by Michael Roberts
Last week, to commemorate 170 years since Marx and Engels wrote
The Communist Manifesto, the editors of the UK’s Financial Times commissioned two executives of a ‘corporate advisory’ firm to consider what was right and wrong in that seminal work about capitalism and communism. The two FT writers started by declaring that “as a partner in a corporate advisory firm and a professor of law and finance, we are true believers in free-market capitalism”, but nevertheless, the 1848 manifesto still had some value, especially “in
the wake of a calamitous financial crisis and in the midst of whirlwind
social change, a popular distaste of financial capitalists, and
widespread revolutionary activity”.
But the FT authors wanted to convert the Communist Manifesto into
what they call a “Activist Manifesto”. They threw out the outdated
concepts of two classes: capitalists and workers; and replaced them with
the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. You see, classes and crises are out
of date as the main critique of capitalism now is rising inequality,
which the FT authors claim the Communist Manifesto was really about. “As
in Marx’s and Engels’ time, economic inequality is rising, wages are
stagnating, and the owners of productive capital are reaping the
benefits of technological advances”.
But the solution to this, the FT authors are at pains to say, is not
the confiscation of private property or communism – this only breeds “murderous tyrannies”. And “we
also think Marx and Engels would update their views about private
property. While the abolition of private property was their first and
most prominent demand, we think they would recognise that Have-Nots have
benefited from property rights. Moreover, we argue that state-held
property is problematic, leading to waste, inefficiency and the
likelihood of being co-opted by the Haves in our societies today. As the
role of the state has grown, inequality has also grown. And the
Have-Nots have been the ones who have paid for it.”
Instead what we need is ‘shareholder activism’ in companies “shaking up complacent boards and advocating for changes in corporate strategy and capital structure.”
This is the way forward, according to our FT authors 170 years after
Marx and Engels’ manifesto. And even the global elite recognise it: “many
Haves too are activists already today… Think of the billionaires such
as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg, who already support
philanthropic efforts to alleviate inequality”. So that’s all right then.
Should the Communist Manifesto be rewritten as a plea for ‘activism’
led by billionaires to reduce inequalities, rather than the abolition of
private property in the means of production and the replacement of
capitalism with communism? While the FT was publishing its view on the
Communist Manifesto today, I was delivering a talk on social classes
today at the Metropolitan University of Mexico in Mexico City (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – UAM) as
part of my recent visit there. I too started off with a reminder that
it was 170 years since the Communist Manifesto was published. But I
emphasised that the basic division of capitalism between two classes:
the owners of the means of production (corporations globally) and those
who own nothing and only have their labour power to sell; remains pretty
much unchanged from how it was in 1848.
Recent empirical work on the US class division of incomes has been done by Professor Simon Mohun.
Mohun analysed US income tax returns and divided taxpayers into those
who could live totally off income from capital (rent, interest and
dividends) – the true capitalists, and those who had to work to make a
living (wages). He compared the picture in 1918 with now and found that
only 3.8% of taxpayers could be considered capitalists, while 88% were
workers in the Marxist definition. In 2011, only 2% were capitalists
and near 84% were workers. The ‘managerial’ class, ie workers who also
had some income from capital (a middle class ?) had grown a little from
8% to 14%, but still not decisive. Capitalist incomes were 11 times
higher on average than workers in 1918, but now they were 22 times
larger. The old slogan of the 1% and the 99% is almost accurate.
The class divide described in the Communist Manifesto is that between
those who own and those who do not and Mohun’s ‘class’ stats confirm
that. For Marx and Engels, all previous history has been one of class
struggle over the surplus created by labour. In slave economies, the
owners of capital literally owned humans as source of their surplus; in
feudal society, they controlled the days of work and obligations of the
serfs.
Under capitalism, the surplus was usurped in a hidden ‘invisible’
way. Workers were paid a wage – a fair wage – but they produced more
value in the commodities they made for sale and it was this surplus
value realised in the sale of commodities (goods and services) that
capitalists accumulated.
The class struggle under capitalism thus took
the form of a struggle between the share of value going to wages or
profits. As Marx put it in Capital: “In the class struggle as a
finale in which is found the solution of the whole smear! From a
struggle over wages, hours and working conditions or relief, it becomes,
even as it fights for those things, a struggle for the overthrow of the
capitalist system of production – a struggle for proletarian
revolution.”
In my presentation to UAM in Mexico, I ambitiously argued that we can
gauge the intensity of the class struggle from the balance of forces in
the wage-profit battle. I used statistics of strikes in the UK since
1890 against the profitability of UK capital (for more on this, see my
paper, Mapping out the class struggle). The
first long depression of capitalism was at its deepest just as Marx
died in 1883. It came to an end in the UK in the early 1890s:
profitability recovered and the labour movement strengthened with the
advent of new mass unions. Labour disputes erupted for a while. The
fall back in profitability from 1907 then sparked a new battle over the
surplus leading to intense levels of strikes just before the WWI broke
out.
After the war, the class struggle resumed with some intensity, but in
the UK that ended with the defeat of the general strike in 1926. On
the back of that defeat, UK capital recovered some profitability while
the unions were weakened. Strikes and class struggle were depressed by
the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The second world war drove up profitability and the labour movement
also made a recovery. It was the golden age of growth, investment,
employment and the ‘welfare state’. So when the profitability crisis of
the late 1960s and 1970s commenced, British workers fought hard to
maintain their gains. Strikes were at a high level and there was talk
of revolution. That struggle came to an end with the defeat of the
miners in 1985. What followed was rising profitability in the
neo-liberal period, along with weakened trade unions. This was a recipe
for low levels of class struggle. With the Great Recession and the
subsequent Long Depression, that low intensity continued.
I concluded from this short analysis that the class struggle as
described in the Communist Manifesto has not disappeared and neither
have the two basic classes, contrary to the amendments advocated in the
‘Activist Manifesto’ of the FT authors. But the intensity of that
struggle depends on the objective conditions of the profitability of
capital and the strength of labour. Class struggle is not always at
fever pitch, revolutionary moments are rare.
The most intense periods of struggle appear to be when the labour
movement is reasonably strong in incomes and organisation but when the
profitability of capital has started to fall, according to Marx’s law of
profitability. Then the battle over the share of the surplus and wages
rises. Historically, in the UK that was from 1910 just before and just
after WW1; and in the 1970s. Such objective conditions have so far not
arisen again. So the spectre of Communism haunting Europe – the phrase
that Marx and Engels started with their manifesto in 1848 (in a similar
intense period as those above) – is not yet with us again.
If you have opinions about the subject matter of posts on this blog please share them. Do you have a story about how the system affects you at work school or home, or just in general? This is a place to share it.
No comments:
Post a Comment