>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 05/02/00 11:24AM >>>
Apsken at aol.com wrote:
> What do you think Marx meant by this prediction? If he was wrong, was he
>stupid to have predicted it? If he wasn't stupid, but was nevertheless wrong,
>what transpired that was different from his prediction?
I think it's absolutely wrong - alienation and all - to say the worker of 2000 is worse off than the worker of 1850, by any objective or subjective measure.
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CB: What is your evidence on the subjective ? How are you measuring it ?
It is difficult for me to believe that you do not recognize that there is not a straight line curve relationship between "real wages" ( amount of stuff you can buy) and subjective "lot" of a human being. It is like you reject absolutely Marx's thesis on commodity fetishism. Yet, so much of the ideas of a number of the writers you often speak favorably of seem to be elaborations of the basic notion that the ability to buy more commodities has diminishing returns in subjective satisfaction of a human being. The whole of the needs and desires threads have this as a main point.
When you say any objective measure , how about number of workers killed and maimed in automobile accidents ? How about number of workers killed and casualtied in crime ? Number of workers in prison ?
Are you saying that you believe that capitalism is bringing workers progress ? I bet somebody like Zizek or Foucault would breakdown such a notion of progress.
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What happened was that real wages rose, the standards of health and education rose, gender relations became more egalitarian - in no small part because the political movements inspired by Marx and other radicals forced these changes. Left to their own devices, the capitalists certainly wouldn't have conferred a better life on the masses.
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CB. The last two sentences are important. Marx , in the passage about workers' lots, is discussing an abstract tendency of "pure" capitalist mechanisms. There are countervailing tendencies from the struggle of the workers of the Third World ( and First) against capitalism's own tendency to immiserate.
CB