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 Conor 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.
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.
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.
And that illegal status makes it much easier to keep them from organizing.
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:
I have more in my inbox along these lines, but those entries should be more than sufficient to make the point.
“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”.
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
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.