“And yet a number of central features of Marx’s analysis remain valid and relevant. The first, obviously, is the analysis of the irresistible global dynamic of capitalist economic development and its capacity to destroy all that came before it, including even those parts of the heritage of the human past from which capitalism had itself benefited, such as family structures. The second is the analysis of the mechanism of capitalist growth by generating internal ‘contradictions’ – endless bouts of tensions and temporary resolutions, growth leading to crisis and change, all producing economic concentration in an increasingly globalised economy. Mao dreamed of a society constantly renewed by unceasing revolution; capitalism has realised this project by historical change through what Schumpeter (following Marx) called unending ‘creative destruction’. Marx believed that this process would eventually lead – it would have to lead – to an enormously concentrated economy – which is exactly what Attali meant when he said in a recent interview that the number of people who decide what happens in it is of the order of 1,000, or at most 10,000. This Marx believed would lead to the supersession of capitalism, a prediction that still sounds plausible to me but in a different way from what Marx anticipated. On the other hand, his prediction that it would take place by the ‘expropriation of the expropriators’ through a vast proletariat leading to socialism was not based on his analysis of the mechanism of capitalism, but on separate a priori assumptions. At most it was based on the prediction that industrialization would produce populations largely employed as manual wage-workers, as was happening in England at the time. This was correct enough as a middle-range prediction, but not, as we know, in the long term. Nor, after the 1840s, did Marx and Engels expect it to produce the politically radicalising pauperization that they hoped for. As was obvious to both, large sections of the proletariat were not getting poorer in any absolute sense. Indeed, an American observer of the solidly proletarian congresses of the German Social Democratic Party in the 1900s observed that the comrades there looked ‘a loaf or two above poverty’. On the other hand, the evident growth of economic inequality between different parts of the world and between classes does not necessarily produce Marx’s ‘expropriation of the expropriators’. In short, hopes for the future were read into his analysis but did not derive from it. The third is best put in the words of the late Sir John Hicks, an economics Nobel laureate. ‘Most of those who wish to fit into place a general course of history,’ he wrote, ‘would use the Marxist categories or some modified version of them, since there is little in the way of alternative versions that is available.’ We cannot foresee the solutions of the problems facing the world in the twenty-first century, but if they are to have a chance of success they must ask Marx’s questions, even if they do not wish to accept his various disciples’ answers.” [p15, How to Change the World Reflections on Marx and Marxism by Eric Hobsbawm]
Posted on: Tue, 23 Jul 2013 11:10:20 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015