Jacob Segal wrote:
> (snip)
> If so, why does Marx appear to write in the Manifesto that the declining
> living standard is a spur to the revolution.
Maybe because he thought so then. Maybe because a Manifesto (and it was the Manifesto of a particular political organization, which Marx & Engels wrote *on assignment* from the Central Committee of that organization) is hardly the place for developing the fine points of theory. Maybe a thousand other reasons including a boil on his ass even then.
> I hardly think workers would
> so clearly know to revolt if their wages were going up in absolute terms,
> no matter what their share of profits.
I suppose "so clarly know to revolt" is a clumsiness such as is inevitable on an e-list, but I don't know what you mean by it.
It is a commonplace (held by many bourgeois as well as marxist thinkers) that revolution is most apt to happen when there has been at least *some* improvement in conditions. That is one reason I hope the present boom continues for quite a while or that no major economic collapse occurs at least. It would fuck up radical political action just as it seems to be stirring a bit.
Carrol
P.S. Whether Marx did or did not predict absolute immiseration is primarily a philological and biographical, not political issue. Certainly no Marxist I know today holds to such a thesis or bases his/her political theory on it.