Immiseration my eye

[Jacob Segal]

>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.

It was just a question!

Marx writes in the Communist Manifest that the worker "instead of rising
with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions
of existence of his own class. . . .[the bourgeoisie]  is unfit to rule
because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his
slavery."

That doesn't sound like the revolution of rising expectation to me.

My point about knowing to revolt referred to Marx's argument that the
"pauperization" of the working class is a spur to revolution because of
their desperate condition.

If the Communist Manifesto is irrelavant to understanding Marx, than ignore
my question, but I teach it a intro to political theory class and so I'be
interested in squaring what he says here with the idea that immiseration is
only relative to profits.

Jacob Segal