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NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





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Monday, May 3, 2021

A REPLY TO MY BIG SISTER

I was the second child in our family. The first was a little girl named Barbara Claire. By the time I was born she was known as Bobs and although I was named Robert Paul I could not really be called Bob, so to my family and my relatives I became Rob   as I am to them to this day. My big sister was 3 ½ years older than I (and, given the way these things go, still is.) I looked up to her even after I got a little bit taller than she. Bobs was a spectacular student and she actually taught me to read, because when she wanted to play school I was the only available pupil. She was a great dancer and taught me both to Foxtrot and to Lindy as well as to folk dance. All my life she has been my big sister and when there was something she wanted I felt it was a command that had to be obeyed. She just sent me the following email message:

 

“So far, you haven’t said anything about how you would design a system that was not built on the exploitation of labor.  Clearly the two countries that tried it failed.  Are you going to tell us?”

 

I have got to say something to my big sister and, by the way, to the rest of you. In answering these questions Marx is virtually no help at all. He must have written more than 5000 pages about capitalism but if you cobbled together everything you could find that he wrote about socialism I do not think it would come to as much as 100 pages. He came to believe, in contradistinction to the 19th century writers whom he called Utopian Socialists, that each stage in the historical development of economy and society grows organically out of the preceding stage through the development of the forces and social relations of production in ways that, although clearly deliberate and the consequence of human choices, are systemic and not really amenable to armchair planning. He certainly would not have thought it possible that a system based on the collective ownership of the means of production could emerge through revolutionary action from a late feudal economy, as in Russia, or, Lord knows, from a peasant society, as in China.

 

It takes no brains at all to see that the private ownership of the means of production in a capitalist economy leads to endlessly greater accumulations of capital and ever greater social inequality. The lifecycle being what it is, and very few capitalists being Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or Elon Musk, what Piketty in the French fashion calls patrimonial capitalism – what we would call inherited wealth – is fated to become an ever more prominent feature of capitalism as it continues to evolve. Separate from this, but of course deeply connected to it, is the grotesque inequality in annual income. Since the median household income these days is around $60,000, it follows that anybody making or inheriting $60 million is making or inheriting the equivalent of a millennium of household median incomes. Simply to think of it in this fashion is to exhibit clearly the utterly unjustifiable inequality that is a defining characteristic of modern capitalism.

 

What could be done? What am I to tell my big sister? I am a great believer in half measures and ad hoc improvements, so increased minimum wages, guaranteed annual incomes, punitively high marginal rates on obscene incomes, and confiscatory inheritance taxes are all to be enthusiastically encouraged. But the more money you put in the hands of working-class Americans, the more profits will be made by those who sell them what they buy with their money and hence the more capital will accumulate in private hands.

 

Not much of an answer for your big sister, is it?  Maybe tomorrow I can come up with something better, but do not cash in your 401(k) and make plans for a millennial celebration.

 

10 comments:

s. wallerstein said...

I was just listening to an interview with Yuval Harari of all people and when asked about capitalism, he pointed out that there's nothing about human nature that makes capitalism the only possible economic system and that while the Soviet economy failed because central planning was a disaster, with artificial intelligence as it is developping there is no reason at all why central planning of the economy would not work and even work better than a free market system.

aaall said...

"But the more money you put in the hands of working-class Americans, the more profits will be made by those who sell them what they buy with their money and hence the more capital will accumulate in private hands."

Not if we have appropriate wages and marginal tax rates/inheritance taxes as well as international agreements that kill off tax havens. When we were young the top marginal rate was in the 90s. It was ~70% when Reagan took office. Those measures not only took but tended to inhibit taking - check the curve and the multiple from the bottom workers to the CEO.

Re; s. wallerstein - I, for one, will welcome our new AI overlords.

LFC said...

At some point when this whole question came up here, there was a thread in which a few people, as I recall, recommended the work of David Schweikart (or maybe that was at Leiter's blog). Anyway, I haven't read it, and I'm under the impression that Prof. Wolff has not either. I'm under the further impression that Prof. Wolff is not esp. interested in looking into what contemp. writers, apart from Piketty, say on the matter. (Which is not really a criticism, since he is retired and can spend his time however he pleases.)

aaall said...

One other item that is important:

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/05/a-seditionist-wrote-a-book

It seems the traitor Hawley has finally had his book published and while he makes a hash of things, it does remind us that a factor in the mid-twentieth century moderation was serious anti-trust enforcement. That ended with Bork, Reagan, and the Chicago Boys about the same time as serious marginal rates.

Anonymous said...

Fond memories of times past:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YEhNHNydIs&t=119s

Jerry Brown said...

Maybe you could tell her that even in neoclassical economics any kind of voluntary exchange is a type of exploitation. The assumption is that the exchange takes place only if each side thinks it is better off participating in that exchange. So there is always a bit of exploitation of the other side of the trade at least in their estimation. The other side is always providing more value and a basically equal value to each occurs as if by magic.

It is bullshit when trying to explain a labor market where some have to work to survive and those who offer the work don't need to offer it to survive. A system where workers would have a fall back position that offered some guarantee of being able to make a living even if they refused to agree to the employer demands in regards to the 'labor trade' would be one way of getting closer to the neoclassical ideal of exchange.

A Job Guarantee as MMT describes it would be one way to equalize the exploitation in the labor exchange with the exploitation inherent in any trade in other markets between equals.

Jerry Brown said...

I guess what I was trying to say is that if you exploit someone in the sense that you benefit more from what they give you but they are exploiting you in the sense that they benefit more from what you give them and you can negotiate on equal terms, then exploitation of that sort is not a problem that you should have to solve for your sister. And most of the solution would be making sure that both sides would have an equal ability to turn down an offer of trade.

Matt said...

He certainly would not have thought it possible that a system based on the collective ownership of the means of production could emerge through revolutionary action from a late feudal economy, as in Russia

This is said a lot, but I wonder how correct it is. For one, I'm not at all sure that Russia in 1917 was more "feudal" than Germany was in 1860 or so, when Marx seemed to think it was ripe for a communist revolution. Maybe I'm wrong, but at the least, the two were not _much_ different at these points. For two, Marx, in his correspondence, was supportive of Russian communists. He seemed to think they were moving in the right direction, and this also suggests that this is a sort of post-hoc rationalization of why the Soviet Union was bad and something Marxists don't have to think seriously about. That seems wrong to me. I'm someone who thinks there were both good and bad things about the Soviet Union, and that it's worth thinking very carefully about what each was and if they can be separated. There is a strong tendency in political theory/philosophy to suggest that we only will or want the good things that come with the views we favor. (This is done a lot in all areas, not only by Marxists, but also by them.) But this is a mistake, and won't help us. Thinking carefully about the Soviet Union might help in this area, I think.

s. wallerstein said...

"There is a strong tendency in political theory/philosophy to suggest that we only will or want the good things that come with the views we favor."

This is all too true. Could you develop that idea a bit? Thanks.

Caillo Lisa said...
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