As Warren Buffett said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” And since the rich have only been getting richer, it also seems that they have been making better use of Marx than the great unwashed masses.
We are admittedly a bit heavy today on the class warfare themes, thanks to KLG having a fine post launching soon on Hayek. Even though Keynes warned, “Even the most practical man of affairs is usually in the thrall of the ideas of some long-dead economist,” one can have better or worse taste in terms of what economic notions to follow.
Yanis Varoufakis hopes to make a dent in this tendency with his article below, which is part of his long campaign for better protection of workers and the economically disadvantaged and against predatory (as in pretty much all) capitalism. We have pointed out that employee-owned firms are one solution to the conundrum of how to get the benefits of capitalism while preventing the exploitation of workers. Sadly, this model does not seem to scale well. Readers can correct me if I am wrong, but Mondragon is the biggest example I know of.
By Yanis Varoufakis, an economist, the leader of MeRA25, former Minister of Finance of Greece, and author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Originally published at the Guardian; cross posted from his website
A young woman I met recently remarked that it was not so much the existence of pure evil that drove her berserk, but rather people or institutions with the capacity to do good who instead ended up damaging humanity. Her musing made me think of Karl Marx, whose quarrel with capitalism was precisely that – not so much that it was exploitative but that it dehumanised and alienated us despite being such a progressive force.
Preceding social systems might have been more oppressive or exploitative than capitalism. However, only under capitalism have humans been so fully alienated from our products and environment, so divorced from our labour, so robbed of even a modicum of control over what we think and do. Capitalism, especially after it shifted into its technofeudal phase, turned us all into some version of Caliban or Shylock – monads in an archipelago of isolated selves whose quality of life is inversely related to the abundance of gizmos our newfangled machinery produces.
This week, alongside a host of other politicians, writers and thinkers, I will be speaking at the Marxism 2025 festival in London, and one of the questions that occupies me is the way in which young people today clearly feel this alienation Marx identified. But the backlash against immigrants and identity politics – not to mention the algorithmic distortion of their voices – paralyses them. Here Marx can re-enter with advice on how to overcome this paralysis – good advice that lies buried under the sands of time.
Take the argument that minorities living in the west should assimilate lest we end up a society of strangers. When Marx was 25, he read a book by Bruno Bauer, a thinker he respected, making the case that to qualify for citizenship, German Jews should renounce Judaism.
Marx was livid. Though the young Marx had no time for Judaism, indeed for any religion, his passionate demolition of Bauer’s argument is a sight for sore eyes: “Does the standpoint of political emancipation give the right to demand from the Jew the abolition of Judaism and from man the abolition of religion? … Just as the state evangelizes when … it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, so the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civic rights.”
The trick that Marx is teaching us here is how to combine a commitment to the religious freedom of Jews, Muslims, Christians etc with the wholesale rejection of the presumption that, in a class society, the state can represent the general interest. Yes, Jews, Muslims, people of faiths that we may not share – or even much like – must be emancipated immediately. Yes, women, black people and LGBTQ+ people must be granted equal rights well before any socialist revolution appears on the horizon. But freedom will take a lot more than that.
Shifting to the topic of immigrant workers suppressing the wages of local workers, another minefield for today’s younger people, a letter Marx sent in 1870 to two associates in New York City offers brilliant clues on how to deal not only with the Nigel Farages of the world but also with some leftists who have bitten the anti-immigration bait.
In his letter, Marx fully acknowledges that American and English employers were purposely exploiting cheap Irish immigrant labour, pitting them against native-born workers and weakening labour solidarity. But for Marx it was self-defeating for trade unions to turn against the Irish immigrants and espouse anti-immigration narratives. No, the solution was never to banish immigrant workers but to organise them. And if the problem is the weakness of the unions, or fiscal austerity, then the solution can never be to scapegoat immigrant workers.
Speaking of trade unions, Marx also has some splendid advice for them. Yes, it is crucial to boost wages to reduce worker exploitation. But let us not fall for the fantasy of fair wages. The only way to render the workplace fair is to do away with an irrational system based on the strict separation of those who work but do not own and the tiny minority who own but do not work.
In his words: “Trade unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. [But] [t]hey fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of also trying to change it.”
Change it into what? A new corporate structure based on the principle of one-employee-one-share-one vote – the kind of agenda that can truly inspire youngsters who crave freedom both from statism and from corporations driven by the bottom lines of private equity firms or an absent owner who may not even know he or she owns part of the firm they work for.
Last, Marx’s freshness shines through when we try to make sense of the technofeudal world that big tech, along with big finance and our states, has surreptitiously encased us in. To understand why this is a form of technofeudalism, something much worse than surveillance capitalism, we need to think as Marx would have of our smartphones, tablets etc. To see them as a mutation of capital – or “cloud capital” – that directly modifies our behaviour. To grasp how mind-bending scientific breakthroughs, fantastical neural networks and imagination-defying AI programs created a world where, while privatisation and private equity asset-strip all physical wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset-stripping our brains.
Only through Marx’s lens can we truly get it: that to own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectively.
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The refusal of Marx to acknowledge the power of demographics was his greatest failure. History shows very clearly that the working class cannot overcome a flooded labor market. When the rich breed us like cattle, when they enact pro-natalist policies, or failing that, flood the market with refugees from other poorer counties, and there are 1000 desperate people competing for every new job opening, workers fail. And vice versa. That’s why, more than anything else, the rich want to flood the market for labor.
When there are 1000 desperate workers competing for every job, the workers do not “control the means of production,” they control nothing. But when there are three businesses competing for every able worker, well, the working class at least has a chance.
Capitalism is neutral as regards workers. It’s all supply and demand. The answer is just to have a tight labor market – or more specifically, to prevent the rich from destroying a tight labor market.
Yes, exactly this. It amazes me to see ‘leftists’ tie themselves into pretzels every time immigration comes up, it’s a shibboleth they just can’t let go of. Every neoshitlib the world over is pro-mass immigration, you would think that would be a giant fu****g clue to our so called ‘leftists’ that maybe this is a policy not in the interests of the working classes of said societies?
And it’s not even just worker’s bargaining power, it impacts every part of life. Canada is a fine example, where not only is immigration a stick to crush labour, it is also a stick to keep the housing market un-affordable, goose GDP ‘growth’, destroy labour standards (eg: trucking), destroy the environment (eg “we need to plow over the GreenBelt for the housing emergency we created!!!!”), put pressure on public services like healthcare to justify privatizing them (eg: “look how bad wait times are!!!” (after we doubled the population)), destroy education standards via scamming diploma mill ‘colleges’. Etc etc. It’s exasperating.
“Just organize them” . Yeah. I’d like to see Varoufakis organizing Gujarati truck drivers that barely speak English who work 12 hours a day. And that’s assuming the overlord class just sits back and ignores said ‘organising’. Pfft. Good luck.
The correct solution is take away that weapon used against us in the first place.
Good points. Regarding pro-mass-immigration “leftists”, they are just liberals or identitarians, not leftists at all.
I also took pause at Varoufakis’ breezy recommendation that the way forward is to organize immigrants. In principle, sure, but how about illegals like in the US?
“Regarding pro-mass-immigration ‘leftists’, they are just liberals or identitarians, not leftists at all.”
I’m not an expert / historian but my reading about anarchy-communism and the IWW, etc. is that an anti-state focus on internationalism, while organizing locally/regionally/nationally is not about “pro-mass-immigration” — whatever that means (?) — but about generating solidarity across arbitrarily drawn divisions.
I bring this up because rather than the leftists I know defining themselves as “pro-mass-immigration” they hold to the idea that borders need to remain porous in recognition of the ever-growing populations displaced by wars and climate catastrophe largely driven by the Western States, who are the States most likely to be slamming shut the borders.
I don’t understand what climate and war refugees are supposed to do if ‘safer’ countries refuse entry — even regulated, secured, health-screened entry.
I’m forgetting the name of the author who somewhat recently discussed regularly explaining to their students that it’s only been about 100 yeas since passports started to become a regulated requirement rather than an exception, and that historically borders were very porous, with passports demonstrating a professional or state-sanctioned distinction.
John P Clark wrote a fantastic short book called “The Tragedy of Common Sense,” (Changing Suns Press, 2016) to detail the staying power of the Lifeboat Theory — the idea that to survive in a limited-resource environment we need to throw others overboard, specifically based in a well-debunked paper “Living on a lifeboat” by Garrett Hardin (1974).
I think about his clarity on this issue frequently.
I have heard this as well, and while it is of course a salutary idea, I can’t help but notice that pretty much all the people I’ve met who argue for this, how they also vote Democrat, i.e., they directly enable a pro-war, pro-Empire party that has greenlit overthrowing legitimate governments and displacing millions. As far as I can tell, these pro-mass-immigration liberals often can’t be bothered with thinking about geopolitics, capitalism, or really thinking much beyond lesser-of-two-evilism.
E.g., a former colleague railing against Trump, how DJT was a horrible racist, xenophobe, how his position against immigrants was unconscionable, but when queried I realized my colleague had never heard of the TPP, had no idea what it was, didn’t care, and had no interest in understanding why USians might be supporting Trump for that reason. This colleague had a PhD, by the way.
As for climate and war refugees, the way things are going, we will very likely see a tsunami of hundreds of millions in the coming years.
I’m not saying “close the borders”, but I think it’s safe to say there will be a lot of public support for those who do. What then?
This, “pretty much all the people I’ve met who argue for this, how they also vote Democrat, i.e., they directly enable a pro-war, pro-Empire party that has greenlit overthrowing legitimate governments and displacing millions” is not my experience at all. I mean, that’s a great description of Democrats I know, but not “leftists.”
Sure, I’ve met them, many academics, but they usually self-define as liberals and progressives, and tend to use the word “radical” as a descriptor for their online activity, and “leftist” as a perforative. Sometimes toward me.
But then I don’t accept conflating “leftists” (they exist as much as the ideologies of the past two-hundred years of ‘leftist’ theory and action exist) and “pro-mass-immigration liberals”.
You don’t get to lump everyone in the US left of moderate in the same bucket with any more accuracy than lumping everyone right of centrist as “trump loving.”
Maybe it’s just that I’ve been lucky enough to know people I still consider leftists, most of whom find projects they can fit themselves in where they feel like they are contributing, whether it was Food Not Bombs in the 90s or Strike Debt in the aughts, or older friends who’d been Solidarity activists who turned to anti-ICE protests over a decade ago (before it was cool?), and all almost all these people — some who vote, some who don’t — are ALSO working in more general direct politics, sometimes electoral, for the Working Families Party or even DSC, and some now moving back to communist groups.
Again: all while also doing mutual aid or caregiving work.
And while a lapsed-since-the-age-of-four Catholic myself, I’ve been lucky enough to know people in the Catholic left, the ALC and/or the Catholic Workers, many of whom have maintained their commitment to direct action and long-term (6-months and up) prison sentences for anti-militarist actions (including anti-drone in recent years), while continuing to do ‘good works’ in their communities, ie. housing the unhoused, AIDS and cancer hospice, food-banks, etc. My experience with the Catholic Workers is that their ability to take on more and more and more, when need is presented, and then find the resources and labor needed to address those needs, is an impressive micro-political model that deserves to be considered as part of a macro-policy solution: basically everyone alive deserves to keep living if it’s within our power to do something to help them, short of irrevocably harming our personal survival.
I’ve had a similar experience with Vets for Peace folks I’ve worked with — some of the most clear-thinking peace-focused, geo-politically following, anti-capitalists I’ve been lucky enough to know.
As for “what then,” there is, as is often discussed on NC, massive misappropriation, mis-use, theft, and hoarding of real resources that could, in different circumstances, be applied toward housing and feeding and screening and health care in a state or confederated society that prioritizes over necropolitics. How we get there from inside the belly of THIS beast, I don’t know, but this beast at least deserves constant indigestion from within while being attacked from without. But then again I consider myself a struggling “leftist” who’s tired of being lumped into two categories, right and left, with an increasingly hostile regularity since, say, 2014.
Sounds just like Australia too. A perpetual skills shortage they say, but no matter how many immigrants come the shortage goes on and on. Unaffordable housing, expensive energy..
“reserve army of labor”
“…This concept, central to Marx’s critique of political economy, highlights how capitalism creates and utilizes a surplus population to maintain its profitability and power…”
Even AI knows what it is.
AI doesn’t know anything The parametrization of probabilities of word succession, given the information ingested from all that is available on the internets and more (all the privately digitized books) leads to such an answer from an AI LLM.
The importance of demographics for the prospects and rights of labor was shown by the black death in Europe circa 1340s. Between one-third and one-half of Europe’s population died in a brief period. The resulting shortage of labor emancipated labor with rising wages and freedom to bargain and the mobility to seek more favorable treatment. Unsuccessful laws were passed for caps on wages and employers were punished for exceeding the maximum rates. The appearance of newly prosperous commoners prompted sumptuary laws to maintain the status of the aristocracy. In England where French was the language of the royal and manorial courts, so many French speaking lawyers died that English was substituted. Demographic decline severely damaged feudalism initiating changes leading to the renaissance and reformation.
With enough self-deportations there should be more wage increases and even, gasp, maybe better benefits. Employers will have to address the new realities.
Please look up “Lumpenproletariat,” which is what you largely seem to be talking about. Marx recognized this issue almost two-hundred years ago.
Capitalism very much is NOT neutral to workers. That is a bizarre statement.
How do you suggest we “…just have a tight labor market?” How does that work?
It’s not anti-immigration; it’s anti-illegal immigration. Big difference. as citizens we have a right to know who is coming into our country, that they are healthy and are not bringing in disease, and that they are pro-American and support the country, and not try to make it into what they left. Somehow that message has been distorted.
If capital is free to move across borders, so should labor. There should be a process, but it should be as easy as capital flows.
I submit that capital ought NOT to be free to cross borders, and that much mischief has been aided and abetted by the widespread abolishment of capital controls.
Agreed. Allowing capital to move freely allows the rich to engage in currency and labor arbitrage.
When we have one global currency, maybe then we can talk about different options.
Capital as currency is unembodied. People are not. Therein a difference lies.
And that illegal status makes it much easier to keep them from organizing.
“Just organize them, bro”
I would argue that it’s not even legal vs illegal immigration that is the crux of the issue here, but the volume of it. A few people on the move coming to a community new to them adds some character, some new ideas, and keeps things from stagnating. Mass immigration in a short time causes big problems – just ask the North American First Peoples. Varoufakis kind of gives the issue a huge handwave and just assumes it will all work out if only the proper prescriptions are followed.
Some musical accompaniment from Randy Newman in conversation with old Karl – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FumuR–6pg&list=RD4FumuR–6pg&start_radio=1
Was there ever a time when those “froggish men” weren’t with us?
Ummmm…
… Varoufakis is whistling past the graveyard. We have a much bigger problem, which squabbles about cross-border capital flow, labor exploitation, and cultural identity don’t begin to touch.
Right now, there are roughly 80 million permanently displaced climate refugees in the world: ~1% of the global population. We are on track for that number to increase by about an order of magnitude in a generation or so, as chunks of the planet become increasingly uninhabitable.
If the global civilization that created this demographic catastrophe cannot figure out how to gracefully reach out and support a hundred million people with nothing left to lose, what happens when it’s a billion people with nothing left to lose?
It’s not a rhetorical question. I actually believe that this is an existential problem that we can still fix, if we really want to. But it’s an issue that’s not even on the table yet.
This is what I am getting at when I say, cue the resource wars of extinction
I’m not anti-immigration, I just think immigrants need to be subjected to interrogation regarding their “pro-American” bona fides.
Wow. Incredible concept of democratic citizenship you got there. “Only people who will pucker up when I drop trou, please. Get that flag waving!”
Obviously you don’t live in Canada. The dissatisfaction here with the “legal ” immigration (over 500K per year) grew soo much (I really wonder what CSIS and RCMP has scooped from the social media), that forced the Federal government to turn off the flood.
The problem is that the US has not proven itself competent to bring in enough legal immigration to fill the country’s needs. It is, next to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, probably the most incompetent part of the government. Especially since we adjusted the immigration laws not to favor people of European descent.
I suspect that given Europe’s current trajectory, we’re going to see another period of mass immigration from Europe, and Congress will likely change the immigration laws to accommodate that.
Re: Examples of cooperative scaling, the emilia-Romagna Region, of Italy boasts some 4,000 cooperative businesses employing something like 250,000 workers seems a promising example. Found an article covering it (perhaps one of our Italian based readers could comment further?)
The high level of contemporary alienation may make something like this a significant ask, but then being optimistic a mass alienation is also a kind of commonality & perhaps in due course a starting point(?)
“In a region of 5 million people, there are 4000 co-operative businesses, that employ 250,000 people – just under a quarter of the entire workforce. The co-op movement in ER goes back to the mid 19th century, with roots in the workers’ mutual aid societies, and many of the early ones are still strong today. It wasn’t a reaction to capitalism. The co-op movement developed alongside capitalism.”
https://www.lowimpact.org/posts/why-is-the-co-operative-movement-so-successful-in-emilia-romagna-with-matt-hancock-no-not-that-one/
So Mel. Are Americans healthy? That’s not the impression I get. When it comes to bringing in disease, aren’t the opioid and firearms epidemics homegrown? As for what the country stands for, judging by recent (and not so recent) behaviour, it needs subversion badly.
Sorry, let me quote IM Doc, who unlike you has treated illegal immigrants and is in North Flyover, as in well away from the southern border:
I have more in my inbox along these lines, but those entries should be more than sufficient to make the point.
I must also add that Mexicans have a greater propensity to get diabetes at normal body weights than Caucasians. See for instance:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6953173/
At least Canada has a very good screening and surveillence for TB from outside sources.
“However, only under capitalism have humans been so fully alienated from our products and environment, so divorced from our labour, so robbed of even a modicum of control over what we think and do. ”
There is a name for what made it all possible: Taylorism (or “scientific management”).
And Taylorism is the forefather of the alleged “AI”.
Hayek’s idea (repeating after Mirowski) that markets are perfect processors that compute social relations with choices as basic operations must tie in this somewhere.
Varoufakis, like me, is stuck in the 60s. But, while he is stuck in the 60s Marxist/socialist dream, I am stuck in the rock and roll world. R+R taught the world to respect and value diversity and creativity and color in the world. Those are values that should run the world, not economic or other social theories that value structure. Capitalism and socialism argue that the answer is in the design of the economic system. Capitalism and socialism are not the answer, just as we are discovering that democracy is not the answer. Even worse is belief in the social and/or political ideologies of capitalism or socialism. The answer is in adept, practical, and controlling regulation based on humane and tolerant values. We need an approach inspired by the FDR/New Deal search for solutions that work. We need to recognize the strength of Taylorism, as referred to by Mikel, although not AI. Read Robert Michels’ Political Parties discussing the iron law of oligarchy or even George Orwell’s Animal House. Our biggest problem at this time is that our governing system has been taken over by a minority funded by, but not limited to, oligarchs who realize that they are always going to be a minority and can only continue to have influence if they exercise brute strength/violence. Part of the solution must be public funding of the election process.
So easily observed that the people who spend the most time insisting that illegals are invading and being brought in and so on live in a stateless world of money.
WalMart eventually gave up on lying about goods their being made in the USA. Buy the long-term campaign did its work.
“We have pointed out that employee-owned firms are one solution to the conundrum of how to get the benefits of capitalism while preventing the exploitation of workers.”
Wrong. People managing their own capitalist enterprise is people managing their own exploitation. The goal of the most clear-sighted past revolutionary movements — in other words, not Leninists, social democrats and various nationalists and bourgeois state officials — has been to abolish wage labor and commodity production.
Capitalist social relations are historically bankrupt, and capitalism itself has amply created the material preconditions for a future mass revolutionary social movement to make an immediate leap to an egalitarian, ecologically sane, post-market society. I suspect that I’m not the only person alive on earth right now who realizes this.
You might want to get that knee seen to. I suggest you actually inform yourself about Mondragon rather than spout ideology.
So do subsistence farmers also manage their own exploitation? It seems that to you, any productive work is exploitation.
See:
Which another YouTube video says may actually have a good bit of historical accuracy to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-wbrKimEOc
So, the Mondragon business endeavor has abolished capitalist social relations? Nope.
You appear to be working under the assumption that work for wages, money and the market are eternal and will always be with us. One way or another they won’t be. Those of us who must sell our labor power for wages and have nothing to lose but our pains can, in a context of future mass collective social struggles, opt to scrap the entire contemporary s**theap, not aspire to run businesses where we sell what we make as commodities to pay ourselves wages and re-invest in the business. The ‘Manifesto of the Equals’ was clear on the need to abolish market relations, although not so clear on the question of wage labor, in Paris in 1796. Many others since then have been unmistakably clear on this as well.
After capitalist social relations over-run everything else you can’t go back to something that is somehow half-capitalist and half-something else, any more than you can have a slight case of Stage 4 cancer. Capitalism is a totalitarian system and its abolition can’t be a half-way thing.
See an interesting pamphlet titled, ‘Lip and the self-managed counter-revolution,’ from a group in France in the 70s called Negation and published in English in 1975 by Black and Red in Detroit:
https://libcom.org/article/lip-and-self-managed-counter-revolution-1973-negation
Help me. I told you that subsistence farming is the alternative and you just prattle more ideology. You SERIOUSLY want that? I sure as hell don’t. Modern production requires hierarchies. Tell me how to organize factories and electrical grids and road-making. FFS.
The Slavic/peasants way of organizing their communities, very “communal” (Romanians for instance seem to have adopted the practice during the several centuries of cohabitation, before 506 BC, and kept the name Obste) is another good example.
I take your point on economic duress, but I think there is a more nuanced view.
Yet, there does seem to be a continuing and unresolved issue with how the notion of ‘work’ fits into various economic ideologies.
Obviously not all work is exploitative, nor is it necessarily unpleasant, or only undertaken under coercion.
Polanyi’s writings do differentiate between types of work, and he saw the wider social functions as an integral part of this activity – as does Herzen, pre-Marx.
Polanyi identifies the commodification of labour and land by the Classical economists (primarily Marx and Ricardo) as the turning point in the creation of capitalism in the Great Transformation, in that change to price setting markets, and that this is the artifice that created the element of compulsion..
Taking away the ‘capitalist’ descriptor in your sentence leaves you with “People managing their own enterprise is people managing their own exploitation.”
Now if you substitute ‘livelihoods’ for ‘exploitation’, you take out the commodification requirement.
Co-operative enterprises were essential in all pre-capitalist societies/economies, and arguably, it is man’s co-operativeness that defines us socially, as Kropotkin stated in his debunking of Social Darwinism.
Excellent comment – I like your nuanced view. As a side note, Bertrand Russell also differentiated between the types of work and how they relate to different economic ideologies (ie politics), albeit somewhat snarkily, in his great essay In Praise of Idleness –
“First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the
position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other
such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is
unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The
second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those
who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should
be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given
simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics.
The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects
as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive
speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.”
Also, I’ve been looking for a copy of The Great Transformation for years now in dusty old book stores and have come up empty, so I think I’m going to break down and order a copy from the interwebs. Sounds like you’ve read it. Any suggestions on a good edition to pick up?
Polanyi is one of the best books ive ever read.
get a copy by any means necessary.
even if it feeds that dickhead’s bottom line.
its on the economic shelves in my Library, next to both Adam Smiths, all the Marx i have, and Mario Puzo.
I manage my own exploitation as the operator of this site. I don’t have a problem with that and am offended at effete know-nothings who say I should.
Does that mean even CEOs are technically exploited? Sounds like we got a way to recruit them!
Varoufakis seems to have borrowed heavily from Kotkin’s neofeudalism in his subsequent version of techno-feudalism. It too is dependent on a lower order of compliant workers with an elite controlling and directing them. But then so is corporate monopoly capitalism. So what’s really new ?
” Preceding social systems might have been more oppressive or exploitative than capitalism. However, only under capitalism have humans been so fully alienated from our products and environment, so divorced from our labour, so robbed of even a modicum of control over what we think and do.”
Though Varoufakis plays lip service to the environment, Marx really did not. He pretty much ignored it.
Karl Polanyi also recognised and described feudalism, but then took an entirely different view to the reductionist approach of the “historically untenable stages theory that is traditional with Marxism… which flowed from the conviction that the character of the economy was set by the status of labour.
The integration of the soil into the economy, however, should be regards as hardly less vital.”
And that connection with the planet, and the natural environment, is central to Polanyi’s anthropological approach, especially given his study of ‘primitive’ societies.
Polanyi also saw the differentiation of current economic structures as being delimited by the commodification of labour, but he dismissed the consequent concept of predictable stages of economic evolution outlined in Marxism as being far from inevitable.
Polanyi’s main emphasis was on the social mores that influence(d) the economic system and noted that capitalism was preceded by a system based on reciprocity, redistribution and households with non-price setting markets, and defines the economy as “man’s dependence for his living upon nature and his fellows … in an interchange with his natural and social environment”.
Of course Marxian analysis has an informative role, especially on alienation, but Varoufakis way overplays it overall. Karl is often much more inclusive and perceptive, and we do need as wide a choice of views as possible.
Regarding this point, there has been some recent work on Marx and ecology that you might find interesting, e.g.:
Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy
https://monthlyreview.org/product/karl_marxs_ecosocialism/
What a mess we are in! Businesses, corporations, want lots of compliant, cheap labor, so they can make bigger profits: meat processing plants, gigantic vegetable growers in the Central and Imperial Valleys and Florida, the kitchens of chain restaurants, construction companies. They would countenance slavery if they thought the concept would fly.
White homegrown Americans are not yet beaten down enough to put up with miserable work: picking strawberries (tomatoes, lettuce, melons …) in the hot sun for 10 hours every day, standing in freezing rooms on concrete floors with sharp machines that will cut off your finger as easy as they slice through a dead chicken.
Scared, desperate ‘illegals’ fill the bill. Corporate money convinces legislators to look the other way, deal with more easily solved issues. ‘Public Health’ services, that could monitor, detect, treat dangerous communicable diseases, hardly exist. And, if they did, why would an ‘illegal’ (or even a ‘legal’ immigrant or ‘guest worker’ in these times) present themselves to any kind of ‘government’ service. They survive only by staying under the radar.
The problem is not immigrants, legal or illegal or guest. The problem is the men (and maybe a few women) and the corporations run by them that value profit above all else. Profit above worker health and welfare. Profit above livable communities. Profit above the survival of the plants and insects and animals and air and water that are our Planet Earth. Profit above any moral and ethical code.
Call this what you will. Late-State Capitalism? Whatever its name, we need to destroy it before it destroys us. Unless we cure this fatal disease ….. valuing profit and money above all else, we are doomed to die from a Plague that is more contagious than TB, more paralyzing than Polio, more insidious than CoVid.
So happy to see these important issues *(class, alienation, capitalism and alternatives) brought up for NC discussion.
I’m going to take a counter-position to Varoufakis and others in the comments on the issue of alienation, based on the arguments of Branko Milanovic, that will, hopefully, deepen the discussion.
Milanovic, in “Capitalism Alone,” argued that, with the acceleration into what he calls hyper capitalism, commodification did away with alienation. He argued that the ultimate success of capitalism might be due to its capacity to transform human nature such that everyone becomes a capitalist–with each of us becoming our own small center of capitalist production.
Here is a concrete example of this from my own life. My wife and I are both retired while many of our neighbors are still caught up in the daily grind. Because we are around the neighborhood much of the time, we volunteered to baby-sit some of our neighbors’ dogs when they went on vacation. We both thought we would be giving something back to the local community (being nice) by doing the dog-setting.
Everyone in the neighborhood whose dogs we baby-sat, insisted, however, that we be paid for our time and effort. Initially our response was “oh, that isn’t necessary,” but we quickly came to enjoy the extra cash we earned each month to help cover our own grocery expenses.
Jumping to a somewhat more abstract level, Milanovic would argue that being paid for neighborhood dog sitting does not presage a crisis of capitalism, which he argues would only erupt if such a commodification of the private sphere was seen by my wife and myself as a commodification that was not welcomed and accepted.
Milanovic goes on to add, that if we are honest, we would admit that we have all become calculating capitalist centers with the capitalist spirit penetrating deeply into our private lives with the result worldwide being the victory of capitalism.
An old acquaintance was fond of quoting his mother to me: “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing for money.”
The converse is obviously does not follow.
All these years I’ve been laboring under a delusion of doing things right! /s
David Graeber describes very well in Debt, the first 500 years, based on anthropological observations, that in primitive, barter societies, people in fact keep a tab on what they owe to others and what they are owed by others.
Heck, even high level animals have this ingrained “fairness”.
This has nothing to do with capitalism.
Perhaps you could point out where in “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” Graeber states, as you claim, that “based on anthropological observations, that in primitive, barter societies people in fact keep tabs on what they owe to each other and what are owed by others.”
A quick scan of my copy does indicate on page 23 of his book, that when discussing the necessity of money exchange he says:
“It is important to emphasize that this is not presented as something that actually happened but is a purely imaginary exercise…The story of money for economists always begins with a fantasy world of barter.”
I was speaking of the commodification of services–the expansion of commodification to activities, even like dog sitting.
The broader point Milanovic is making is that this type of commodification tends to do away with alienation– it becomes a commodification process in which individuals choose to freely participate.
If you look for “barter” or “primordial debt” you might find quite a few instances of such examples.
Graeber most definitely discussed the nature of obligation and that it did NOT have to do with money exchange. This is is your construction.
There were rough hierarchies of obligation in terms of the magnitude of what was done. Some might be settled by giving a chicken, bigger ones by giving a cow.
aye.
out here, on the dirt road, i exist in such a barter/favor society.
they help me out, i help them out…with the understanding being that i will be there when they need me.
no $ is exchanged.
as for transactions, i’m currently saving my insane mother $300 per month by doing her mowing(i work for cigarettes,lol)…and i sell my eggs and veg, mostly to Tam’s Familia, who are happy to pay…altho it aint near market price…but its familia.
mowing my mom’s yard for cash is not exactly where i wanted to be, at almost 56 years of age, to say the least.
Tam’s tiny little survivor’s pension has 2 years left on it.
but i at least eat like a king of old…roast lamb w taters and veg in a gravy thats to die for.
rosemary, thyme and parsley, and even the bay leaves are from here.
dutch oven, over a fire, for 4 hours.
Posted earlier, but lost to SkyNet:
United Air Lines is arguably a larger “employee-owned” corporation than Mondragon, although it does not conform to Varoufakis’ model of “one worker-one share”. In 1994 the UAL unions owned a 55% majority stake of United. A lot of good it’s done them:
«United CEO Scott Kirby has a net worth of at least $44.1 million and collects an annual salary of $16,779,500 as Chief Executive Officer and President of United Airlines at United Airlines Inc.
…
Kirby’s wealth is not typical for airline CEOs. Average pay for the top 14 U.S.-based carriers is “only” $4.05 million.»
https://iam141.org/united-ceo-scott-kirby-makes-226-years-of-wages-in-a-single-year/
In the late 90s my brother-in-law organized the largest UAL union, the “ticket agents and bag-smashers” union. He said they organized in self-defense against the pilots’ and machinists’ unions.
Alas, even unions sometimes behave like capitalists. What FDR said before Congress in 1942 is worth repeating (adjusting for inflation):
For at least 100 million years, testosterone has rewarded aggression with dopamine. I don’t think we’ll make it to the equality of one-worker one-share, but a limit needs to be placed on predation. There’s no need to also reward aggression with money. FDR showed a 94% top marginal income tax rate is possible. Then we must make it sustainable.
I think Huawei is bigger than Mondragon or UAL.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/technology/who-owns-huawei.html
I am well aware of coops as a viable (and less alienating) form of organizing labour/work, being myself the admin in a small publishing cooperative, here in Portugal. I also was not aware of how big Mondragón is.
But…
Isn’t Huawei actually the bigger company in the world owned by its workers (albeit via a different model, a managed ownership instrument, handled by the union to which all the employees in China must belong)?
You beat me to it!
There is no democracy without the upper limit on personal wealth.
There is no freedom without the lower limit on personal wealth.
The upper limit is the max (human) lifetime of average wages per local state’s economy.
The lower limit is the unconditional universal basic income.
If I may suggest complimenting and being aware of the generosity of Yves in posting this, and divergent opinions I would argue help us get along as we try and digest them.
Immigration, borders, t’s good to have dialogue, and to try and come to terms with even the idea of displacement. It’s a rife subject. Corporations have been hiring immigrants since I was a kid back in N.W. Iowa. Packing plants, egg plants, now even worse. They came raining down on our little farms and polluted it all with chemicals and fertilizers, bankrupting small farmers for greed and also a general hatred of working and normal people. The reason for their hatred, as always, is authentic working people are a a mirror to their shamelessness and depravity. Destroying communities was and is not a by-product, it was and is policy.
The folks who showed up to make a living, after we all fled to colleges and big cities, were – and are not – enemies. Working communities and shared experiences, a beer out on the picnic table with your neighbor. That’s not about money or ‘policy.’ And they hate that. Always will.
About 10 years ago a local business was “sold” to it’s employees. It advertises itself as employee owned. Really some Wall st firm specializing in such things bought out the original owner and manages the business in trust for the employees who, after 10 years of service to the new entity, earn the right to a benefit. Don’t know if it is a dividend of some sort or a lump sum when they retire or quit. One person recently vested and is now leaving the area because the job does not cover local living expenses. There is no worker control and the real estate was sold off and reckless expansion engaged in just before “selling” to the employees so I see little chance of long term stability or growth. I fear many business advertised as “employee owned” are similar.
I have great respect for Varoufakis, but I think he is very narrow vision regarding immigration is a problem. I really think this absolute refusal by some sections of the Left the growing alientation in western societies driven by the lack of social and cultural cohesion driven by mass immigration and tourism will cause great harm. Of course, this applies to both “Third-World” impoverished immigrants and yuppie European and North American digital nomads. Living in Lisbon, in Portugal, I can assure you that this does often feel like a “Land of Strangers”, where the sound of poorly spoken English is more common than my native tongue. Social bonds, too, have become far to superficial.