And just to emphasise the inanity of our capitalist loving rednecks, I just happen to have Thursday's Australian Financial Review, and sure enough, on page 26, sourced from UK Financial Times, we see a rare picture of building workers plus the comment:

"Wages have been falling in real terms since the 1990s in Japan"

Marx would be pleased. Andrew Bolt and Catallaxy will probably go into apoplexy.

Even if you're right old retrobate all the Japanese are shareholders and their dividends have been going up to compensate.

Old zygote

You say:
“If the poor go from one bowl of rice to two bowls of rice, while the rich go from 5 bowls of rice to 25, then the poor have got poorer”

To show the absurdity of your example, let’s assume a Socialist government is elected and decides to reverse this terrible iniquity. The rich are stripped of their extra 20 bowls a day, and fall from 25 bowls to 5 of rice. The poor also lose their extra bowl, falling from 2 bowls to 1 bowl of rice a day. In your logic, this would be a victory for poverty reduction. In mine, it would be a 50% reduction in real living standards.

As Churchill said:
“the inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”

I don’t deny that poverty has both an absolute and a relative dimension. I also support a role for government in income redistribution and poverty alleviation.

And when Marx talked of the law of poverty he was talking of absolute, not relative poverty.

Re Japan
No-one says real wages are always and everywhere increasing, especially in the short term

Have you found that Andrew Leigh reference yet?

You must be an academic old zygote, only a fool could put your interpretation on things.

A man with one bowl of rice who finds himself with 2 is greatly enriched. he has gone from insufficient to excess. He can now walk the land with a full belly in happiness.

The man who goes from 5 to 25 has gained stuff all. He can drive a bigger car, live in a bigger house, but those things give but a few minutes gratification, not to be compared with the wellbeing of the other.

I have mixed with people you would consider poor. They could build themselves a house for free from palm fronds, & all the food they wanted was there for the taking. I have not known happier people.

I have met their brothers who have been put through school, & university. That they now hold senior positions in the bureaucracy, live in fine houses & eat in the best restaurants has not made them happy, & their education & wealth make it impossible to go back to the old island life.

Be careful what you wish for, you could be unlucky enough to get it.

Oh & don't put your faith in prophecies by Credit Suisse, climate scientists or anyone else for that matter. Most prophecies are in the bin, with their author trying to pretend they never existed within a few years.

Rhian; You say that labour theory of value "has been debunked" and that so has Marx's theory of declining wages.

Marx rightly perceived that labour is in a sense the source of all value... (in addition to Nature!) For instance gold is valuable because of its rarity and the difficulty in mining it - this translates in a large amount of labour... But the PRICE also depends on demand and supply... So an extra layer of complexity....

But at the same time Marx erred, I think, in not discerning the subjective value of labour insofar as it relates to of skills, hardship, productivity etc... Produced goods are there because of creative labour... But is all labour equal? That's the problem...

Also importantly, though - It remains true from Marx that workers suffer unpaid labour time as a consequence of surplus value/exploitation... Even if not all labour is equal - exploitation still remains...

Part of the answer (at least in theory; the means of achieving it in the real world is arguably missing for now) is for workers to receive the full proceeds of their labour; but with room for the role of distribution and exchange also... And if the labour market does not give a fair deal to workers - then there is a need to intervene via the welfare state/social wage/tax mix.... (which is achievable now)

Re: Declining wages - You admit the wage share has been falling for about 40 years... Yes there was the post-war boom; and labour was well-organised and powerful for a period.... But I wonder what we would uncover is we looked back to the period spanning the 19th to mid 20 century? I think it would show that declining wage share was a TENDENCY then as well...

Marx and Lassalle were wrong about absolute imiseration; But Marxists have long recognised that productivity and technology have improved living standards even at the same time as exploitation has intensified....

Tristan,

I was not pointing out the Austro Marxists "diversity", I was pointing out that most of them had very little in common in as much as Hitler and Stalin's ideas were diverse. The only common thread is that they wanted greater government involvement in the markets. To try and paint the Austro Marxists as a "movement" rather than a series of diverse groups is disingenuous.

Secondly, that labour is the source of all value is a simplistic and archaic concept, as labour is useless without capital and entrepreneurship. The state can create and control capital, but not entrepreneurship, which is why every communist regime has collapsed or is collapsing.