Marx’s Revenge: How Class Struggle Is Shaping the World

[struggle4progress]

With workers around the world burdened by joblessness and stagnant incomes, Marx’s critique that capitalism is inherently unjust and self-destructive cannot be so easily dismissed
By Michael Schuman
March 25, 2013

... With the global economy in a protracted crisis, and workers around the world burdened by joblessness, debt and stagnant incomes, Marx’s biting critique of capitalism — that the system is inherently unjust and self-destructive — cannot be so easily dismissed. Marx theorized that the capitalist system would inevitably impoverish the masses as the world’s wealth became concentrated in the hands of a greedy few, causing economic crises and heightened conflict between the rich and working classes. “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole,” Marx wrote ...

Workers of the world are growing angrier and demanding their fair share of the global economy. From the floor of the U.S. Congress to the streets of Athens to the assembly lines of southern China, political and economic events are being shaped by escalating tensions between capital and labor to a degree unseen since the communist revolutions of the 20th century. How this struggle plays out will influence the direction of global economic policy, the future of the welfare state, political stability in China, and who governs from Washington to Rome. What would Marx say today? “Some variation of: ‘I told you so,’” says Richard Wolff, a Marxist economist at the New School in New York. “The income gap is producing a level of tension that I have not seen in my lifetime.”

ensions between economic classes in the U.S. are clearly on the rise. Society has been perceived as split between the “99%” (the regular folk, struggling to get by) and the “1%” (the connected and privileged superrich getting richer every day). In a Pew Research Center poll released last year, two-thirds of the respondents believed the U.S. suffered from “strong” or “very strong” conflict between rich and poor, a significant 19-percentage-point increase from 2009, ranking it as the No. 1 division in society.

The heightened conflict has dominated American politics. The partisan battle over how to fix the nation’s budget deficit has been, to a great degree, a class struggle. Whenever President Barack Obama talks of raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans to close the budget gap, conservatives scream he is launching a “class war” against the affluent. Yet the Republicans are engaged in some class struggle of their own. The GOP’s plan for fiscal health effectively hoists the burden of adjustment onto the middle and poorer economic classes through cuts to social services. Obama based a big part of his re-election campaign on characterizing the Republicans as insensitive to the working classes. GOP nominee Mitt Romney, the President charged, had only a “one-point plan” for the U.S. economy — “to make sure that folks at the top play by a different set of rules” ...

http://business.time.com/2013/03/25/marxs-revenge-how-class-struggle-is-shaping-the-world/

[Journeyman]

1. Not so much his "revenge" as it is his validation. . .

[struggle4progress]

2. That might be too much to expect from a Time magazine headline

[Journeyman]

3. How true. . .

[dimbear]

4. Marx is just ticked off cuz his system flopped.

Hey, the world gave it a good hard try. Hang in there, Cuba!

[struggle4progress]

5. Marx can be read as a theoretician of history, as an organizer, or as a moral voice crying out

against the mass impoverishment of industrial workers. He was not always right, and he was not always particularly pleasant in his rhetoric of people he disagreed with. And by now, much of his work is about a century and a half out of date

But IMO he added a very useful tool to the toolkit of would-be progressive political reformers -- namely, the notion of class analysis. As a method for understanding how people form their ideas, and for tracing some of the fault lines in society it can be extremely useful. Marx himself, in his specific uses of it, did not apply it blindly: he took into account local traditions and local history. Its uses by mere ideologues, of course, have been worthless -- but it can be a helpful method whenever one is willing to do the hard research necessary for the class analysis

[dimbear]

6. It's a shame Herr Marx cannot have a peek at the world of 2013.

That would be one astonished chap.

[struggle4progress]

7. In some ways. In other ways, he'd see a familiar landscape but displaced from the locations

in which he encountered it. Workers in the electronics manufacturing industry in China, for example, might seem to be an entirely familiar proletariat to him

[dimbear]

8. Given the lapse of time, Marx might well have expected

that the dictatorship of the proletariat would have in fact run its course, and that the time for the enjoyment of Utopia would have at last arrived. That would jar against present day China.

He might not enjoy reading German history, and comparing the relative success of East and West Germany during the years of the division. Can't be sure.

[struggle4progress]

9. What's commonly called "Marxism" may not have much to do with the actual thinking of Marx,

who in response to some early "Marxists" himself said "Ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste" -- that is, I am certainly not a Marxist

[dimbear]

10. The sort of remark you expect from painters when their

works start to catch, but they've moved on.

I wonder what his next period was going to be.

[fasttense]

11. Marx never set up a political or economic system of his own.

He only commented on the all the economic systems. He was very critical of capitalism.

So saying that anyone tried out Marx's economic system makes no sense.

He did see communism and socialism as less destructive than capitalism.

But I do NOT believe any country has ever put the means of production into the workers hands. That is instead of CEOs and boards of directors or a government political bureau running the means of production the workers at the plant make all those decisions. That has never, ever been tried on a mass scale by any country that I know of.

[rug]

13. The October Revolution was 96 year ago.

How long did it take capitalism to supplant feudalism?

[dimbear]

14. Good point.

Not looking to see Marxism pull this one out, tho.

[Democrats_win]

12. Das Kapital is Kaput!

Look how things have changed. Just a few years ago, most Americans liked their jobs. Now, according to a recent survey, most Americans don't like their jobs. As the 2008 "flash depression" began people held signs saying that capitalism has failed.

The "benefits" of having read Marx is that we're watching his predictions come true. Worse, the Democrats who could save it, as they did during the Great Depression, don't have the will or the power to do it this time. Self-destructive, INDEED!