Rhian

Thanks for the paper reference.

I certainly agree that living standards have increased and where once a salary my have purchased a black and white TV they no purchase a colour plasma or where once horse drawn carts moved produce, we now have semi-trailers. However, structurally, if wages increases do not keep pace with productivity then they must fall relatively. This relative fall is the problem.

In later years Marx noted that the revolution had not come his way as he probably expected, but the analysis retains its pertinacity. A long-run tendency to cut labour's factor share is the mode by which the Marxist wage cut is produced. The fact that we have gone from inkwells to biros, from slide rules to calculators, from telegrams to emails indicates rising living standards. Nonetheless you have to compare the share of produce going to workers to discern what is really occurring.

Since the nineteenth century workers and popular movements (Chartists - UK, Populists - USA, trade unions) have produced fundamental changes to what previously could be seen as "capitalism in the raw". The welfare state, secret ballots, elected parliaments, and regulations have all alleviated raw capitalism but, in essence only by pushing problems off into the future.

The present situation in OECD economies is the result of two catastrophic wars plus astronomical increase in debt since 1900 all facilitated by population increase and a shift of exploitation from advanced nations to the Third World.

From 1900, we certainly are in a worse economic crisis than the Great Depression. See: http://archive.is/n9uHY

I would only want to point to an implicit real wage decline from the 1970's.

So with those clarifications, I see Marx's analysis completely vindicated.

Cohenite

"The GFC is an example of Marxism at work not capitalism."

Most reasonable people will know that Cohenite's statements are false.

Just piling more obnoxious slanders on top of your previous outbursts does not help your cause.

Andrew points to the Popperian critique of Hegel and Marx - because of the dialectical interpretation of totality.

A few responses:

a) Francis Fukuyama uses the Hegelian framework to support liberal democracy as the 'universal', permanent, final form of social organisation, and of political consciousness. Arguing socialism is to be abandoned because of misgivings about the grand dialectical schema - would then leave us to make the same conclusions about Fukuyama and liberal democracy. Clearly then neither socialism nor liberal democracy are to be rejected on these grounds.

b) Any 'essential' connection between dialectics, totality and 'totalitarianism' is false. Nonetheless Marx's materialist dialectic - with its emphasis on class struggle - should be open to criticism. Revisionists (and self-proclaimed Marxists) like Bernstein (though that is contested) abandoned the dialectic in favour of empiricism, and perhaps Kantian ethics. Yet despite assertions to the contrary Bernstein retained an emphasis on Marxist notions of class struggle, the crisis-prone nature of capitalism, economic democracy, mutual disarmament, and the gradual overcoming of capitalism, etc.

c) 'Totality' exists; but my argument is that it cannot be fully grasped by theory. Interestingly there is the 'Post-Marxism' of thinkers such as Mouffe and Laclau. These are radical voluntarists. (and so were the Bolsheviks as against 'orthodox' Marxism!)

In response perhaps a 'middle way' is most appropriate... ie) there are social dynamics like class struggle that run throughout human history and contribute to the ever-changing evolution of totality... But there are contingent aspects as well - free will, the role of the individual in history, even 'the will to power'; And while 'bourgeois historians' were wrong to emphasise too much 'great men', and the dynamics of nations and empires - 'orthodox' Marxism arguably put too little emphasis on those aspects were are contingent...

Finally: That's not saying that there are not forces which exist which are outside what can be verified immediately and empirically. ...The boom-bust cycle in capitalism, the tendency to monopoly, the falling wage share of the economy, reserve army of labour and so on.

And socialism is NOT inevitable; Arguably barbarism far more likely now...

"Slanders"?! How on Earth do you slander a vile thing such as Marxism and its progenies, bolshevism, communism, Nazism, crony capitalism, which is what the GFC was [it's amazing you can't accept that the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac catastrophe was a perfect example of applied Marxism; but then cultists and utopians cannot comprehend any defect with their vision of perfection]?

In regard to the blight of Marxism and what it inevitably becomes I defer to that great man Churchill who said:

"I yield to no one in my detestation of Bolshevism, and of the revolutionary violence which precedes it. ... But my hatred of Bolshevism and Bolsheviks is not founded on their silly system of economics, or their absurd doctrine of an impossible equality. It arises from the bloody and devastating terrorism which they practice in every land into which they have broken, and by which alone their criminal regime can be maintained"

Marxism is the Dorian Grey of social philosophies; a pretty face, noble clichés, supported by energised and enthusiastic nitwits with a putrid Doppelgänger being the actual reality.

How do you slander that; you don't; it is beyond slander.

Tristan ... I've never read up on Leninist voluntarism. Probably because of Lenin's ideas about putting all the hope-for-socialism eggs in the infallible central committee basket!

The voluntarism of the Russian communist leadership may have helped bring them to power, gave them the hope and confidence to win in the most backward country in Europe, and the Red Army thereby helped to bring like central committee run communist parties to power all over Eastern Europe.

P.S. Let's regard China as a different case, to be discussed separately.

The real question for those who place their trust in the central committee model is why did the whole Russian and Eastern European model collapse? Was it socialism in one country? Was it the command economy? Was it the corruption of ten per cent of the population including almost the entire managerial class being party members with party membership privileges? Do the scum float to the top? And how is top leader hegemony or politbureau rule different from the royalist absolutisms of 1100 to 1600?

Tristan in a recent reply says: 'Finally: That's not saying that there are not forces which exist which are outside what can be verified immediately and empirically. ...The boom-bust cycle in capitalism, the tendency to monopoly, the falling wage share of the economy, reserve army of labour and so on.' I think he means they can be verified. Certainly boom and bust, the tendency to monopoly, the falling wage share of the economy, the levels of unemployment are all verifiable.

I agree with Tristan that there can be no socialism without democracy. The corollary is also correct in my view - there can be no real democracy without socialism. The current vote every 3 years for one set of capitalist politicians who can only try to make conditions good for capital but not address the fundamental crisis prone nature of the system is not democracy. There is no democracy for example in the workplace, about what we need to produce.

I disagree with Tristan in his caricature of the Bolsheviks as anti-democratic. The workers and peasants councils were much more democratic than the Constituent Assembly, based in the workplace, automatic recall, paid the average wage etc. The reasons for their collapse are complex but the decimation in the Civil War of the Russian working class which made the revolution, the foreign intervention, the failure most importantly of revolutions especially in Germany, saw the revolution isolated. The rise of stalin represented the defeat of the revoluiton and the establishment of a new form of capitalism - state capitalism - in the USSR.

Bolt's idea that people like me should be banned from universities and that we are somehow responsible for the deaths that Stalinist state capitalism inflicted on millions is ridiculous. Stalin had to wipe out the old Bolsheviks who understood the connection between democracy and socialism before he could fully implement his state capitalist project free from dissent and different interpretations of the revolution.

It is ironic that Bolt favours the very cleansing of Universities and establishment of monolithic thought centres that Stalin sought too