Karl Marx----- More Right Than Wrong

[Rakhmetov]

Excerpt from Dr. Michael Parenti's book Blackshirts and Reds

The End Of Marxism?


Some people say Marxism is a science and others say it is a dogma, a bundle of reductionist unscientific claims. I would suggest that Marxism is not a science in the positivist sense, formulating hypotheses and testing for predictability, but more accurately a social science, one that shows how to conceptualize systematically and systemically, moving from surface appearances to deeper, broader features, so better to understand both the specific and the general, and the relationship between the two.

Marxism has an explanatory power that is superior to mainstream bourgeois social science because it deals with the imperatives of class power and political economy, the motor forces of society and history. The class basis of political economy is not a subject for which mainstream social science has much understanding or tolerance. In 1915, Lenin wrote that “ science will not even hear of Marxism, declaring that it has been refuted and annihilated. Marx is attacked with equal zest by young scholars who are making a career by refuting socialism, and by decrepit elders who are preserving the tradition of all kinds of outworn systems.”

[B]Some Durable Basics

With the overthrow of communist governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, announcements about the moribund nature of “Marxist dogma” poured forth with renewed vigor. But Marx’s major work was Capital, a study not of “existing socialism,” which actually did not exist in his day, but of capitalism--- a subject that remains terribly relevant to our lives. It would make more sense to declare Marxism obsolete if and when capitalism is abolished, rather than socialism. I wish to argue not merely that Marx is still relevant but that he is more relevant today than he was in the nineteenth century, that the forces of capitalist motion and development are operating with greater scope than when he first studied them.

This is not to say that everything Marx and Engels anticipated has come true. Their work was not a perfect prophecy but an imperfect, incomplete science (like all sciences), directed toward understanding a capitalism that leaves its bloody footprints upon the world as never before.

More Right Than Wrong


Those who reject Marx frequently contend that his predictions about proletariat revolution have proven wrong. From this, they conclude that his analysis of the nature of capitalism and imperialism must also be wrong. But we should distinguish between Marx the chiliastic thinker, who made grandly optimistic predictions about the flowering of the human condition, and Marx the economist and social scientist, who provided us with fundamental insights into capitalist society that have held painfully true to the present day. The latter Marx has been regularly misrepresented by anti-Marxist writers. Consider the following predictions:

Business Cycles and the Tendency toward Recesssion.
Marx noted that something more than greed is involved in the capitalist’s relentless pursuit of profit. Given the pressures of competition and rising wages, capitalists must make technological innovations to increase their productivity and diminish their labor costs. This creates problems of its own. The more capital goods (such as machinery, plants, technologies, fuels) needed for productions, the higher the fixed costs and the greater the pressure to increase productivity to maintain profit margins.

Since workers are not paid enough to buy back the goods and services they produce, Marx noted, there is always the problem of a disparity between mass production and aggregate demand. If demand slackens, owners cut back on production and aggregate demand. If demand slackens, owners cut back on production and investment. Even when there is ample demand, they are tempted to downsize the workforce and intensify the rate of exploitation of the remaining employees, seizing any opportunity to reduce benefits and wages. The ensuing drop in the work force’s buying power leads to a further decline in demand and to business recessions that inflict the greatest pain on those with the least assets.

Marx foresaw this tendency for profits to fall and for protracted recessions and economic instability. As the economist Robert Heilbroner noted, this was an extraordinary prediction, for in Marx’s day economists did not recognize boom-and-bust business cycles as inherent to the capitalist system. But today we know that recessions are a chronic condition and --- as Marx also predicted--- they have become international in scope.

Capital Concentration.
When the communist Manifesto first appeared in 1848, bigness was the exception rather than the norm. Yet Marx predicted that large firms would force out or buy up smaller adversaries and increasingly dominate the business world, as capital became more concentrated. This was not the accepted wisdom of that day and must have sounded improbable to those who gave it any attention. But it has come to pass. Indeed, the rate of mergers and take-overs has been higher in the 1980s and 1990s than at any other time in the history of capitalism.

Growth of the Proletariat.
Another of Marx’s predictions is that the proletariat (workers who have no tools of their own and must work for wages or salaries, selling their labor to someone else) would become an ever-greater percentage of the work force. In 1820 about 75 percent of Americans worked for themselves on farms or in small business and artisan crafts. By 1940 that number had dropped to 21.6 percent. Today, less than 10 percent of the labor force is self-employed.

The same shift in the work force can be observed in the third World. From 1970 to 1980 the number of wage workers in Asia and Africa increased by almost two thirds, from 72 million to 120 million. The tendency is toward the steady growth of the working class, both industrial and service workers, and --- as Marx predicted--- this is happening globally, in every land upon which capitalism descends.


Proletarian Revolution.
As capitalism develops so will the proletariat, Marx predicted. We have seen that to be true. But he went further: With the growing misery and polarization, the masses would eventually rise up and overthrow the bourgeoisie and put the means of production under public ownership for the benefit of all. The revolution would come in the more industrialized capitalist countries that had large, developed working classes.

What struck Marx about the working classes was its level of organization and consciousness. Unlike previously oppressed classes, the proletariat, heavily concentrated in urban areas, seemed capable of an unparalleled level of political development. It would not only rebel against its oppressors as had slaves and serfs but would create an egalitarian, non- exploitative social order as never before seen in history. In his day Marx saw an alternative system emerging in the clubs, mutual aid societies, political organizations, and newspapers of a rapidly growing British working class. For the first time, history would be made by the masses in a conscious way, a class for itself. Sporadic rebellion would be replaced by class-conscious revolution. Instead of burning down the manor, the workers would expropriate it and put it to use for the collective benefit of the common people, the ones who built it in the first place. Certainly Marx’s predictions about revolution have not materialized. There has been no successful revolution in an advanced capitalist society. As the working class developed so did the capitalist state, whose function has been to protect the capitalist class, with its mechanisms of police suppression and its informational and hegemony...

Marx also underestimated the extent to which the advanced capitalist state could use its wealth and power to create a variety of institutions that retard and distract popular consciousness or blunt discontent through reform programs. Contrary to his expectations, successful revolutions occurred in less developed, largely peasant societies such as Russia , China , Cuba , Vietnam--- though the proletariats in those countries participated and sometimes, as in the case of Russia in 1917, even spearheaded the insurgency.

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Of course Marx made his study based on the state of capitalism as it existed in his day. He foresaw probable developments in the capitalist order, missed others.

For example, according to Marx, the dynamism of the people's revolution into socialism rises from the interaction of two psychological attitudes: (a) the spiritual alienation of the proletariat, because of extreme division of labor and capitalist productive relations, from humanity's original concern with production and from natural social cooperation; (b) the brute reaction to intolerable deprivation brought on by the falling rate of profit and the capitalist crises. To expand these points somewhat:

(a) To Marx the specific properties of humanity are the ability to produce things and to give mutual aid in production. But the sub-division of labor and the capitalist use of machine technology dehumanize production: a person makes only a part of a commodity sold on a distant market, and performing an automatic operation she employs only a modicum of her powers. Further, the conditions of bourgeois competition and wage-slavery isolate people from each other and destroy mutuality, family-life, comradeship. There is therefore nothing in the capitalist institutions to engage the deep interest or keep the loyalty of the proletariat. They are made into fractional people and these fractions of beings are indifferent to the bourgeois mores and society.

(b) On the other hand they are not indifferent to starvation, disease, sexual deprivation, infant mortality, and death in war; but these are the results of the wage-cuts, imperialism, unemployment, and fluctuation inherent in the bourgeois need to counteract the falling rate of profit and to reinvest. At the level of resentment and frustration and animal reaction to pain, there is concern for a violent change, there is latent rebellion.

From these attitudes, the revolutionary idea emerges somewhat as follows: driven by need to consult their safety, and with understanding given by teachers who explain the causes of their hurt, and with their original human aspirations recalled from forgetfulness and already fulfilled somewhat by comradely unity, the proletariat turns toward a new order, new foundations, a socialism immeasurably improved yet in its main features not unlike original human nature. By contrast to this idea, the life of the bourgeoisie itself seems worthless. And being increased in numbers and with their hands on the productive machinery of all society, the proletarians know that they can make the idea a reality.

Psychologically and even anthropologically and ethically this Marxian formula has great power, if indeed all of its elements exist as prescribed. But on the contrary, if any of the elements is missing the formula is disastrous and takes us as far from fraternal socialism as can be. Now there is no question that point (b) is missing: that by and large over the last century in the advanced industrial countries the real wages of the working class as a whole have not lingered at the margin of physical subsistence and reproduction; they have advanced to a point where even revolutionary writers agitate for a "comfortable standard of living" and cry out against lingering poverty in the midst of plenty. (The reasons, of course, are the astounding increase in productivity, the need for domestic markets, and such gross profits that the rate of profit has lost paramount importance.) What has been the result?

The spiritual alienation of point (a) has gone even further, I suppose, than Marx envisaged. He followed the dehumanization of production to the last subdivision of labor into an automatic gesture, but I doubt whether he (being sane) could have foreseen that thousands of adult persons could work day in and day out and not know what they were making. He did not foresee the dehumanization of consumption in the universal domestic use of streamlined conveniences whose operation the consumer does not begin to understand; the destruction of even the free choices in the market place by mass-advertising and monopolistic controls; the segregation among experts in hospitals and other institutions of all primary experience of birth, pain, and death, etc., etc.

Yet it is not the case that these fractional persons, alienated from their natures, are brought sharply to look out for themselves by intolerable deprivation. On the contrary, they are even tricked, by the increase in commodities, into finding an imitation satisfaction in their "standard of living"; and the kind of psychological drive that moves them is--emulation! The demand of the organized proletariat for a living-wage and tolerable working-conditions, a demand that in the beginning was necessarily political and revolutionary in its consequences, now becomes a demand for a standard of living and for leisure to enjoy the goods, accepting the mores of the dominant class. (What are we to say of "leisure" as a good for an animal whose specific humanity is to be productive?) Then if these persons have gone over to the ideals of another class, can they be called "proletarians"? ("producers of offspring," as Marx nobly and bitterly characterized the workers.) Given the apparently satisfied alienation from concern in production--and where do we see anything else--it is also unjust to attribute class consciousness to them.

Marx saw wonderfully the emptiness of life in the modern system; but he failed to utter the warning that this emptiness could proceed so far that, without the spur of starvation, it could make a person satisfied with the state affairs that exists under capitalism.

Lastly, the scientific teachers of the masses are no longer concerned to recall us to our original creative natures, to destroy the inhuman subdivision of labor, to look to the bands of comrades for the initiation of direct action. On the contrary, their interest has become the health and smooth functioning of the industrial machine itself: they are economists of full employment, psychologists of vocational guidance, and politicians of administrative bureaus.

So far the psychology of the masses. But in the psychology of the bourgeoisie there is a correlated difference from what Marx envisaged. The Marxian bourgeois has the following characteristics: (a) Preoccupied with exchange-value, with money which is featureless, he is alienated from all natural personal or social interests; this makes all the easier his ruthless career of accumulation, reinvestment, exploitation, and war. (b) On the other hand, he embodies a fierce lust, real even though manic, for wealth and power. The conditions of his role are given by the economy, but he plays the role with all his heart; he is an individual, if not quite a man. The spur of a falling rate of profit or of closed markets, therefore, drives him on to desperate adventures.

By and large I do not think that this type is now very evident. Partly, to be sure, it is that the owning classes adopt a democratic camouflage for their protection; but the fact that they are willing to do this already shows that they are different men. Other factors seem to me important: (1) In absentee-ownership there is a weakening of the drive for maximum exploitation of the labor and the machine; the owner does not have the inspiration of his daily supervision; he is not approached by inventors and foremen, etc.; but his salaried manager is usually concerned with stability rather than change. (2) And even if the drive to improve the exploitation is strong, the individual capitalist is disheartened by the corporate structure in which most vast enterprises are now embedded; he is willing to accept limited government regulation. (3) Not least, it now seems that even in peace-time there is a limit to the falling rate of profit; technical improvement alone guarantees an annual increment of more than 2%. By deficit spending the state can subsidize a low but stable rate of profit on all investment, and there is apparently no limit to the amount of nonsense that people can be made to want to buy on credit, mortgaging their future labor. And in fact we see, to our astonishment, that a large proportion, almost a majority of the bourgeoisie, are even now ready to settle for plans that guarantee a low but stable profit.