Also Rhian - The economy may be mixed in your book; but the traditional mixed economy that arose in the mid 20th century went much further. It included nationalised communications, transport, energy, water; It included strategic government business enterprises; and it included more services which were provided publicly. Believe me there is VERY LITTLE left after decades of privatisation. You want to claim 'the moderate ground' and a 'relatively mainstream' term - 'the mixed economy'. But if that is the case then the term 'mixed economy' has lost its meaning. We are at the point now where government does not even provide roads without resort to privatisation and tolls. After decades we are approaching the extremes of neo-liberalism.

Forgive me for suggesting that most commentators here are making the same error that Marx did, of treating the working class as a given, a sort of Black Box, always there, unchanging, while economic changes and policies changed around them.

No, it's not. Compared to the fifties and sixties, there is almost no working class (numerically speaking) in Australia any more. The vague hope that somehow "it" would come together, rise up and overthrow capitalism, was a pretty vain one even in the fifties (probability = 0.001), and its probability now is vastly smaller again.

Let's face it: Marx got another thing wrong: that the working class is somehow inherently revolutionary. That's certainly a convenience, but honestly, it has always been a fiction. Of course, workers stick up for their rights, but so does pretty much every group, farmers, bureaucrats, miners, Aborigines, truckies. The working class has fought for better wages and conditions, but never for the complete overthrow of the economic system which provided, however miserly, those wages and conditions.

I'm not saying that's necessarily wrong: why should some bloke on a building site or a woman on an assembly line sacrifice their job for the lofty ideals of a fundamentally pseudo-intellectual clique ? My parents were both in the Party and my mum told me once that they were the only working-class people in her branch - in a working-class area: Chullora, for god's sake.

So much of this 'debate' is akin to arguing about how many angels can stand on the head of a pin, or point of a needle, whichever; Marx tried, but he couldn't predict history; in fact, he got much of the trends of contemporary history wrong.

Move on, boys.

Joe

Loudmouth, I agree that the working class is not inherently and essentially revolutionary. I agree it was a mistake for Marxists to assume otherwise. Self-avowed 'Post-Marxists' like Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau have developed a theory to the effect that revolutionary subject identities have to be 'articulated' in the context of counter-hegemonic strategies. That many workers turned to fascism in the 20th century showed this was true even then. But that's not to say there's not revolutionary *potential* in the working class and other groups - hopefully allied together in 'a movement of movements'. Look to Spain and Greece today.

A couple of points also a) by 'revolutionary' I mean qualitative change and not violent insurrection.

b) I'm interested in your idea of the 'working class'; because for Marx they were the class of wage labourers. And even here he theorised a 'labour aristocracy'.

c) Marx could not project forward 150 years ; He identified real and emerging tendencies for his time. Some of his ideas on alienation, surplus value, the business cycle, falling rate of profit as a tendency, the intensification of the rate of exploitation; the corruption of government by wealth - remain valid. Indeed class struggle remains a valid notion ; though not necessarily taken to the critical point of revolution.

d) The point re; the working class is the strategic power of wage labourers to withdraw their labour. There needs be an alliance with other forces, yes. But the mass strike remains a potentially potent weapon. This is relevant in a context where rights are being wound back - wages and conditions, age of retirement, industrial liberties; and at a more political level Conservative attacks on free assembly for a start...

None of this means I'm kidding myself a revolution is around the corner. But some important *tendencies* identified by Marx still persist.

Hi Tristan,

In our continuing obituary for Marxism - Mouffe and Laclau's 'post-Marxism' is already forty-odd years old - I would sharply differentiate radical, progressive and revolutionary:

* everybody is pretty much radical in their own interests;

* in my arbitrary schema, a progressive is someone who goes into bat in defence of somebody else's interests, the oppressed, abused ad/or brutalised, not just their own;

* a revolutionary seeks to transform the whole of society, in the name of all oppressed classes.

I don't see the activists in Greece or Spain as anything but 'radical' in this sense: people who want to protect their own featherbedded jobs, early pensions, low or no tax regimes, that the huge government debt with no prospect of repayment, shouldn't be repaid, in fact Germany should pay Greece more to maintain their lifestyles. I don't see anything much progressive about that, let alone 'revolutionary': who are the Greeks going to overthrow, their own bourgeoisie who contributed to this mess ?

Bottom line is that Marxism had its historical moment, between say 1860 and 1930, and blew it. No workers' revolution in any advanced capitalist country.

And every country which claimed to have launched a Marxist-oriented socialist revolution turned totalitarian. It didn't help that they succeeded totalitarian regimes almost everywhere, so perhaps we can blame their role-models, the sorts of power relations the people simply expected.

So let's be honest and move on: the Marxist experiment has not had a single success, and its moment has passed, forever. Many of us have wasted much of our lives living in hope. Let's just consign Marxism to the dust-bin of history and be done with it.

Joe

Joe
Obviously we have shared similar disillusionment; but, given your usually well grounded and lucid contributions, I am disappointed that you follow others in confusing a critique of the validity of Karl Marx’s analysis of capital and class with
“every country which claimed to have launched a Marxist-oriented socialist revolution turned totalitarian…Let's just consign Marxism to the dust-bin of history and be done with it.” Even in his lifetime, Marx had to disown “Marxists”

Hi Leslie,

If even Marx was disillusioned with 'Marxists', then I suppose I'm in good company :)

So what comes after 'Post-Marxism'? Or do we have to go back to the progressive aspects of the Enlightenment, and re-build a program from there, given present and possibly-future circumstances ? Can a genuinely progressive/revolutionary ideology for the future be put together ?

Joe