> The problem is that any attempt – such as Marx’s attempt to deduce
> immiserization from long run changes in the organic composition of
> capital and the rate of profit – to deduce long run consequences from
> fixed axioms ignores the feature of reality that makes Marx’s
> materialism “historical,” namely that reality is a system of “internal
> relations.” This is the idea that the essences of things are the
> outcome of their relations and so change with changes in their
> relations.
You have constructed the classic kind of "straw Marx" which liberals love to construct. Nowhere in Marx's writings does he outline a specific sequence/timetable which will signify/lead to the collapse of capitalism. What he did do was to point out contradictions within the capitalist economic system as a whole, which make it inherently unstable.
> Marx’s argument ignores this implication. For instance, it makes
> assumptions about the nature of technical change in the long run,
> something which can’t be known and which there is no reason to believe
> must be of the kind the argument requires.
I don't know what you mean by this. Obviously there were hugely significant technological breakthroughs in Marx's own time (e.g. the telegraph) and he discussed the implications of these. Technological change is neither overlooked _nor_ critical to Marx's general argument; he considered that technology could assist class conciousness as much as it could impede it.
> Nor is it evident why, even
> if the organic composition were to rise and the rate of profit fall,
> this would lead to immiserization. This depends on, among other things,
> what happens to the identities of capitalists and workers (certain
> features of these identities must remain unchanged for them to continue
> to be capitalists and workers, but this leaves lots of room for
> variation in their identities, variation having significant
> implications for the functioning of capitalism).
"Labour" is still the people who rely on the sale of their labour power to make a living. In fact, the populations of western countries contain a higher proportion of _us_ than ever before, thanks to the ongoing collapse of small commodity production. "Mom & Dad" shareholders were cleaned out by the Wall St Crash and there is no reason to think that their renaissance in the 1980s and 90s is any more permanent. I mean, the markets _may_ now be somewhat better regulated in the west than they were in 1929, but as we know, economic activity is undergoing a massive shift to countries where the operations of individual businesses are even less transparent.
> The conclusion that capitalism will be transformed into a better system
> by absolute immiserization also requires that such immiserization be
> not merely consistent with but productive of a subject able to do this.
> Socialism requires a particular kind of subject – a very highly
> developed one - both for its creation and for its continuing existence.
> The idea that such a subject could develop in conditions of absolute
> immiserization is prima facie absurd (certainly it contradicts what is
> claimed about the requirements for positive development in Klein's
> version of psychoanalysis).
In this context, the reference to Klein suggests a conflation of individual psychology and mass psychology. As students of the history of revolutions can tell you, such events rely in the first place on the active participation of a small minority of the population. They certainly do not rely on the majority pf participants being ideal, class conscious individuals. The Russian Empire in 1917 was in chaos: Tsarist policy in WW1 had caused modern industry to virtually cease and hundreds of thousands were deproletarianised, i.e. they fled the cities because there was no food to be found. And yet within 10 years agricultural and industrial output had regained the levels of 1913.
> All these features - messianic-apocalyptic thinking, the embracing of
> suffering, the mistaken identification of reason with formal logic, the
> belief in magical mathematical formulas relating money to the
> achievement of some ultimate good, capitalist “purposiveness” – are
> claimed in Kleinian psychoanalysis to be aspects of the same
> psychopathological complex, a complex issuing from a particular set of
> social relations (Klein’s theory derives subjectivity from “object
> relations”). These psychological claims are, therefore, claims
> grounded in an approach consistent with “historical materialism”
> understood as an ontology of internal relations.
More straw men and simple abuse, dressed up with psychoanalysis. Historical materialism was never claimed by Marx to be an ontology of anything; in fact, he specifically rejected the idea. It is neither here nor there that this has been ignored by many of Marx's admirers, beginning with Engels. HM was, as Frederic Jameson put it, intended to be nothing more than a method; an approach to the study of history, political economy and the other social sciences (for want of a better name).
There is, it seems to me, an undertone of antipathy to materialism in general in your post. This is more usually manifested by the abuse of materialists as "cynics", "misanthropes" etc. Perhaps it would help to point out that Marx was not a "pure" materialist, as shown when he railed against Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."
Regards,
Grant.