Arthur,
Yes, a useful article and a corrective to those who think that Marx --
surely one of the most powerful thinkers of the last couple of centuries --
was entirely misguided. He wasn't. His grasp of history and economic
development was enormous and Peter Hudis is doing a service in setting the
record straight and giving a more balanced view. Marx's view of history was
panoramic and he rightly viewed capitalism as arising in the sixteenth
century, long before the revolutionary changes in industrial production
that started to occur in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
Where Marx went wrong is that, like most thinkers and writers of his era
(and in several different disciplines), he conceived the society of his day
as being a sort of final accomplishment of modern man. So, when he said
that capital and innovation would drive down the cost of production, and
hence profit, and hence the wages of the workers �leading to increasing
impoverishment of the masses -- he didn't anticipate that, remarkable
though the products of his times were, further products and services would
continue to arise leading to renewed profits and higher wages for the
workers in the new industries.
To support his view that the working classes were becoming increasingly
impoverished, it is a pity he relied on the statistics which Engels had
collected. Unfortunately, these statistics were already largely out of date
and didn't reflect the fact that, from the time he wrote the Communist
Manifesto (1848), the standard of living of the ordinary worker was already
improving in leaps and bounds -- something like a four- or five-fold
increase in real terms from then to the turn of the century. Also, Marx
could never have envisaged that the ordinary worker in the West today owns
a significant proportion of modern capital -- namely, the pension funds.
And, of course, the dramatic increase in the standard of living of the
masses was due primarily to the vast expansion in globalisation. Even now
the proportion of goods traded across the world compared with total
production is only now reaching that of the 1880s and 90s. No doubt that
will proportion will rise if we don't have too much resistance to the WTO
(either from nation states, or violent protestors).
Marx was well-read in almost every discipline of his day. He was deeply
interested in ethnology, for example, which was important in the formation
of his views. Today, we can be certain that Marx would be fully aware of
the finding of modern anthropology and ethology. That being so, I think he
would not have fallen into the trap which Peter Hudis mentions when he
quotes John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge's book "A Future Perfect:
<<<<
"one of the things that Marx would
>recognize immediately about this particular global era is a paradox that he
>spotted in the last one: The more successful globalization becomes, the more
>it seems to whip up its own backlash.... The undoing of globalization, in
>Marx's view, would come not just from losers resenting the success of the
>winners but also from the winners themselves losing their appetite for the
>battle." "There is even a suspicion," they go on, "that globalization's
>psychic energy-the uncertainly that it creates which forces companies,
>governments, and people to perform better-may have a natural stall point, a
>movement when people can take no more."
If Marx were writing today he would have realised that hierarchy is deeply
embedded in human nature and there will always be a yearning for
recognition and power -- whether in politics, science, commerce and so on.
There will be no decrease in "psychic energy" so globalisation will
continues until at least the total population of mankind will have reached
a high and comfortable standard of living. Maybe, then, the steam will
start to go out of global commercial development because our descendants
will have as much as they reasonably want, given the limited number of
hours in the day. In that case, I'm sure that entrepreneurial minds will
turn their minds to colonising and developing other parts of the solar system.
Finally, what must be said that, despite his personal faults, Marx was
basically a liberal Victorian gentleman and he would have been aghast at
what was committed in his name during the last century.
Keith Hudson
At 16:35 17/09/00 -0400, you wrote:
>This may be of interest to some...
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Sid Shniad [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>Sent: September 12, 2000 4:51 PM
>Subject: Marx in the Mirror of Globalization - Britannica.com
>
>
>Britannica.com Sept. 5,
>2000
>
>Marx in the Mirror of Globalization
>
> by Peter Hudis, special to Britannica.com
>
>One interesting-some would say surprising-aspect of the ongoing discussions
>and debates about globalization is the renewed interest being shown in the
>ideas of Karl Marx, which only recently seemed to have been consigned to the
>dustbin of history. In the journalistic and academic worlds alike, a number
>of reappraisals of Marx's work are appearing that identify the 19th-century
>thinker as "the prophet of globalization" because of his focus on capital's
>inherent drive for self-expansion and technological innovation on the one
>hand and its tendency to exacerbate social inequality and instability on the
>other. Even some of globalization's most fervent supporters note the
>importance of Marx's work for anticipating the imbalances and disturbances
>associated with the unfettered expansion of global capital. As John
>Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, writers for the passionately
>pro-capitalist magazine The Economist, put it in their new book A Future
>Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization, "As a prophet of
>socialism, Marx may be kaput; but as a prophet of 'the universal
>interdependence of nations,' as he called globalization, he can still seem
>startlingly relevant...his description of globalization remains as sharp
>today as it was 150 years ago."
>
>Some may find such talk of Marx a bit odd, given the abject failure of the
>communist regimes that claimed to rule in his name. Yet as Marx scholars
>have long pointed out, the communist regimes had little in common with
>Marx's actual ideas. Marx opposed centralized state control of the economy
>(he called those who advocated it "crude and unthinking communists"); he
>passionately defended freedom of the press (he made his debut as a radical
>journalist espousing it); and he ridiculed the notion that a small
>"vanguard" of revolutionaries could successfully restructure society without
>the democratic consent of its citizens. If anything, the collapse of
>communism seems to have spurred new interest in Marx, since it makes his
>predictions concerning the global reach of capitalism seem even more timely.
>Micklethwait and Wooldridge contend that "one of the things that Marx would
>recognize immediately about this particular global era is a paradox that he
>spotted in the last one: The more successful globalization becomes, the more
>it seems to whip up its own backlash.... The undoing of globalization, in
>Marx's view, would come not just from losers resenting the success of the
>winners but also from the winners themselves losing their appetite for the
>battle." "There is even a suspicion," they go on, "that globalization's
>psychic energy-the uncertainly that it creates which forces companies,
>governments, and people to perform better-may have a natural stall point, a
>movement when people can take no more."
>
>The tone of much of the current discussion of Marx on the part of both
>supporters and critics of globalization (for a forceful example of the
>latter, see William Greider's One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of
>Global Capitalism) was established by John Cassidy's 1997 New Yorker article
>"The Return of Karl Marx," in which he called Marx "the next big thinker."
>Cassidy cited a high-placed Wall Street investment banker who told him, "The
>longer I spend time on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was
>right."
>
>What is it about Marx's work that produces such comments? First, though Marx
>was a severe critic of capitalism, few captured better its inherent drive
>for technological and social innovation. As Marx saw it, capitalism is not
>only about the production of material goods and services but also about the
>production of value. Labor, in Marx's view, is the source of value. And the
>magnitude of value, he argued, is determined by the amount of socially
>necessary labor time it takes to produce a given commodity. Marx held that
>there is a continual contradiction between these two purposes: producing for
>material wealth and producing for value. As productivity rises, more goods
>are produced in the same unit of time, so the value of each commodity falls.
>The increase in material wealth corresponds with a decline in the magnitude
>of value-that is, production costs fall and prices tend to fall as a result.
>This presents the capitalist with a knotty problem: the relative decline in
>the value of each commodity risks leaving him short of the funds needed to
>maintain his level of productive output. He responds by trying to further
>boost productivity, since the greater the quantity of goods produced, the
>better the opportunity to realize the value of his initial investment. The
>best way to increase productivity is to invest in labor-saving devices. The
>resulting growth in productivity, however, reproduces the initial problem,
>since the increase in material wealth leads to a further decrease in the
>relative value of each commodity. Capitalism is thus based on a kind of
>treadmill effect, in which the system is constantly driven toward
>technological innovation regardless of its human or environmental cost. The
>restlessness and drive for innovation that characterize contemporary
>high-tech capitalism was long ago anticipated by Marx.
>
>Second, Marx held that this process of constant innovation and productive
>expansion ultimately proceeds with disregard of national borders. The logic
>of capital, he held, was to create a world market. National restrictions on
>the movement of capital would eventually have to be lifted, he argued,
>because capital must constantly find new markets to absorb its ever-growing
>productive output.
>
>Third, Marx held that this process inevitably leads to a concentration and
>centralization of capital at one pole and a relative immiseration of the
>majority of the population at the other. Since capital is driven to increase
>productivity through labor-saving devices, "dead labor"-machines,
>technology-expands at a faster rate than the need for labor power. Since
>workers do not own capital, but only their labor power, social wealth gets
>increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Many consider this
>confirmed by the growing inequities that follow from the globalization
>process, as indicated by the fact that 225 individuals now control more
>wealth than half of the world's population.
>
>Marx the Man
>
>The importance of such issues is also addressed in Francis Wheen's Karl
>Marx: A Life, the first English-language Marx biography to appear in almost
>two decades. In Wheen's portrait Marx the man comes across as embodying in
>many respects the dialectic, a concept Marx drew from Hegel, that every unit
>contains its opposite within itself. Marx came from a family of renowned
>rabbis, yet showed not the slightest inclination toward religion. He was a
>loving husband and father whose daughters became important spokeswomen for
>socialism in their own right, yet he once sighed "blessed be he that hath no
>family." He preached the virtues of communalism and railed against egotism,
>yet he was such an individualist himself that when a friend said that she
>couldn't imagine him living happily in an egalitarian society, he responded:
>"Neither can I. These times will come, but we must be away by then." He
>spent more time thinking over the origins, nature, and function of money
>than perhaps anyone, yet he was continuously unable to earn any himself.
>What is most striking from Wheen's portrayal is Marx's gargantuan
>intellectual appetite. From his earliest writings there appears no subject
>that was not of interest to him-history, ancient and modern philosophy,
>economics, art, literature, geology, natural science, ethnology, and
>mathematics. This surely makes any effort to sum up his contribution far
>from easy. So formidable was Marx's output that although he published only a
>handful of books in his lifetime (including one volume of his planned
>multivolume magnum opus Das Kapital), his collected works come to more than
>100 volumes, and the work of transcribing and publishing all his writings
>remains to be completed even today.
>
>Wheen approaches his subject with considerable skepticism, especially
>concerning Marx's goal of a classless society. A columnist for The Guardian,
>Wheen has never considered himself sympathetic to Marxism. Yet, he writes,
>"The more I studied Marx, the more astoundingly topical he seemed to be.
>Today's pundits and politicians who fancy themselves as modern thinkers like
>to mention the buzzword 'globalization' at every opportunity-without
>realizing that Marx was already on the case in 1848." Two issues make Marx
>especially relevant in his view: one, Marx's notion that even in the most
>propitious economic conditions, the laborer under capitalism is compelled to
>endure overwork and "the reduction to a machine, the enslavement to
>capital"; and two, Marx's insistence that once capital becomes the
>predominant formation in any society, "what is truly human becomes congealed
>or crystallized into a material force, while dead objects acquire meaning,
>life and vigor."
>
>None of these recent discussions of Marx can be considered wholesale
>appropriations of his legacy. The consensus on the part of most commentators
>is that while Marx may have been right about the nature of capitalism, he
>was less correct about the practicality of the alternative he envisioned.
>Yet in light of the way Marx is gaining increased attention from many who
>only a short time ago thought that history had pronounced his ideas dead,
>his work may continue to illuminate the quest to understand life under the
>"manic logic" of global capitalism. As Marx once put it, "We are firmly
>convinced that the real danger lies not in practical attempts, but in the
>theoretical elaboration of communist ideas, for practical attempts, even
>mass attempts, can be answered by cannon as soon as they become dangerous,
>whereas ideas, which have conquered our intellect and taken possession of
>our minds...are demons which human beings can vanquish only by submitting to
>them."
>
>Peter Hudis is a freelance writer living in Chicago.
>
>
>
