Notes on Marxism

Why Marx is becoming relevant again: “For thirty years after 1945 a high rate of growth in the advanced economies was accompanied by a rise in incomes that benefitted all classes. Severe wealth inequality came to seem a thing of the past (which is why, in 1980, people could quite reasonably call Marx’s predictions mistaken). It now appears that those thirty years were an anomaly. The Depression and the two world wars had effectively wiped out the owners of wealth, but the thirty years after 1945 rebooted the economic order. After 1945, wages rose as national incomes rose, but the income of the lowest earners peaked in 1969, when the minimum hourly wage in the United States was $1.60. That is the equivalent of $10.49 today, when the national minimum wage is $7.25.  And, as wages for service-sector jobs decline in earning power, the hours in the workweek increase, because people are forced to take more than one job.” - Louis Menand

A. Class Analysis

1. Marxist economic theory places class conflict at the center of the analysis, the most important phenomenon left out of classical economics.

New concept of class: 

not distinguished by wealth or power per se but defined in terms of means of production and distinction of resources to support human life. (173) That is, one’s class is defined in terms of one’s participation in the production of surplus labor. 

In the “fundamental class process,” some members of the society - direct laborers - produce both necessary and surplus goods and services. 

Necessary: what they need to survive

Surplus: what is produced over and above what is required to maintain the process.

2. Exploitation: 

a situation in which the laborers do not directly appropriate their own surplus labor. (slave to master, serf to lord, wage worker to capitalist boss)

Key question: How is this surplus distributed and who controls it?

3. The Dirty Secret of Capitalism: Surplus value is appropriated by the capitalist, a new form of slavery. Capitalism does not do away with classes but brings a new set of class relations, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. 

B. Capitalism’s Contradictions

4. Ever greater exploitation

For exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” (p.160-61) Capitalism destroys feudal society, a good thing, but its unfettered desire for ever more profit leads it to destroy itself. There is no natural limit to the appropriation of money. Endless growth leads to imperialism, economic centralization, every-increasing wealth inequality.

5. Alienation

The commodification of labor: Man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. The medieval worker as individual producer, owns the fruits of his/her labor. the modern worker does not. Industrialization and mechanization as a tool for increasing exploitation. No democracy in the workplace. (164) 

6. Contradictions

Capitalism creates the conditions for its demise and transition to socialism, then communism

Increasing inequality destroys the means of its continued productivity.

Increasing misery of the proletariat leads to the “socialization of labor” - class consciousness, in the form of labor unions, worker’s political parties, socialist takeover of states, state takeover of productive resources. (168)

C. Marxist Prophesies

7. True Freedom

World history as moving towards freedom - self-mastery and self-understanding without illusions through the overcoming of contradictions, moving inexorably towards harmony.

8. The Promised Land

True communism would be a classless society governed by the principle of socialism: 

“To each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities.” 

- the social ethics of families, tribes, and communities not dominated by market exchange.

9. Withering away of the State

As a tool of capitalists, the state exists to maintain the capitalist mode of production, as having a monopoly on the use of force (police, judges, jails and prisons). In the transition to socialism, the state slowly makes itself unnecessary. (180) 

10. Many Marxisms, many Socialisms

Former Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Scandinavia, France/Germany/italy

But generally, socialists believe the government should provide a range of basic services to the public, such as health care and education. In the present day, "Democratic socialist" and "socialist" are often treated as interchangeable terms, which can be confusing given Democratic socialists don't necessarily think the government should immediately take control of all aspects of the economy.

They do, however, generally believe the government should help provide for people's most basic needs and help all people have an equal chance at achieving success. The call for universal health care as a right reflects the socialist view that since everyone needs health care, it should be provided to all out of the collective wealth of the society. 

11. Socialism as Economic Democracy

If the basic problem with capitalism is exploitation of workers, then the most simple Marxist solution is the democratization of the workplace by the dissolution of the class distinction between owners and workers. 

A worker cooperative is a cooperative that is owned and self-managed by its workers. This control may be exercised in a number of ways. A cooperative enterprise may mean a firm where every worker-owner participates in decision-making in a democratic fashion, or it may refer to one in which management is elected by every worker-owner, and it can refer to a situation in which managers are considered, and treated as, workers of the firm. In traditional forms of worker cooperative, all shares are held by the workforce with no outside or consumer owners, and each member has one voting share. In practice, control by worker-owners may be exercised through individual, collective, or majority ownership by the workforce; or the retention of individual, collective, or majority voting rights (exercised on a one-member one-vote basis). A worker cooperative, therefore, has the characteristic that each of its workers own one share, and all shares are owned by the workers.