the foundation of the _next_ social order, the one he did _not_ describe or analyze or give any instructions for. It simply has not happened yet, and if it ever does, Marx’s works can only at best suggest things to try and remind us why certain tactics probably _won’t_ work. But socialism will be the creation of the people who make it, not the embodiment of some prophet’s vision.
On the other hand we’ve had big revolutions, of people with good claims to the title “proletarian,” which did indeed create societies with alternative economies and systems to the world-capitalist ones. We are often told to take their viciousnesses and generally speaking, ultimate failures, as proof positive that Marx must have been wrong. But you know, the first place he went wrong with these countries is that he didn’t predict they would ever happen in the first place.
When I look at the tragic and frustrating histories of the USSR, China, or Cuba, I see another side, however. There is no reason to believe any of these countries would have developed as far as they have in the direction of meeting the standards of the industrialized First world in terms of literacy, medical care, general level of technology in use, etc, had they remained normal countries in the capitalist sphere. On the contrary, every one of them had been suffering spectacular forms of exploitation and general misery before their revolutions. If Stalin was morally no better than Tsar Nicholas, I think it takes a pretty strange mind to conclude he was worse. Unless of course one takes the angle that Stalin’s machinery was after all more competent and capable and therefore did more damage. Very true. He also led the Russians to do far more damage to the invading Germans than the Tsar had been able (or apparently, willing) to do in WWI. Two edges of the same sword.
When we remember that Capital is not about experiments in socialism but an analysis of capitalism, I think that aspect of Marx has never been proven wrong, remains useful, in fact is becoming more useful and directly applicable every day. If this makes me a crazed voodoo doctor raising up a long-dead zombie, well, my ambition when I went to Caltech was to be a mad scientist.
The conclusion “for it is a prior assumption he _must_ be wrong and anyone who says otherwise is naive, sick, evil or stupid, I think Walt is demonstrating that social imperative clearly enough” comes from where, exactly? A well-developed persecution complex? Marx is an incredibly widely-read author. When I was in college, the most frequently assigned book in American colleges was “the Marx-Engels Reader”. While Marx does not have much influence in economics, essentially all sociologists read Marx. I don’t think Marx is necessarily wrong, except in so far as someone writing in 1870 about the future would necessarily be wrong.
But Marx was wrong, about a great deal of things. He predicted that business cycle would worsen with each go-round, until, in his words:
“Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”
Instead, economists and governments figured out how to smooth out the business cycle, and recessions have become milder, not stronger. The proletariat did not become immiserated under capitalism, they became better off than their peasant ancestors. Capitalism did not force them to become a revolutionary force, instead in the United States they have almost totally disappeared as political actors. Instead, the bourgeosie itself grew as a class. Any class conflict in the United States today pits one branch of the bourgeosie against another just as much as it pits the bourgeosie against the proletariat.
I’m not saying there is nothing of value in Marx. You can certainly draw constructive parallels between things he says and events of our time. But if you want to claim, as Mark does, that Marx provides a genuinely scientific of the workings of history, then as a scientific theory, Marxism has been falsified by events. Perhaps we can find something of value in what’s left, but for a true scientific understanding of history, we’re on our own.
I had a big reply to Mark which seems to have gotten lost, so I’ll summarize: Marxism as a scientific theory has been falsified by events. It made a series of predictions, that everyone who was not a capitalist would be thrown into the proletariat, that the proletariat would be increasingly immiserated, that by the inevitable logic of capitalism the proletariat would become a revolutionary class, and that the business cycle would get worse and worse until the revolution broke up. None of these predictions have come true. When that happens to a scientific theory, we call that scientific theory false. Maybe parts of Marx are illuminating for the present period, but to make a scientific theory of history out of them, you must begin again.
Foolish Owl, if I had to choose between a dictatorship of the proletariat and a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie , I would take a dictatorship of the bourgeosie. The bourgeoisie is the genuine revolutionary class. (And bourgeoisie means what it means: Office workers, bourgeoisie. Computer programmers, bourgeoisie. College professors, bourgeoisie. Social workers, bourgeoisie.) If anything, the history of the progressive politics in the twentieth century is the bourgeoisie throwing off feudal institutions such as patriarchal marriage and heteronormativity. And I’m speaking from experience here: I grew up in a proletarian family, and I learned my progressive politics from my bourgeois classmates at my bourgeois college.
“The US ruling class is completely united on enforcing poverty. Trying to claim that this it’s just the Republicans behind it is absurd”
This is, sadly enough, true. An excellent primer on what’s been happening for the last 30 years or so, specifically as it relates to our tax system is “Perfectly Legal - The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich - and Cheat Everybody Else” by David Cay Johnston.
Mike:
I’d recommend reading Revolutionary Rehearsals, on revolutions from 1968 to 1980, in each of which the working class played a major role, and in which there was a potential for a socialist revolution.
Not true. There WAS the long boom that followed WWII and lasted until the early 70s, which had Marxist economists stumped, until the development of the theory of the permanent arms economy. Since the 70s the economic cycle has returned with something like its classic pattern.
By the way, I believe Stalin’s rise to power is best understood as a counterrevolution that succeeded in claiming the title of the revolution it defeated. Look at the policies enacted in 1918 that were reversed under Stalin. Look at the fate of the old Bolsheviks. It was precisely in order to destroy the authentic revolutionary tradition that Stalin established a police state.
Walt:
None of the examples you gave are members of the bourgeoisie. Office workers, most computer programmers, some college professors, and nearly all social workers are working class. The bourgeoisie have not been the middle class since the Middle Ages.
Broce:
While I feel the need to defend Marxism, I don’t expect many people to be persuaded by that just now. But I do hope that people will start to recognize that the Democrats and the Republicans really do share the same fundamental purposes, and those purposes are opposed to the welfare of the majority of people.
Thanks, Broce, for bringing this back to Amanda’s point. Which I was trying to underscore by bringing in Marx, who said this was going on, had been going on all along, and would continue to go on until captialism is replaced or we are all dead.
Walt, your objections deserve a proper reply, but not here. If I can I’ll write something on my own blog, where it belongs.
Before 1980 of course I’d have agreed with you that clearly the general trajectory of capitalist society had diverged from the Marxist prediction. But I was a young college student in the mid-1980s, and that is when the word “homeless” became a regular part of the lexicon. That is when our policies toward Third World peoples lost whatever veneer of humanism they’d been coated with and became clearly a matter of naked self-interest. That is when US domestic politics more and more clearly disregarded the interests of the poorest Americans and became blatantly the interests of the rich alone. And that, Walt, is when, after about one generation of _apparent_ moderation of the business cycle peaking in the apparent solution of that problem in the go-go 60’s, when I was born, after entering the bizarre and frustrating thickets of the stagflation of the ’70s, returned to old-fashioned boom-bust cycles with brutal, unmitigated downswings that bashed down working and formerly working people.
As I say, I could go on and did, but it doesn’t belong here.
But the short answer to your rejoinder to Marx and me is–yep, it _looked_ that way until about 1970 or so. Since then, take a look at every one of your distinctions and honestly ask, have these trends not all been reversed? Have we not returned to the same mucky, fetid mainstream of capitalism Marx described?
By the way, when Marx said “bourgeoisie,” he meant _capitalists_. That is, the modern class system _emerged_ from the medieval Third Estate, in which a rich guild-master and his youngest apprentice were thrown together into one legally defined class, and the townsfolk (from which we get the term) in particular had solidarity as much forced on them as generated by their own cohesive action. But with the triumph of that class in sweeping aside the old system, the _leaders_ of that old class take on the title and claim to _be_ the class, and a new system has evolved in which we all claim or pretend to be “middle-class” equals, but in fact everyone knows there are the people who matter and the ordinary folks who don’t. In a strong, healthy capitalist society everyone claims to be bourgeios, but the real Bourgeoisie are in fact a tiny minority of capitalists.
So in the confused, mythic sense, where “bourgeois” = “middle class”=normal, sane, loyal citizen and not some crazed bohemian hippie rebel types, yes, that class grew. By definition. But in the sense Marx used the term, to equate to the capitalists, do you seriously think that since 1970 or so the rich class has actually _broadened_? Deepened yes, they’ve got more money. But the middle classes you seem to have confounded with the rich have been badly eroded at both ends. A tiny minority of them have swelled the ranks of the absurdly rich; a fraction have risen to modest wealth and gated communities. But most have either held off total disaster as their overall standing and options slide grimly downward, or dropped completely out of middle-class pretentions into grinding poverty.
Mark, thanks for that last post. I didn’t know how to get all that put together…
You definitions of “bourgeoisâ€? really help. A lot of people have a totally skewed idea of what that phrase means in the modern context. There are a hell of a lot fewer “bourgeoisâ€? around than most people understand…
Bottom line: Most of us are (as Orwell would say) “Proles”, and we are likely to stay that way regardless of the party in power…
Is anyone still reading this? It’s scrolled off the front page, so I don’t know if it makes any sense for me to reply.
Because us proles hardly count, after all.
Seriously Mike, the total proletarianization of the entire so-called “professional” class is one of the most amazing, outrageous, and perfectly Marxist phenomena of the past generation. Thirty years ago, would the phrase “doctor’s union” have made any sense whatsoever in the USA? The MD was the very paradigm of how to escape the basic class system. “Become a doctor!” What better contradiction of the Marxist concept that all labor would be subordinated to capital could there be than the example of the earnest, hard-working student who might just as well be son or daughter of coal miners as the country club set, who by sheer work and devotion masters a skill valued by all, literally saves lives, and has no need to become a capitalist themself in order to live well when taking well-earned rest from their heroic labors?
And yet in the past thirty years have we not witnessed the transformation of the medical profession from an array of independent professionals to hired servants of medical corporations and HMOs? Lawyers are going down the same path. Long before that engineers and even academic scientists were mere cogs, if once highly respected cogs, in for-profit enterprises owned by someone else.
The mystique of the middle class is based on the idea that between the magnate who commands the labors of others (already under suspicion in 1776) and the laborer utterly dependent on the paycheck doled out by these big shots, there was space for independent, self-employed people. During the very era we celebrate as divorcing ourselves from the iron hand of Marx’s class polarization thanks to the New Deal reforms and post-WWII prosperity and power, sociologist C Wright Mills was extensively documenting how the old middle classes of independent farmers and urban professionals were being replaced with a fake “middle class” that objectively speaking was already proletarian in that they did own the enterprises they worked for, or in the case of “independent contractors” or retailers owned them only nominally, and were in either case just as abjectly dependent on the whims of a small class of real owners just as much as if they just drew a plain paycheck. But there was an all-important _social_ distinction between “blue collar” and “white collar.” In our leaner, meaner generation the extra expense of maintaining that distinction, and the inefficiencies of indirect control, have given way, and with it the _illusion_ of the continuity of the higher-ranking workers with the old independent middle class that once did provide an alternative paradigm to the richest owners defining the national interest.
The New Deal reforms did not actually transform American society. At some cost to the owning class, they saved their butts by lubricating and placating the clanking of the machinery as Marx’s mechanisms ground on inexoribly. Today our rulers dispense with the lubricant. Nothing fundamental has changed, except that the upholstery has worn away.
“I think increasing that gap is the plan. In other words, the redistribution of wealth upwards and the accompanying spread of poverty is a feature, not a bug.” Well said, Amanda. I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Quotes from the pdf: “In reality, over a period of years virtually all of Ohio’s existing Medicaid program should be transferred to the private insurance marketplace that will be created through the Buckeye Health Connection. Any suggestion that the correct approach to address the uninsured in Ohio is through growing the existing Medicaid program is flatly wrong.”
I typed many words here, sometimes effecting sarcasm, other times merely pointing out trifling facts, but erased them all because nothing I wrote wholly and concisely enunciates my feelings of despair for the future and abandonment by my government.
But I will say this:
The filthy stinking rich who own congress will not be satified until we have another Great Depression. They are vampires feasting on our blood a drop at a time, and most of us are so facinated by the process as each wee drop of blood passes from us to them that we do not notice our limbs failing from lack of care.
There’s no logical reason to assume the next presidential election is going to solve any of the problems which are facing this country.
On one side we have Big Corp pushing laws which benefit no one but the extremely wealthy. Then we have the terrified religious sheeple who don’t feel up to thinking logically for themselves right now, thankya verymuch. Then, dead last, there’s us, a minority both in terms of numbers and power. Hope you haven’t forgotten about the Diebold voting machines still in use.
In Russia, government owns YOU!!!
\What, this still isn’t fark?
Ever watch Scrubs? It’s funny that we now understand a comedy in which a major element is that three of the main characters are doctors, who are broke all the time.
Doctors are a particularly interesting case. Abortion was criminalized in the 19th century, and prosecution encouraged in the US, by the AMA and other professional associations of doctors — even as doctors, through social and economic pressures, were compelled to perform abortions regularly. It was the AMA, not religious groups, that was insisting that life began at conception, not at “quickening.” The attacks on abortion were part of a process of the medical profession’s attempt to establish a reputation for professionalism and morality, and official legal status — in other words, doctors were striving for bourgeois respectability, to secure their middle class status.
The middle class is, however, by nature an unstable class position.
As hospitals became the dominant form of medical practice, doctors lost independence, and were reduced to mid-level actors in a bureaucratic system. With hospitals systematizing the rules on when abortions could be performed, doctors were no longer able to condemn abortion on the one hand and perform them on the other. It seems to me that there’s a connection between the medical profession’s proletarianization and its transition from opposing to supporting abortion rights.
As Walt so smugly observed, the thread is dead and I suppose no one will see any of this. Too bad as it is dead on Amanda’s topic!
We just can’t think clearly about what has happened and is happening to our society if we don’t factor in a scientifically useful model of how our economy works and how it underlies society. I’m wide open to a model that works that has nothing to do with Marxist concepts–except that those work so well it is pretty hard to believe there can be one that doesn’t essentially recap exactly what Marx had to say.
I guess if anyone ever reads this other than FoolishOwl or the other handful of people here who have actually, you know, _read_ Marx (as opposed to academic regurgitations and cut-and-paste jobs like the Marx/Engels Reader) I should put in the disclaimer that I know Marx and even the best of his followers had some major blind spots. The man was personally a sexist pig for instance.
Nevertheless, if we don’t look at the way that economic relations integrate with social and political dynamics in a systematic way, and if we have no useful model for predicting how the economy and its symbiotic political system will evolve, we are flying blind, and any valuable insights into gender or race relations for instance that we may have will be overwhelmed by these unknown tides.
From my own academic studies it seems clear that no academic tradtion in the West ever took Marx seriously _as an economist_. The moment Capital v 1 was out, a few academic economists began “revising” him and trying to build their own careers around plagarizing him–but selectively, and the selections always impaired the science. But most economists reacted by retreating into “marginalism.” They redefined economics to render Marx’s whole inquiry irrelevant. As a side effect, they rendered their own “science” even more irrelevant, but they continued to be supported in their careers, which was the main thing for them.
The tradition of political economy Marx responded to and joined was concerned, as Adam Smith’s title suggested, with “The Wealth of Nations.” From the early 17th century essays through Smith and the rival French school of the Physiocrats, on in Smith’s wake through Ricardo and Malthus, the focus was on what is “wealth,” where does it come from, how should society be organized in order to maximize it, who should get what. This is what political economy was all about. Marx, IMHO, came up with solid resolutions of the various scientific paradoxes and unsolved problems the revered giants who preceeded him had left. That to do so he had to turn the basis and message of the science around makes sense to me. Academics generally are patronized by the ruling levels of any society that supports them. Generally this does not distort their science much, but when they turn to matters of human affairs, obviously their judgement will be tilted by their obligation to justify the system that put them into their privileged positions. If they forget to do this, their patrons will remind them! So in social sciences we can expect a paradox–the mainstream of the academy will systematically drift _away_ from observable fact whenever clear sight of the latter calls into question the power ploys of the masters.
In the West, the economists reacted to Capital by declaring economics to now be about the logic of individual economic decision-making, sidestepping the whole matter of where wealth comes from or any large view about what should become of it. In so doing, they created a kind of secular religion of the “free market,” which after all their predecessors had also been trying to do and which businessmen and politicians had been doing on a pragmatic basis all along. Academic economics is basically PR for captalism, which is why business and governments never take economists seriously except for seeking their blessing for putting capitalists in charge of things, or sometimes baptizing non-capitalist measures “kosher” for restricted use.
In the USSR and other Leninist countries, Marx’s science was as effectually cocooned as it was neglected in the West, for parallel reasons. What the better Marxists among the Bolsheviks, such as Lenin and Trotsky, were counting on after taking power in November 1917, was triggering the “real revolution” in the West. They never imagined that Russia alone could become the nucleus of a new socialist order. One reason Trotsky eventually was driven from power and into exile by Stalin was that he had a clear Marxist understanding, and that told him that by the mid-1920s when all chance for successful revolution in the West had past, that the USSR was on mighty thin ice at best. He was paralyzed politically because he had nothing hopeful to promise any potential followers in Russia. Stalin on the other hand was able, by his pragmatic disregard of bad news from Marx, to bluff through, and the repressive machinery he controlled rammed into being a sort of a caricature of a Socialist society. Where the West reviled and scorned Marx, his regime worshiped him, but embalmed his science in academic machinery designed to guarantee that the mummified prophets Marx and Lenin would say only what was expedient for Stalin at the moment.
For exactly parallel reasons then, there has never been any period where Marxist economics has been taken seriously either in the West, where it applies, or in the various anti-capitalist governments, which could benefit from a clear understanding of Western capitalist dynamics but would suffer worse from the exposure of their own questionable underpinnings. No exploitive society can afford to have its own mechanisms exposed clearly for public scrutiny. Even one that works differently from the capitalist kettle cannot afford to call it black, for fear that the example of how to clearly analyze one society will enable critics in its own society to expose the soot of their own anticapitalist pot.
This is why Marx has been welcomed as a foundation for schools of sociology, political science, psychology, literature and art criticism in general, but never in economics. In the other fields Marx’s insights are peripheral and undermined by Marx’s dependence on economic arguments which are refuted by being ignored; thus academics can safely take what is useful to them and disavow any implications they don’t like by saying that after all the economics is no good.
But ironically, Marx’s economics are rock solid, it is the mainstream academic economists who have the most incredibly bad track record.
Mark - great read, good points all.
Thanks. I find myself defending Marx mainly because few other people do. But it is truly amazing how many people who have apparently never read or heard of Marxist ideas even secondhand wind up reinventing his wheels, partially. The major effect of what discussion of Marx there is in academia is to inocculate people against thinking that parallels his; I know this was true in my own case anyway. If I found myself agreeing with something I had been told was “Marxist” or heard someone saying my own ideas sounded Marxist, I’d rein myself in and try to show where I disagreed with Marx.
I think that if Marx was indeed right about a number of things, it would follow that this regime in academia and in public discourse and political policy would result in preventing straightforward, reasonable solutions to particular problems from being considered, or implemented.
And the amazing thing is, in the past generation, have we not observed our mainstream rulers getting more and more explicit and overt in refusing to even discuss more and more topics, because to do so–even to think about some of these things!–would be “class warfare?”
Marx clearly went wrong in his assumption that working-class movements would prevail politically. But then again, his whole theory of revolution was predicated on the idea that the ruling class would resist, violently.
I do think that our ruling class is indeed aware more and more consciously, that they are in a war against all of humanity, and it is getting more and more reasonable to view what they do as deliberate moves in a game of chess against all of us.
Today is the anniversary of the levees breaking in New Orleans after Katrina. Contemplate what has happened there–and who predicted what, and which of them were right. Consider the occupation of Iraq, the way the occupation of Afghanistan is falling to the Taliban, that Iran is being set up as the great power in the Middle East and that plans are already underway to answer that challenge with nuclear strikes and invasion. Consider that the IRS has shut down its division that works to collect unpaid taxes from taxpayers who owe millions, but is about to privatize collections for those who owe only thousands and that this transaction will slash expected collections from $9 billion to about $3 billion, while expected overhead (that is, profits for the collection agencies) will shoot up from 3 cents on the dollar to 22. Consider that according to Rachel Maddow today, a whistleblower who used to work for Lockheed-Martin reports that a program to refurbish old ships into Coast Guard cutters he was working on is producing dangerous clunkers with deficient sensor systems and stuff that breaks down in cold weather on the decks–for which he was fired of course.
Wow, good. Dense, but good. I’ll need some lapsang and I’ll come back for a second go.
Amazing things happen the moment you mention the old man’s name in polite conversation…
anyway, something before all this to which I wanted to respond:
Why do they want a few rich people and a lot of poor people?
…Or, as I fear, is this just the first step in a plan to eliminate large segments of the population? Instead of the Nazi’s “Jewish Problemâ€?, they feel they are faced with a “Poor Problemâ€??
They have a solution in mind. Aggressive, expansionistic war, imperialism and direct hegemony in fact, across the globe, requiring a pretty much endless supply of boots on a vast array of grounds.
Mark, I gave that a quick read, and it sounds about right — especially the bit about how Lenin, Trotsky, etc., counted on the revolution to spread west. It almost did. Most people miss the importance of that.
Mark: I wasn’t being smug. Usually scrolling off the front page is death for a thread. (I would say more, but this time I assume the thread really is dead.)