I have argued that Marx did not consistently argue or systematically theorise that capitalism would automatically produce a working class with revolutionary class consciousness. The early socialists, Draper explained, took pity on the working class, seeing it as suffering, incapable of self-organisation and in need of philanthropic help. While the young Marx also saw the proletariat as victim, he came to reject this argument, proposing instead that the people were capable of helping themselves.
While the bourgeois revolution concentrated power in the hands of a minority class, the proletarian revolution would transfer power to a class representing the majority.
Further, all previous revolutions have substituted one form of private property for another. By contrast, if the working class could seize power, Marx and Engels thought, it would abolish class society as such. Second, Marx proposed that capitalism is based in an objectively determined class structure consisting of a small capitalist class and a large working class encompassing the vast majority of the population. Rather than seeing a universal process of deskilling resulting in a homogeneous, unskilled working class, Marx argued that capitalism would require a complex division of labour including unskilled workers, skilled workers and a hierarchy of managers to coordinate it all.
The category of expert managers includes members of the top 1 percent such as investment bankers, corporate lawyers, hedge fund and private equity managers and corporate executives. As such, the salariat of experts and managers should be distinguished from the working class.
The remaining class fragments consist of workers on hourly wages: non-skilled workers, skilled workers with no authority, non-skilled supervisors and skilled supervisors. As such, I define these four locations as the working class. Based on the foregoing definition, the working class as a percentage of the total labour force including capitalists, small employers and the self-employed is 76 percent in Sweden, 71 percent in the UK, 67 percent in the US, and 66 percent in Canada and Norway.
Japan is an outlier, having fully 23 percent of its population in self-employment, with 1. In terms of stock ownership, the top 10 percent of American households own a staggering 84 percent of all stocks, including pension plans, k retirement savings plans and mutual funds.
This 23 percent is consistent with the Wright data indicating that roughly 25 to 35 percent of workers are in the salariat. Just 52 percent of American households own some form of pension. Again this is consistent with the definition of the working class consisting of 65 to 75 percent of the total labour force, according to the Wright data.
The majority of the population are wage workers with no ownership stake in the capitalist economy in any form.
However, it remains internally differentiated and this is the central issue for class analysis and class politics. While the organic labour market relation between supervisors, skilled workers and unskilled workers is likely to generate a close subjective class affinity, there is likely to be a substantial subjective class distance between this group and the salariat.
The question of cross-class alliances is key here, and Draper shows that in their letters to each other and various additional parties, Marx and Engels were deeply concerned with these questions of differentiation and alliance. Finally, a central developmental dynamic of capitalism that Marx elaborated in detail in Capital is the concentration and centralisation of capital. Specifically, he argued that there would be an increasing concentration of capital into the hands of a small number of capitalists and firms, and a centralisation of capital in the form of ever bigger enterprises.
Both predictions ring true today. On concentration of wealth, in the top 1 percent of the US population held 40 percent of total net wealth, while the bottom 80 percent held just 10 percent.
The next 20 percent by wealth consists of the remaining capitalists and the top two thirds of the salariat. The bottom 80 percent by wealth consists of the bottom third of the salariat and the entire working class wage workers and supervisors. The fact that the bottom 80 percent has such a meagre proportion of total wealth reflects wage stagnation.
In the US, from to , wages for high school educated males aged 25 to 44 and college educated males aged 25 to 34 declined in real terms. In the US the 25 largest employers each employ over , workers, with each of the top nine employing more than , workers. While there has been substantial growth in and differentiation of high-skilled occupations, 35 percent of the US labour force is in a low-autonomy job, such as a machine operator, clerk, nursing aid or cook, with another 27 percent in semi-autonomous jobs such as sales person, sales supervisor, secretary or primary school teacher.
Just 38 percent of workers are in high-skilled, autonomous jobs. Over a century after Capital , volume 1, was published, its analysis of class structure and the organisation of capital remains valid: ownership and wealth are obscenely concentrated; the economy is dominated by mega-corporations, and the vast majority of the population are wage workers, most of whom have zero ownership stake in corporate stocks and limited skills and autonomy at work.
What, then, did Marx see as the relation between such objective conditions and the development of class consciousness?
Similarly, as argued in The Poverty of Philosophy , common interests are not sufficient for the development of class consciousness:.
Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital , but not yet for itself.
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Reset Password Cancel. Sunday newsletter. By proceeding, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions. If you are not already registered, this will create a PS account for you. You should receive an activation email shortly. May 9, Carl Bildt. Support High-Quality Commentary For more than 25 years, Project Syndicate has been guided by a simple credo: All people deserve access to a broad range of views by the world's foremost leaders and thinkers on the issues, events, and forces shaping their lives.
Show More Contact Us. Your name Your email Friend's name Friend's email Message. Cancel Send. Please select an option. Choose an option Please wait, fetching the form. Get our weekly newsletters. Technology was advancing rapidly, but government social protections were almost non-existent. Workers were often brutally exploited. Marx was born to an upper-middle-class German Jewish family on May 5, ; he died in London in March , a couple of months shy of his 65th birthday.
When he was 30, in the fateful year of , a wave of democratic revolts broke out in much of Europe. Millions of Europeans were fed up with the continued rule of unelected kings and hereditary aristocrats.
They wanted democracy, and they had the examples of the American and French revolutions to inspire them.
Those revolutions had succeeded, two generations earlier, in toppling monarchical rule. But the revolution of failed. It was suppressed by armed force, and monarchical rule continued in Germany and elsewhere until , at the end of the First World War. Yet it was in that Marx, then a young revolutionary intellectual, co-published a pamphlet with his collaborator Friedrich Engels that was to become world-famous: the Communist Manifesto. Marx spent the rest of his life working out the political-economic ideas he first gave clear expression to in His main body of work was published in three thick volumes, under the title "Das Kapital" Capital , written between and Marx was a brilliant — albeit flawed — economic thinker.
He was also a strong-willed, opinionated egoist who was always sure he was right. At leftist meetings, he had a tendency to bully and humiliate anyone who tried to disagree with his theses. His wealthy friend Engels was an effective promoter and organizer who believed in Marx and his ideas with messianic fervor, and supported him financially. As fate would have it, this combination of brilliance, controversy and self-promotion meant that Marx's reputation rose far above that of rival leftist political economists.
Over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, his ideas came to be accepted as unchallengeable dogmas on the revolutionary political left. As a result, when the credibility of Europe's royal houses collapsed in the wake of the disastrous First World War that they had misled the Continent into, it was Marx's ideas and doctrines that leftist revolutionaries tried to implement.
Marx's writings became the Bible of the revolutionaries who took power in Russia in , and later in other countries. Even today, after Marxism-inspired state communism has been thoroughly discredited by the dark experiences of history, innumerable leftist groups define themselves as "Marxists" and cling to the bearded economist's ideas with quasi-religious intensity. Many insist that Marx's theories were largely correct — and the disasters of real-world Communism only occurred because his ideas were not implemented correctly.
Marx's core idea was that the whole of human history could be explained as a materialist struggle between classes, playing out a zero-sum game over control of the means of production and the distribution of what is produced. He based this idea on his and Engels' observation of the exploitation of the 19th century "proletariat," or factory workers, by factory owners industrialists , whom Marx termed "capitalists," or owners of capital.
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