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The French economist Thomas Piketty’s magisterial, marvelously
cross-disciplinary, and audaciously titled volume Capital in the
Twenty-First Century (New York: Harvard University Press, 2014) contains
an interesting statement on its very first page. “Modern economic growth
and the diffusion of knowledge,” Piketty writes, “have made it possible
to avoid the Marxist apocalypse but have not modified the deep
structures of capital and inequality – or in any case not as much as one
might have imagined in the optimistic decades following World War II.”
(Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p.1).
Who is Piketty’s (or his translator’s) “one” here? Certainly not a
Marxist who was familiar with his or her hero’s (Karl Marx’s) analysis,
according to which capitalism naturally tends towards the concentration
of wealth and income.
“The Marxist Apocalypse” That Wasn’t
And what is “the Marxist apocalypse” that hasn’t happened, exactly?
Piketty means the growing division of Western industrial society between
a wealthy bourgeoisie on one hand and a vast property-less proletariat,
leading (in Marx’s vision) to international working class and
socialist/communist revolution – what Piketty calls “Marx’s dark
prophecy.” (Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p.9)
He is of course correct that the European and North American socialist
revolution Marx dreamed of didn’t happen in the late 19th or 20th
centuries. Neither did proletarian immiseration on the scale that Marx
predicted [1] – at least not in the core Western countries at the center
of capitalist development.
But why call Marx’s dialectical divination “apocalyptic” and “dark”? “In
the place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class
antagonisms,” Marx proclaimed in 1848, “we shall have an association, in
which the free development of each is the conditions for the free
development of all.” For Marx and many socialist, communist, and left
anarchist fellow revolutionaries of the mid and late-19th century,
workers’ revolution – the overthrow of private capital and its savage,
amoral profits system and the replacement of the capitalist ruling class
by the popular reign of the associated producers and citizens in service
to the common good was hardly a catastrophe. To the contrary, it was for
them the dawning of the end of the long human pre-history of class rule,
ushering in the possibility of a world beyond exploitation and the de
facto dictatorship of privileged owners – a “true realm of freedom”
beyond endless toil and necessity, “worthy of [homo sapiens’] “human
nature.” [2]
full: http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/avoiding-the-capitalist-apocalypse/
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