No More Learning

In Mongolia, hundreds of homeless children live in the sewers of Ulaanbaatar. Before 1990, Mongolia was a prosperous nation that had benefited from Soviet and East European financial assis- tance and technical aid. Its new industrial centers produced leather goods, woolen products, textiles, cement, meat, grain, and timber. "The communist era dramatically improved the quality of life of the people. . . achieving commendable levels of social devel- opment through state-sponsored social welfare measures," but free-market privatization and deindustrialization has brought unemployment, mass poverty, and widespread malnutrition to Mongolia. 3
Shock Therapy for the Many
Unemployment rates have risen as high as 30 percent in countries that once knew full employment under communism. One Polish worker claims that the jobless are pretty much unemployable after age 40. Polish women say economic demise comes earlier for them, since to get a job, as one puts it, "you must be young, childless and
3 K. L. Abeywickrama, "The Marketization of Mongolia," Monthly Review, 3/96, 25- 33, and reports cited therein.
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have a big bosom" (Nation, 12/7/92). Occupational safety is now almost nonexistent and workplace injuries and deaths have drasti- cally increased.
Workers now toil harder and longer for less, often in sweatshop conditions. Teachers, scientists, factory workers, and countless oth- ers struggle for months without pay as their employers run out of funds (Los Angeles Times, 1/17/96). The waves of strikes and work stoppages in Russia and Eastern Europe are accorded unsympathetic press treatment in those countries.
Even in the few remaining countries in which communist govern- ments retain control, such as China, Vietnam, and Cuba, the open- ing to private investment has contributed to a growing inequality. In Cuba, the dollar economy has brought with it a growth in prostitu- tion (including girls as young as eleven and twelve), street beggers, and black-market dealings with tourists (Avi Chomsky, Cuba
Update, 9/96).
In China, there are workers who now put in twelve- to sixteen-
hour days for subsistence pay, without regularly getting a day off. Those who protest against poor safety and health conditions risk being fired or jailed. The market reforms in China have also brought a return of child labor (San Francisco Chronicle, 8/14/90). "I think this is what happens when you have private companies," says Ms. Peng, a young migrant who has doubts about the new China. "In pri- vate companies, you know, the workers don't have rights" ( Wall St. Journal 5/19/94).
Throughout Eastern Europe, unions have been greatly weakened or broken. Sick leave, maternity leave, paid vacations, and other job benefits once taken for granted under communism have been cut or abolished. Worker sanitariums, vacation resorts, health clinics, sports and cultural centers, children's nurseries, day-care centers, and other features that made communist enterprises more than just workplaces, have nearly vanished. Rest homes formerly reserved for workers have been privatized and turned into casinos, night clubs,
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and restaurants for the nouveau riche. 4
Real income has shrunk by as much as 30 to 40 percent in the ex-
communist countries. In 1992 alone, Russia saw its consumer spend- ing drop by 38 percent. (By comparison, during the Great Depression, consumer spending in the United States fell 21 percent over four years. ) In both Poland and Bulgaria, an estimated 70 per- cent now live below or just above the poverty line. In Russia, it is 75 to 85 percent, with a third of the population barely subsisting in absolute economic desperation. In Hungary, which has received most of the West s investment in Eastern Europe, over one-third of its citizens live in abject poverty, and 70 percent of the men hold two or more jobs, working up to 14 hours a day, according to the Ministry of Labor.
After months of not getting paid, coal miners in far eastern Russia were beginning to starve. By August 1996, 10,000 of them had stopped working simply because they were too weak from hunger. With no coal being extracted, the regions power plants began to shut down, threatening an electrical blackout that would further harm the nations Pacific coastal industry and trade (Los Angeles Times, 8/3/96).
Eastern Europeans are witnessing scenes "that are commonplace enough in the West, but are still wrenching here: the old man rum- maging through trash barrels for castaway items, the old woman picking through a box of bones at a meat market in search of one with enough gristle to make a thin soup" (Los Angeles Times, 3/10/90). With their savings and pensions swallowed up by inflation, elderly pensioners crowd the sidewalks of Moscow selling articles of their
4 One booming employment area is the business security forces and private armies, which in the Soviet Union alone muster some 800,000 men. "Another employer of choicc for working class youth is the immense state apparatus of repression which is now more formidable than that of the Soviet period. Today, this apparatus is numerically superior to the Armed Forces, better paid and better equipped. The regimes real enemy is inside, after all": Bilenkin, uRussian Workers Under the Yeltsin Regime," Monthly Review, 11/96, 7.
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clothing and other pathetic wares, while enduring harassment by police and thugs {Washington Post, 1/1/96). A Russian senior citizen refers to "this poverty, which only a few have escaped" while some "have become wildly rich. " (Modern Maturityy September/October
1994).
Crime and Corruption
With the socialist ethic giving way to private greed, corruption assumed virulent new forms in the post-Communist nations. Officials high and low are on the take, including the police. The Russian security minister calculated that one-third of Russian oil and one-half of Russian nickel shipped out of the country was stolen. Among those enjoying "staggering profits" from this plunder were Shell Oil and British Petroleum (Washington Post, 2/2/93). In April 1992, the chairman of Russia's central bank admitted that at least $20 billion had been illegally taken out of the country and deposited in Western banks (Nation, 4/19/93).
Choice chunks of public real estate are quietly sold off at a frac- tion of their value in exchange for payoffs to the officials who preside over the sales. Government officials buy goods from private contrac- tors at twice the normal price in exchange for kickbacks. Factory directors sell state-made commodities at low state prices to their own private firms, which those firms then resell at market prices for a vast profit. One member of the Moscow City Council estimated that cor- ruption amounted to hundreds of billions of dollars. If these funds went into state coffers instead of private pockets "we could meet our budget three or four times over" (Los Angeles Times, 7/10/92).
Along with corruption, there is an upsurge in organized crime. Over one hundred racket syndicates in Russia now extort tribute from 80 percent of all enterprises. From 1992 to 1995, as competi- tion for the spoils of "reform" intensified, forty-six of Russia's more prominent businessmen were slain in gangland-style murders. In
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1994, there were more than 2500 contract murders, almost all of them unsolved. "Contract murders occur regularly now in Russia, and most go without much notice" (San Francisco Chronicle, 11/17/95). Police say they lack the funds, personnel, and crime detec- tion equipment for any real campaign against the mobs.
Street crime also has increased sharply (New York Times, 5/7/96). In the former Soviet Union, women and elderly who once felt free to sit in parks late at night now dare not venture out after dark. Since the overthrow of communism in Hungary, thefts and other felonies have nearly tripled and there has been a 50 percent increase in homi- cides (NPR, 2/24/92). The police force in Prague today is many times greater than it was under communism, when "relatively few police were needed" (New York Times, 12/18/91). How odd that fewer police were needed in the communist police state than in the free- market paradise.
In the Republic of Georgia, life has been reduced to a level of vio- lent chaos never imagined under communism. Criminal rings con- trol much of the commerce, and paramilitary groups control most of the criminal rings. No longer able to sell its goods on the Soviet mar- ket but unable to compete on the international market, Georgian industry has experienced a massive decline and, as in most Eastern countries, the public debt has leaped upward while real wages have shrunk painfully (San Francisco Chronicle, 7/20/93).
Cultural Decay
Cultural life has drastically declined in the former communist countries. Theaters are sparsely attended because tickets are now prohibitively expensive. Publicly owned movie industries in coun- tries like Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic, which produced a number of worthwhile films, have been defunded or bought out by Western business inter- ests and now make cartoons, commercials, and music videos. Movie
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houses have been taken over by corporate chains and offer many of the same Hollywood junk films that we have the freedom to see.
Subsidies for the arts and literature have been severely cut. Symphony orchestras have disbanded or taken to playing at block parties and other minor occasions. The communist countries used to produce inexpensive but quality editions of classical and contempo- rary authors and poets, including ones from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. These have been replaced by second-rate, mass-market publications from the West. During the communist era, three of every five books in the world were produced in the Soviet Union. Today, as the cost of books, periodicals, and newspapers has sky- rocketed and education has declined, readership has shrunk almost to Third World levels.
Books of a Marxist or otherwise critical left perspective have been removed from bookstores and libraries. In East Germany, the writ- ers' association reported one instance in which 50,000 tons of books, some brand new, were buried in a dump. The German authorities who disposed of the books apparently did not feel quite free enough to burn them.
Education, once free, is now accessible only to those who can afford the costly tuition rates. The curricula have been "depoliti- cized," meaning that a left perspective critical of imperialism and capitalism has been replaced by a conservative one that is supportive or at least uncritical of these forces.
Descending upon the unhappy societies of Eastern Europe and Russia are the Hare Krishnas, Mormans, Moonies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Bahais, rightist Christian evangelicals, self-improvement hucksters, instant-success peddlers, and other materialistic spiritual- ist scavengers who prey upon the deprived and the desperate, offer- ing solace in the next world or the promise of wealth and success in this one.
The president of one of Russia's largest construction companies summed it up: "All the material well-being that people had, they lost
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in one hour. There is practically no more free medical care, accessi- ble higher education, no right to a job or rest. The houses of culture, libraries, stadiums, kindergartens and nurseries, pioneer camps, schools, hospitals and stores are closing. The cost of housing, com- munal services and transport are no longer affordable for the major- ity of families" (Peoples Weekly World, 4/6/96).
Facing forced privatization, news and entertainment media have had to find rich owners, corporate advertisers, conservative founda- tions, or agencies within the newly installed capitalist governments to finance them. Television and radio programs that had a left per- spective, including some popular youth shows, have been removed from the air. All media have been purged of leftists and restaffed by people with acceptable ideological orientations. This process of moving toward a procapitalist communication monopoly has been described in the Western media as "democratization. " Billboards and television commercials promoting U. S. cigarettes, automobiles, and other consumer items--many of them beyond the average pocket- book-- now can be seen everywhere.
Women and Children Last
The overthrow of communism has brought a sharp increase in gender inequality. The new constitution adopted in Russia eliminates provisions that guaranteed women the right to paid maternity leave, job security during pregnancy, prenatal care, and affordable day-care centers. 5 Without the former communist stipulation that women get at least one third of the seats in any legislature, female political rep- resentation has dropped to as low as 5 percent in some countries.
In all communist countries about 90 percent of women had jobs in what was a full-employment economy. Today, women compose
s Under Soviet law, women had been granted four months off with full pay for childbirth, and a year of partial pay if they elected to stay home with the child. In addition, they were allowed up to three years leave with a guarantee that their jobs would be held for them.
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over two-thirds of the unemployed. Those who do work are being channeled into low-pay unskilled positions. Women are being driven from the professions in disproportionate numbers and are advised against getting professional training. More than 30 percent of unem- ployed females are skilled workers and professionals who previously earned higher salaries than the national norm. The loss of maternity benefits and child care services has created still greater obstacles to female employment.
Throughout the Eastern European nations, the legal, financial, and psychological independence that women enjoyed under socialism has been undermined. Divorce, abortion, and birth control are more dif- ficult to obtain. Released from the "Soviet yoke," the autonomous region of Ingushetia decriminalized polygamy and made it legal for women to be sold into marriage. Instances of sexual harassment and violence against women have increased sharply. In Russia, the num- ber of women murdered annually--primarily by husbands and boyfriends--skyrocketed from 5,300 to 15,000 in the first three years of the free-market paradise. In 1994, an additional 57,000 women were seriously injured in such assaults. These official figures under- state the level of violence. The Communist party committees that used to intervene in cases of domestic abuse no longer exist.
Women also are being recruited in unprecedented numbers for the booming sex industry that caters to foreign and domestic busi- nessmen. Unable to find employment in the professions for which they originally were trained, many highly educated Russian and Eastern European women go abroad to work as prostitutes. Women are not the only ones being channeled into the sex market. As reported in Newsweek (9/2/96):
Prague and Budapest now rival Bangkok and Manila as hubs for the collection of children to serve visiting pedophiles. Last year one investigator was stunned to find stacks of child pornography in the reception rooms of Estonia'a Parliament and its social welfare depart- ment. "Free love is regarded as one of the new 'freedoms' which the
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market economy can offer," she wrote. "Simultaneously, sex in the market economy has also become a profitable commodity" In some cases "children are kidnapped and held like slaves," says [Thomas] Kattau [a specialist with the Council of Europe]. "This is happening more and more. It is organized crime "
Life conditions for children have deteriorated greatly throughout the ex-communist world. Free summer camps have been closed down. School lunches, once free or low-priced, are now too costly for many pupils. Hungry children constitute a serious school problem. Instead of attending classes, chidren can be found hawking drinks or begging in the streets. Juvenile crime is booming along with juvenile prostitution, while funds for youth rehabilitation services dwindle (Los Angeles Times, 7/15/94).
"We Didn't Realize What We Had"
While many Eastern European intellectuals remain fervent cham- pions of the free-market paradise, most workers and peasants no longer romanticize capitalism, having felt its unforgiving lash. "We didn't realize what we had" has become a common refrain. "The lat- est public opinion surveys show that many Russians consider Brezhnev's era and even Stalin's era to have been better than the pre- sent-day period, at least as far as economic conditions and personal safety are concerned" (New York Times, 10/15/95). A joke circulating in Russia in 1992 went like this: Q. What did capitalism accomplish in one year that communism could not do in seventy years? A. Make communism look good.
Throughout Eastern Europe and the former USSR, many people grudgingly admitted that conditions were better under communism (New York Times, 3/30/95). Pro-capitalist Angela Stent, of George- town University, allows that "most people are worse off than they were under Communism . . . . The quality of life has deteriorated with the spread of crime and the disappearance of the social safety
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net" (New York Times, 12/20/93). An East German steelworker is quoted as saying "I do not know if there is a future for me, and I'm not too hopeful The fact is, I lived better under Communism" (New York Times, 3/3/91). An elderly Polish woman, reduced to one Red Cross meal a day: "Im not Red but I have to say life for poor people was better before. . . . Now things are good for businessmen but not for us poor" (New York Times, 3/17/91). One East German woman commented that the West German womens movement was only beginning to fight for "what we already had here. . . . We took it for granted because of the socialist system. Now we realize what we [lost]" (Los Angeles Times, 8/6/91).
Anticommunist dissidents who labored hard to overthrow the GDR were soon voicing their disappointments about German reuni- fication. One noted Lutheran clergyman commented: "We fell into the tyranny of money. The way wealth is distributed in this society [capitalist Germany] is something I find very hard to take. " Another Lutheran pastor said: "We East Germans had no real picture of what life was like in the West. We had no idea how competitive it would be. . . . Unabashed greed and economic power are the levers that move this society. The spiritual values that are essential to human happiness are being lost or made to seem trivial. Everything is buy, earn, sell" (New York Times, 5/26/96).
Maureen Orth asked the first woman she met in a market if her life had changed in the last two years and the woman burst into tears. She was 58 years old, had worked forty years in a potato factory and now could not afford most of the foods in the market: "It's not life, it's just existence," she said ( Vanity Fair; 9/94). Orth interviewed the chief of a hospital department in Moscow who said: "Life was differ- ent two years ago--I was a human being. " Now he had to chauffeur people around for extra income. What about the new freedoms? "Freedom for what? " he responded. "Freedom to buy a porno- graphic magazine? "
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In a similar vein, former GDR defense minister Heinz Kessler commented: "Sure, I hear about the new freedom that people are enjoying in Eastern Europe. But how do you define freedom? Millions of people in Eastern Europe are now free from employment, free from safe streets, free from health care, free from social security" (New YorkTimes. ,7/20/96).
Do people in the East want the free market?
Opinion polls taken in late 1993 in Russia showed only 27 percent of all respondents sup- ported a market economy. By large majorities, people believed that state control over prices and over private business is "useful," and that "the state should provide everyone with a job and never tolerate unem- ployment. " In Poland, 92 percent wanted to keep the state welfare sys- tem, and lopsided majorities wanted to retain subsidized housing and foods and return to full employment (Monthly Review, 12/94). "Most people here," reports a New York Times Moscow correspondent (6/23/96), "are suspicious of private property, wonder what was so bad about a system that supplied health care at low cost from birth to death, and hope that prices are once again reined in by the government "
One report from Russia describes "a bitter electorate, which has found life under a democrat [meaning Yeltsin! ] worse than under the now-departed Communists" (New York Times, 12/18/91). A report from Warsaw refers to the "free-market economic transformation that most Poles no longer support" (Washington Post, 12/15/91). People's biggest fears are inflation, unemployment, crime, and pollution.
State socialism, "the system that did not work," provided everyone with some measure of security. Free-market capitalism, "the system that works," brought a free-falling economy, financial plunder, dete- riorating social conditions, and mass suffering.
In reaction, Eastern European voters have been returning Communists to office--to preside over the ruin and wreckage of broken nations. By 1996, former Communists and their allies had won significant victories in Russia, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, and Estonia, sometimes emerging as the strongest blocs in
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their respective parliaments. This was achieved in the face of the same intimidations, police harassments, monetary disadvantages, restrictive ballot access, media shutout, and fraudulent vote counts that confront leftist parties in most "democratic capitalist" countries.
When the first anticommunist upheavals began in Eastern Europe in 1989, there were those on the Left who said that if the people in those countries discovered that they didn't like the free-market sys- tem they could always return to some variant of socialism. As I argued at the time, this was hardly a realistic view. Capitalism is not
just an economic system but an entire social order. Once it takes hold, it is not voted out of existence by electing socialists or commu- nists. They may occupy office but the wealth of the nation, the basic property relations, organic law, financial system, and debt structure, along with the national media, police power, and state institutions, have all been fundamentally restructured. The resources needed for social programs and full employment have been pilfered or com- pletely obliterated, as have monetary reserves, markets, and natural resources. A few years of untrammeled free-market marauding has left these nations at the point of no foreseeable return.
The belief propagated by the free-market "reformers" is that the transition from socialism to capitalism can only be made through a vast private accumulation of capital. The hardship inflicted by such privatization supposedly is only temporary. The truth is, nations get stuck in that "temporary" stage for centuries. One need only look at Latin America.
Like other Third World nations, the former communist countries are likely to remain in poverty indefinitely, so that a privileged few may continue to enjoy greater and greater opulence at the expense of the many. To secure that arrangement, the corporate class will resort to every known manipulation and repression against democratic resurgence. In these endeavors they will have the expert assistance of international capital, the CIA, and other agencies of state capitalist domination.
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According to Noam Chomsky, communism "was a monstrosity" and "the collapse of tyranny" in Eastern Europe and Russia is "an occasion for rejoicing for anyone who values freedom and human dignity"61 treasure freedom and human dignity yet find no occasion for rejoicing. The postcommunist societies do not represent a net gain for such values. If anything, the breakup of the communist states has brought a colossal victory for global capitalism and impe- rialism, with its correlative increase in human misery, and a historic setback for revolutionary liberation struggles everywhere. There will be harder times ahead even for modestly reformist nationalist gov- ernments, as the fate of Panama and Iraq have indicated. The breakup also means a net loss of global pluralism and a more inten- sive socio-economic inequality throughout the world. 7
The peoples of Eastern Europe believed they were going to keep all the social gains they had enjoyed under communism while adding on all the consumerism of the West. Many of their grievances about existing socialism were justified but their romanticized image of the capitalist West was not. They had to learn the hard way. Expecting to advance from Second World to First World status, they have been rammed down into the Third World, ending up like capitalist Indonesia, Mexico, Zaire, and Turkey. They wanted it all and have been left with almost nothing.
6 Noam Chomsky, Powers and Prospects (Boston: South End Press, 1996), 83.
7 The overthrow of communism, however, does not mean the end of the U. S. global
military machine. Quite the contrary, huge sums continue to be spent, and new weapons systems and high-tech methods of killing continue to be developed in order that a tight grip be kept on the world by those who own it.
? CHAPTER 8
THE END OF MARXISM?
Some people say Marxism is a science and others say it is a dogma, a bundle of reductionist unscientific claims. I would suggest that Marxism is not a science in the positivist sense, formulating hypotheses and testing for predictability, but more accurately a social science, one that shows us how to conceptualize systematically and systemically, moving from surface appearances to deeper, broader features, so better to understand both the specific and the general, and the relationship between the two.
Marxism has an explanatory power that is superior to mainstream bourgeois social science because it deals with the imperatives of class power and political economy, the motor forces of society and history. The class basis of political economy is not a subject for which main- stream social science has much understanding or tolerance. 1 In 1915, Lenin wrote that "[bourgeois] science will not even hear of Marxism, declaring that it has been refuted and annihilated. Marx is attacked
1 This aversion to recognizing the realities of class power exists even among many who consider themselves to be on the Left; see the discussion on the Anything- But-Class theorists in the next chapter.
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with equal zest by young scholars who are making a career by refut- ing socialism, and by decrepit elders who are preserving the tradition of all kinds of outworn systems"
Over eighty years later, the careerist scholars are still declaring Marxism to have been proven wrong once and for all. As the anti- communist liberal writer, Irving Howe, put it: "The simplistic for- mulae of textbooks, including the Marxist ones, no longer hold. That is why some of us . . . don't regard ourselves as Marxists" (Newsday, 4/21/86). Here I want to argue that Marxism is not outmoded or sim- plistic, only the image of it entertained by anti-Marxists like Howe.
Some Durable Basics
With the overthrow of communist governments in Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union, announcements about the moribund nature of "Marxist dogma" poured forth with renewed vigor. But Marx s major work was Capital, a study not of "existing socialism," which actually did not exist in his day, but of capitalism--a subject that remains terribly relevant to our lives. It would make more sense to declare Marxism obsolete if and when capitalism is abolished, rather than socialism. I wish to argue not merely that Marx is still rel- evant but that he is more relevant today than he was in the nine- teenth century, that the forces of capitalist motion and development are operating with greater scope than when he first studied them.
This is not to say that everything Marx and Engels anticipated has come true. Their work was not a perfect prophecy but an imperfect, incomplete science (like all sciences), directed toward understanding a capitalism that leaves its bloody footprints upon the world as never before. Some of Marxisms basic postulates are as follows:
In order to live, human beings must produce. People cannot live by bread alone but neither can they live without bread. This does not mean all human activity can be reduced to material motives but that all activity is linked to a material base. A work of art may have no
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direct economic motive attached to it, yet its creation would be impossible if there did not exist the material conditions that allowed the artist to create and show the work to interested audiences who have the time for art.
What people need for survival is found in nature but rarely in a form suitable for immediate consumption. Labor therefore becomes a primary condition of human existence. But labor is more than a way of providing for survival. It is one of the means whereby people develop their material and cultural life, acquiring knowledge, and new modes of social organization. The conflicting class interests that evolve around the productive forces shape the development of a social system. When we speak of early horticultural societies, or of slave or feudal or mercantile or industrial capitalist societies, we are recognizing how the basic economic relations leave a defining stamp on a given social order.
Capitalist theorists present capital as a creative providential force. As they would have it, capital gives shape and opportunity to labor; capital creates production, jobs, new technologies, and a general prosperity. Marxists turn the equation around. They argue that, of itself, capital cannot produce anything; it is the thing that is pro- duced by labor. Only human labor can create the farm and the fac- tory, the machine and the computer. And in a class society, the wealth so produced by many is accumulated in the hands of relatively few who soon translate their economic power into political and cul- tural power in order to better secure the exploitative social order that so favors them.
The standard "trickle down" theory says that the accumulation of wealth at the top eventually brings more prosperity to the rest of us below; a rising tide lifts all boats. I would argue that in a class soci- ety the accumulation of wealth fosters the spread of poverty The wealthy few live off the backs of the impoverished many. There can be no rich slaveholders living in idle comfort without a mass of pen- niless slaves to support their luxurious life style, no lords of the
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manor who live in opulence without a mass of impoverished landless serfs who till the lords' lands from dawn to dusk. So too under cap- italism, there can be no financial moguls and industrial tycoons without millions of underpaid and overworked employees.
Exploitation can be measured not only in paltry wages, but in the disparity between the wealth created by the worker and the pay she or he receives. Thus some professional athletes receive dramatically higher salaries than most people, but compared to the enormous wealth they produce for their owners, and taking into account the rigors and relative brevity of their careers, the injuries sustained, and the lack of life-long benefits, it can be said they are exploited at a far higher rate than most workers.
Conservative ideologues defend capitalism as the system that pre- serves culture, traditional values, the family, and community. Marxists would respond that capitalism has done more to under- mine such things than any other system in history, given its wars, col- onizations, and forced migrations, its enclosures, evictions, poverty wages, child labor, homelessness, underemployment, crime, drug infestation, and urban squalor.
All over the world, community in the broader sense--the Gemeinschaft with its organic social relationships and strong recip- rocal bonds of commonality and kinship--is forcibly transformed by global capital into commercialized, atomized, mass-market soci- eties. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels referred to cap- italisms implacable drive to settle "over the whole surface of the globe," creating "a world after its own image. " No system in history has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cul- tures, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, devouring the resources of whole regions, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.
Big Capital has no commitment to anything but capital accumu- lation, no loyalty to any nation, culture, or people. It moves inex- orably according to its inner imperative to accumulate at the highest
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possible rate without concern for human and environmental costs. The first law of the market is to make the largest possible profit from other people s labor. Private profitability rather than human need is the determining condition of private investment. There prevails a rational systematization of human endeavor in pursuit of a socially irrational end: "accumulate, accumulate, accumulate. "
More Right than Wrong
Those who reject Marx frequently contend that his predictions about proletariat revolution have proven wrong. From this, they conclude that his analysis of the nature of capitalism and imperial- ism must also be wrong. But we should distinguish between Marx the chiliastic thinker, who made grandly optimistic predictions about the flowering of the human condition, and Marx the econo- mist and social scientist, who provided us with fundamental insights into capitalist society that have held painfully true to the present day. The latter Marx has been regularly misrepresented by anti-Marxist writers. Consider the following predictions:
Business Cycles and the Tendency toward Recession. Marx noted that something more than greed is involved in the capitalist s relent- less pursuit of profit. Given the pressures of competition and rising wages, capitalists must make technological innovations to increase their productivity and diminish their labor costs. This creates prob- lems of its own. The more capital goods (such as machinery, plants, technologies, fuels) needed for production, the higher the fixed costs and the greater the pressure to increase productivity to maintain profit margins. 2
2 As an industry becomes more capital intensive, proportionately more money must be invested to generate a given number of jobs. But business is not dedicated to creating jobs. In fact, capitalists are constantly devising ways to downsize the workforce. From 1980 to 1990, the net number of jobs created by the biggest corporations in the United States, the "Fortune 500," was zero. The new jobs of that period came mostly from less capital-intensive smaller firms, light industry, service industry, and the public sector.
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Since workers are not paid enough to buy back the goods and ser- vices they produce, Marx noted, there is always the problem of a dis- parity between mass production and aggregate demand. If demand slackens, owners cut back on production and investment. Even when there is ample demand, they are tempted to downsize the workforce and intensify the rate of exploitation of the remaining employees, seizing any opportunity to reduce benefits and wages. The ensuing drop in the workforce s buying power leads to a further decline in demand and to business recessions that inflict the greatest pain on those with the least assets.
Marx foresaw this tendency for profits to fall and for protracted recessions and economic instability. As the economist Robert Heilbroner noted, this was an extraordinary prediction, for in Marx's day economists did not recognize boom-and-bust business cycles as inherent to the capitalist system. But today we know that recessions are a chronic condition and--as Marx also predicted--they have become international in scope.
Capital Concentration. When the Communist Manifesto first appeared in 1848, bigness was the exception rather than the norm. Yet Marx predicted that large firms would force out or buy up smaller adversaries and increasingly dominate the business world, as capital became more concentrated. This was not the accepted wis- dom of that day and must have sounded improbable to those who gave it any attention. But it has come to pass. Indeed, the rate of mergers and take-overs has been higher in the 1980s and 1990s than at any other time in the history of capitalism.
Growth of the Proletariat Another of Marxs predictions is that the proletariat (workers who have no tools of their own and must work for wages or salaries, selling their labor to someone else) would become an ever-greater percentage of the work force. In 1820 about 75 percent of Americans worked for themselves on farms or in small businesses and artisan crafts. By 1940 that number had dropped to 21. 6 percent. Today, less than 10 percent of the labor force is self-employed.
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The same shift in the work force can be observed in the Third World. From 1970 to 1980 the number of wage workers in Asia and Africa increased by almost two-thirds, from 72 million to 120 mil- lion. The tendency is toward the steady growth of the working class, both industrial and service workers, and--as Marx predicted--this is happening globally, in every land upon which capitalism descends.
Proletarian Revolution. As capitalism develops so will the prole- tariat, Marx predicted. We have seen that to be true. But he went fur- ther: With the growing misery and polarization, the masses would eventually rise up and overthrow the bourgeoisie and put the means of production under public ownership for the benefit of all. The rev- olution would come in the more industrialized capitalist countries that had large, developed working classes.
What struck Marx about the working class was its level of organi- zation and consciousness. Unlike previously oppressed classes, the proletariat, heavily concentrated in urban areas, seemed capable of an unparalleled level of political development. It would not only rebel against its oppressors as had slaves and serfs but would create an egalitarian, nonexploitative social order as never before seen in history. In his day Marx saw an alternative system emerging in the clubs, mutual aid societies, political organizations, and newspapers of a rapidly growing British working class. For the first time, history would be made by the masses in a conscious way, a class for itself. Sporadic rebellion would be replaced by class-conscious revolution. Instead of burning down the manor, the workers would expropriate it and put it to use for the collective benefit of the common people, the ones who built it in the first place.
Certainly Marx s predictions about revolution have not material- ized. There has been no successful proletariat revolution in an advanced capitalist society. As the working class developed so did the capitalist state, whose function has been to protect the capitalist class, with its mechanisms of police suppression and its informa- tional and cultural hegemony.
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Of itself, class struggle does not bring inevitable proletarian vic- tory or even a proletarian uprising. Oppressive social conditions may cry out for revolution, but that does not mean revolution is forth- coming. This point is still not understood by some present-day left- ists. In his later years, Marx himself began to entertain doubts about the inevitability of a victorious workers revolution. So far, the pre-
vailing force has not been revolution but counterrevolution, the dev- ilish destruction wreaked by capitalist states upon popular struggles, at a cost of millions of lives.
Marx also underestimated the extent to which the advanced capi- talist state could use its wealth and power to create a variety of insti- tutions that retard and distract popular consciousness or blunt discontent through reform programs. Contrary to his expectations, successful revolutions occurred in less developed, largely peasant societies such as Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam--though the prole- tariats in those countries participated and sometimes, as in the case of Russia in 1917, even spearheaded the insurgency
Although Marxs predictions about revolution have not material- ized as he envisioned, in recent years there have been impressive instances of working-class militancy in South Korea, South Africa, Argentina, Italy, France, Germany, Great Britain, and dozens of other countries, including even the United States. Such mass struggles usu- ally go unreported in the corporate media. In 1984-85, in Great Britain, a bitter, year-long strike resulted in some 10,500 coal miners being arrested, 6,500 injured or battered, and eleven killed. For the British miners locked in that conflict, class struggle was something more than a quaint, obsolete concept.
So in other countries. In Nicaragua, a mass uprising brought down the hated Somoza dictatorship. In Brazil, in 1980-83, as Peter Worsley observes, "the Brazilian working class . . . has played pre- cisely the role assigned to it in 19th century Marxist theory, paralyz- ing Sao Paulo in a succession of enormous mass strikes that began over bread-and-butter issues but which in the end forced the military
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to make major political concessions, notably the restoration of a measure of authentic party-political life " Revolutions are relatively rare occurrences but popular struggle is a widespread and constant phenomenon.
More Wealth, More Poverty
Marx believed that as wealth becomes more concentrated, poverty will become more widespread and the plight of working people ever- more desperate. According to his critics, this prediction has proven wrong. They point out that he wrote during a time of raw industri- alism, an era of robber barons and the fourteen-hour work day. Through persistent struggle, the working class improved its life con- ditions from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Today, mainstream spokespersons portray the United States as a prosperous middle-class society.
Yet one might wonder. During the Reagan-Bush-Clinton era, from 1981 to 1996, the share of the national income that went to those who work for a living shrank by over 12 percent. The share that went to those who live off investments increased almost 35 percent. Less than 1 percent of the population owns almost 50 percent of the nation s wealth. The richest families are hundreds of times wealthier than the average household in the lower 90 percent of the popula- tion. The gap between Americas rich and poor is greater than it has been in more than half a century and is getting ever-greater. Thus, between 1977 and 1989, the top 1 percent saw their earnings grow by over 100 percent, while the three lowest quintiles averaged a 3 to 10 percent drop in real income. 3
The New York Times (6/20/96) reported that income disparity in 1995 "was wider than it has been since the end of World War II. " The average income for the top 20 percent jumped 44 percent, from $73,754 to $105,945, between 1968 and 1994, while the bottom 20
3 Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity (New York: W. W. Norton: 1994), 134-35.
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