Who Are The Gravediggers?

Karl Marx was on point as to the capitalist system creating its own enemies, the gravediggers who would bury capitalism. Most, though not all, bourgeois economists dismissed Marx even when he was alive, and understanding of his approach to political economy has always had trouble gaining traction in European-dominated discussion. Mostly I suspect this is a matter of ideology and dedication to serving one's masters. Obviously, places like the Cato Institute or the Wall Street Journal won't pay people to forecast proletarian revolution. On the other hand, they are only too happy to have consigned Marxism and socialism to the dustbin of history with the demise of the USSR. One difficulty everyone has with the issue and its comprehension is short-term outlook. It took at least 2 centuries (14th and 15th) for capitalism to gain a foothold in England and the explosion of the industrial revolution had to wait until the 19th century. Now, it is true, as Keynes wrote, that in the long run we're all dead. But though Keynes is dead we are not and are those chickens now coming home to roost?

As it happens, or rather happened, the growth of Marxism was tied to imperialist war more than to industrial exploitation. In Germany, which had an active and advanced worker movement the Freikorps pointed their rifles at the workers and shot dead thousands while the year before Russian soldiers refused the Czar's orders to shoot and the Bolsheviks took over easily. In Russia's 1905 Revolution on what's called Bloody Sunday, December 22, more than 250,000 protestors gathered in the square in front of the Palace and the Czar had the soldiers fire into the crowd killing more than 1500 and wounding more than 3000. Afterward the Czar was quoted as saying, "I forgive them their guilt." He meant the peasants not the soldiers. I recall someone once referring to the Bolsheviks' execution of the Romanovs as a noble deed and he didn't intend humor. But in the West, for decades, we've been trained to think of that execution as murder. As with the French Revolution where we are taught about the Reign of Terror when, in fact, only about 1500 people were executed in a country of tens of millions. But those 1500 deserved to live. After all they were parasitic aristocrats. Kind of like financiers today.

Looking back it's obvious that the 20th century, and the first decade of the 21st, were marked by wars of colonial struggles for independence. To capitalist societies and their political henchmen all these struggles were Communist inspired or Communist led or Communist financed and had to be put down. So Britain and France and the US fought against these insurgencies and many, many millions died, as millions more continue to do. If one reads D.F. Fleming's The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917-1960 (2 vol., 1961) one finds that Western opposition actually helped the insurgencies because oppressed people would look at the two sides and pick the one that was indigenous and not funded by the imperialistic West. They preferred a home-grown Red to a Chiang or Diem or Rhee who sided with the white people. But I doubt that means the West chose the "wrong" side; they simply chose their side, the side of private property and exploitation. It's like that same goes-nowhere argument leftists have been having for half a century: how can we design a humane capitalism? The answer, of course, is you can't. As Adam Smith wrote, "All for us and nothing for anyone else."

These colonial struggles do continue. Afghanistan has been in civil war for 35 years; that's how the Soviets got involved. Now the US has been there for nearly a decade and I read where Karzai thinks he'll need western troops for at least 15 more years. Supposedly, Nato troops outnumber Taliban by more than 12 to 1. That Durand line from 19th century Britain has led to the spreading of the Afghan civil war into Pakistan since it seems the US has chosen the Tajik minority to support over the more numerous Pashtun, 2/3 of whom live in Pakistan. We don't have Bolsheviks to push around any longer so now we have to use terrorists. 9/11 seems to have been a godsend for the fascists and they will stoke our fears to the utmost to keep up the military spending - somebody's gotta absorb that surplus - and increase world domination. That assumes the US doesn't self-destruct. Once they've drained our blood we will have become useless to them and they can simply arrange our unfortunate deaths. Healthcare is just too expensive. If people need things let them find jobs. The rule or ruin types of the Confederacy and the Cold War eras are still with us and the financial crisis maneuvers make very clear who is thought important enough to save.

So, in many countries, notably in my own dear US, the expendables, the dispossessed are growing and they won't be able to afford enough jails to house us all. Those poor rich bastards are in a bind, forced to bankrupt the nation to support a bankrupt economy arisen from a bankrupt ideology. In political terms reaction means fighting to hold back the tide and like that Indonesian tsunami the US will likely be swamped. The entire fight over intellectual property - copyrights and patents - is all about stopping development. Obviously if technology makes file reproduction easy and nearly costless a new paradigm is called for. How does one make money from free? But then why are there millions of homeless and millions more forced out of their homes when over 18 million housing units sit empty? The time has come to think of moving past labor-power as a commodity. If our rulers continue they will test the bottom - the mere subsistence wage - from both sides and that's where many of us will perish. In poor communities of my own experience the police are viewed as an occupation force and not just by ethnic minorities.

The modern welfare state arose in post-WW I Europe and its motivation was not humanitarianism but security: to stave off rebellion. This was the other side of demolishing the “soviets” that had formed among German workers. Just as civil rights laws, court decisions and enforcement in the US arose more from fear caused by riots than from a progressive impulse. Today's economic depression mostly eludes bourgeois solution and with reduced government revenues the welfare state is shrinking and many poor are being cast adrift. And with the “hook” of terrorism as a propaganda tool, one that isn't tied to a country, like the USSR, or a defined ideology, like Marxism, disgruntled and protesting poor people will be easily demonized. The contemporary response to disorder will be a mailed fist, no velvet cover. Rebellion will be suppressed. Period. The Dispossessed will be the locus of unrest and they are the least likely to have strong organizations, such as unions. As in discussions about angels dancing on the head of a pin, leftist theorists find the Dispossessed a puzzle.

Being long-term or permanently unemployed puts people outside the productive process, the center of capitalist exploitation. So Marxists have trouble pigeon-holing them. The easy answer is to consider them de-classed elements. But from an historical viewpoint that might be a rash judgment. Has automation, specifically computer control, rendered human labor obsolete? In the opening pages of Capital, Marx writes, insightfully, of value and use-value and how when one want is sated a new want appears. If he was right, and I suspect he was, then, as a matter of principle, it is impossible to render human labor redundant. That cheap, low quality, Chinese-made shoes, from automated factories using dirt cheap labor, are the only shoes we can afford or that are even sold, doesn't mean that higher quality, more expensive, more labor-intensive shoes are unwanted or unnecessary. One shouldn't confuse the limited reality that capitalists shove down our throats with a bigger, more desirable reality that is possible. The de-industrialization of the US occurred not because we live in a post-industrial era but because transportation was “rationalized” – containerized shipping – and digitized telecommunications and relaxed capital controls made it possible and profitable to relocate jobs to low wage countries. The bourgeoisie controls not only the economy and the state but accepted discourse as well and progressive people must fight as much to liberate their thought as their daily lives. I think the approach of Ramin Ramtin's Capitalism and Automation (1991) is closer to the mark: those with jobs, or job prospects, are working class proletarians and those without jobs or job prospects are non-working class proletarians. The details change but the song remains the same.

It's good to recall that the struggle is political, not merely economic. Decades of media propaganda have us believing that more and more and more stuff is god's plan for the universe and produces the best of all worlds. As with discussions schooling for trade skills versus liberal education, what we want and why is a necessary partner with how we do things. In 1933 Irving Fisher wrote that technically society had developed enough to satisfy all human needs. Now, in the age of robots, some think many humans are mere surplus and, well, tough. People on opposite ends of the political spectrum seem to buy this. I do not.