Rhian. Thanks for your responses; but we are going nowhere as we talk past one another, because I insist that to debate capital and class we have to adopt a global perspective- so that as well as local wage statistics we also have to take into account, for example, Bangladesh garment factories producing clothes for British retailers are forcing girls as young as 13 to work up to 11 hours a day in appalling conditions.
From a personal, selfish point of view, I wish I could share your optimism about booms and busts, but the reality is that the world economy after 8 years has not yet recovered from the GFC, despite frantic stratagems like “quantitative easing” (printing money making the rich richer) and low interest rates ( which has destroyed the living standards of independent retirees). What is your alternative to Marx’s explanation of the cycle of booms and busts since the 19th century?; please don’t say greed. As you think in terms of local , empirical evidence, the clue is H Normans “no payment for 36 months”.

Tristan

The reference to social democrats is in Chapter IV. Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch04.htm

I agree the left is making a comeback in some countries the aftermath of the GFC. But even Syriza are hardly Marxist.

My preference is for a mixed economy; your “hybid” is rather different. I have no objection to the co-ops and so on you would like, if they are efficient and socially useful. Likewise I have no objection to privatisation, if a business can be run efficiently by the private sector and government can use the capital more productively elsewhere. Though government may have privatised some assets it is still a major player in the economy. Government consumption spending as a percentage of GDP peaked at 38% in 2009 and is currently only slightly lower, at about 37%.

Re immiseration: in my opinion, this is the baby, not the bathwater. The whole force of Marx’s argument is that capitalism is bad for workers. That is also still the dominant narrative from parts of the left. He’s not a commentator I normally like, but Clive Hamilton summit it up beautifully a few years ago:

“Difficult as it may be to admit, social democrats and democratic socialists have a psychological predisposition to believe that the mass of people are suffering from material deprivation. We thrive on the imagined wretchedness of others. When the economy goes bad we feel secretly vindicated, for our reason to condemn the system is renewed. We revel in a collective schadenfreude. But we must face up to the facts of today's world. While rooted in historical fact, the left's ''deprivation model" is today the opposite of the truth”

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/05/13/1021002429844.html

Leslie

I’m happy to debate the global or the national perspective, but I do not accept your inference that rising real wages in Australia are causally linked to refugees fleeing conflict elsewhere.

I agree the world economy is not fully recovered from the GFC. But the GFC was mild compare to the Great Depression or the 19th century recessions witnesses by Marx and Engels.

I also agree it’s tragic that Bangladesh garment workers have much lower wages and poorer conditions that us. But I do not think the left has a realistic better alternative to offer them. Almost every country we know of that has escaped abject poverty has done so by building a manufacturing industry initially based on low wages and exports (the exceptions are blessed with abundant valuable commodities such as oil). That was what Marx witnessed in 19th century Britain. As productivity and the skills base rise, living standards improve, and poverty declines. This is what happened in Europe and North America, and more recently Japan, Korea and Hong Kong. It is happening in China, which has recorded the largest and most rapid decrease in poverty in human history.

The early stages are ugly, as Marx saw, and we see in Bangladesh. But the only real alternative is to remain a feudal agrarian society where most people live in absolute poverty. Another thing Marx got right was that, for all its faults, capitalism “rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.”

From a truly global perspective, the story is similar. We recently achieved the UN’s Millenium Development Goal of halving the number of people living in absolute poverty. Across most indicators of human welfare, things are getting better. Real incomes are rising. Life expectancy is increasing, and infant mortality falling. Illiteracy is declining. More people have safe drinking water. Malnutrition is declining, and mass starvation has virtually disappeared.

http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/mdgoverview.html

Of course, many people still live in abject poverty. Things could be better, and more could be done. But every experiment in trying a radically different economic model has failed

Rhian

'On your earlier post, I suspect the SNP vote was driven by nationalist sentiment and a backlash against Labour for supporting the “No” case in the independence referendum.'

Fifty-five per cent of Scots votes voted 'No' in the independence referendum.That means that more than 1 in 2 Scots were not driven by nationalist sentiment in the recent UK election. Of those who voted 'Yes', the majority were over age 55 - enough to sway the total vote in favour of staying with the UK.

So, given the factors that motivated the Labour wipeout in Scotland in the UK election, even those who voted 'No' were not willing to go along with the Westminster austerity/neoliberal consensus. While the over-55 voters preferred the assumed security of staying with the UK, they rejected neo-liberal austerity.

Corrction: In my above post, I meant to say: 'Of those who voted 'NO', the majority were over age 55 - enough to sway the total vote in favour of staying with the UK.'

Rhian; Then maybe we're arguing at cross-purposes. Because the most important social democratic party of the time - the German Social Democrats - weren't formed until 1869 and didn't merge with the Lassalleans until 1875.And the original social democrats - or Eisenachers - were Marxists. The Lassalleans were also very radical in their own way. As most of the world knew it in the mid-late to late 19th century Social Democracy was a mainly-Marxist movement.