Chrystia Freeland writes that: >Their central assertion, Mr. Milanovic writes, was that capitalists (and their >class allies, the landowners) exploited workers, and that the workers of the >world were equally and similarly oppressed. It turns out that Marx and Engels >were pretty good economic reporters.... But Marx and Engels did not do as well >as economic forecasters. They predicted that oppression of the proletariat >would get worse, creating an international — and internationally exploited — >working class. <
It's true that Marx and Engels did not anticipate the way that the rise of (capitalist) Imperialism changed the global distribution of wealth and income and allowed proletarians in the global "core" to reap more of the benefits of their productivity (which was also rising faster in the core during this period, something totally ignored in Freeland's article). This reinforced preexisting divisions within the global laboring classes. (I use the word "laboring" because back in Marx's time, the workers in the periphery were mostly not proletarians.) In the current era, the old style of Imperialism is breaking down, as Freeland suggests, so that wages (corrected for productivity, of course) are tending toward global equalization. In addition, the international mobility of capital and technology is likely equalizing labor productivity numbers. (At the same time, the national ruling classes are uniting to become a global ruling class, while reaping an increasing share of the economic "pie.") -- Jim Devine / It's time to Occupy the New Year! _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
