>>> <shag@
At any rate, this is what Lewis had to say then:
"It should be added that the "immiseration thesis" is really a legacy of the Cold War. It was a distortion of Marx used by the Communist parties to "prove" that workers in the West generally would suffer dire poverty if they did not emulate the state capitalist dictatorships. While the latter have been consigned to the dustbin of history, I think Marx's legacy deserves a more honest re-consideration."
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2000/2000-May/009526.html
^^^^^
CB: This sounds like something of an misrepresentation of the immiseration thesis. which does not claim that a majority of the working class is always immiserated in all countries; particularly the rich imperialist countries have richer sections of the working class, bourgeoisified sections of the workers. Even Engels and Marx noted this about sections of British workers. However, There is a mass of immiserated workers, wage earners, rank and file consumers constantly and consistently created by capitalism, a pulsating "pole" in contrast with the opposite pole of rich, getting richer, nowadays getting richer faster than in the immediate past. This immiseration of a mass, even if minority of the whole working class, occurs even in booms times of the business cycle ,is even large during long booms , or predominantly boom periods, as in the US for 25 years lately. The immiseration thesis is a legacy of Karl Marx, and his absolute general law of capitalist accumulation, more important than any theory Marx might have had about a business cycle. Marx didn't write a definite such theory. Rather later economic scholars piece such theories together by picking through volumes of _Capital_. The law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as part of some piecemeal theory of Marx on the business cycle derives from parts of Vol. III. Marx didn't even finish Vol. III, but turned to other studies , such as anthropology. Why didn't Marx finish Vol. III if it was so important to his ideas. Why leave it to Engels to put together ? Because it wasn't central. The absolute general law of capitalist accumulation is written out completely by Marx in Vol. I and it is so fancifully named because it is more important than the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in Marx's conception of his own total thesis.
Marx's discussion of immiseration includes discussion of the lumpen proletariat, thus, crime , thus imprisonment. Mass imprisonment in the US today is a major expression of immiseration or locus of impact of capitalist mass immiseration. The prison-industrial-complex is a major immiserating institution of modern capitalism , especially in the U.S.
The working class victims of crime are immiserated by a major institution of US capitalism, crime. This is another mass immiseration process continually operating , boom or bust , in US capitalism Layoffs contribute to the increase in the relative surplus population.
There several other major immiserating institutions as well, and all of them substantially negate , for a great mass of the population( its relative surplus section )the enjoying fulfillment of the unusually great mass of commodities, goods and services, personal consumption in the US.
layoffs = pauperization and misery
As Marx says:
"The lowest sediment of the relative surplus-population finally dwells in the sphere of pauperism. Exclusive of vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in a word, the “dangerous” classes, this layer of society consists of three categories. First, those able to work. One need only glance superficially at the statistics of English pauperism to find that the quantity of paupers increases with every crisis, and diminishes with every revival of trade. Second, orphans and pauper children. These are candidates for the industrial reserve army, and are, in times of great prosperity, as 1860, e.g., speedily and in large numbers enrolled in the active army of labourers. Third, the demoralised and ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation, due to the division of labour; people who have passed the normal age of the labourer; the victims of industry, whose number increases with the increase of dangerous machinery, of mines, chemical works, &c., the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, &c. Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative surplus-population, its necessity in theirs; along with the surplus-population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It enters into the faux frais of capitalist production; but capital knows how to throw these. for the most part, from its own shoulders on to those of the working-class and the lower middle class.
The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus-population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of the working-class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here.
The folly is now patent of the economic wisdom that preaches to the labourers the accommodation of their number to the requirements of capital. The mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation constantly effects this adjustment. The first word of this adaptation is the creation of a relative surplus-population, or industrial reserve army. Its last word is the misery of constantly extending strata of the active army of labour, and the dead weight of pauperism.
The law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production, thanks to the advance in the productiveness of social labour, may be set in movement by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, this law, in a capitalist society - where the labourer does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the labourer - undergoes a complete inversion and is expressed thus: the higher the productiveness of labour, the greater is the pressure of the labourers on the means of employment, the more precarious, therefore, becomes their condition of existence, viz., the sale of their own labour-power for the increasing of another’s wealth, or for the self-expansion of capital. The fact that the means of production, and the productiveness of labour, increase more rapidly than the productive population, expresses itself, therefore, capitalistically in the inverse form that the labouring population always increases more rapidly than the conditions under which capital can employ this increase for its own self-expansion.
We saw in Part IV., when analysing the production of relative surplus-value: within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus-population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital. [25] This antagonistic character of capitalistic accumulation is enunciated in various forms by political economists, although by them it is confounded with phenomena, certainly to some extent analogous, but nevertheless essentially distinct, and belonging to pre-capitalistic modes of production."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm#S4