At 06:48 30/08/2011, REH wrote:
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-29/give-marx-a-chance-to-save-the-world-economy-commentary-by-george-magnus.html>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-29/give-marx-a-chance-to-save-the-world-economy-commentary-by-george-magnus.html
Interesting.
Karl Marx was quite right about capitalism in the sense that the
modern consumer goods-based economy is now coming to an end. He was
quite wrong when forecasting the increasing impoverishment of the
working class in his own time. Fooled by unrepresentative statistics
supplied by Engels, Marx didn't realise that the worker was doing
better in the factories of the northern and midland cities of England
than he had ever done previously in the countryside and, moreover,
that he was becoming more prosperous all through the 19th century,
particularly during the latter half. Living in distant London with
his aristocratic wife, fathering a child with a servant, occasionally
playing with stocks and shares, and never visiting a factory shop
floor in his life, Marx entirely overlooked the automation that was
already taking place in great leaps and bounds in the cotton
factories and the metal-bashing industries of England.
Thus he could never have envisaged the time when automation seriously
began to dump workers and their children in their millions into
lifetime unemployment in America and Western Europe from about the
1980s. Nor could he have realized that treasury civil servants would
allow clever young financiers to create giant heaps of credit-money,
the debts of which are now already impoverishing millions more -- as
well as whole governments. (Marx had astonishingly little idea of the
way finance worked, even as London was becoming the financial centre
of the whole world at that time.)
Polymathic though Marx undoubtedly was, most of his ideas, except the
class structure of society, have little relevance today given the
huge events that have taken place since his day. The irony is that
Marx's own class -- the highly educated upper middle-class, and
necessarily inter-dependent with the rich -- is the one that is
pulling itself even further away from the masses and living quite
comfortably, thank you very much. It is likely to be the only one
that survives in reasonably good heart in the coming years as the
same class in the emergent countries which is now burrowing into the
technologies of the West and sharing whatever prosperity still exists.
As for George Magnus's own nostrums, they are no better than dozens
of other varieties which are being hawked about. Hanging his own onto
some supposed relevance to Marx's ideas won't take his any further
than most others'.
KSH
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/08/
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