> > From: Mark Baugher > Date: Mon, 03 Jun 2024 07:02:33 PDT > ... > I don't understand, Tom, why reduction of wage labor is a precondition to > social revolution. It sounds like a conundrum.
Thank you, Mark, for some excellent questions and points. To be frank, I think Marx's "precondition" *is* a bit of a conundrum. The way I understand it is as a response to and acknowledgement of the actually existing labour movement in England and the United States in the middle of the 19th century. Just as I would see the Communist Manifesto as a response to and acknowledgement of potentially revolutionary forces in the late 1840s. Marx's remarks in the Inaugural Address on the Ten Hours Bill almost explicitly make that point. So it is not an entirely theoretical question but also an empirical one. Whether Marx's mid-19th century assessment is relevant today is a question I will return to at the close of this reply in response to your point about the demands of degrowth advocates. Both Huber and Saito accept the "classical" interpretation of the 1859 preface as "productivist" but while Huber *endorses* that productivism and sees technological progress at the command of the working class as an environmental panacea, Saito argues that Marx "changed his mind" after 1859 and abandoned productivism. I addressed Huber's and Saito's positions in earlier blog posts. Growth below zero and the development of the productive forces <https://econospeak.blogspot.com/2023/11/growth-below-zero-and-development-of.html> for Saito and Matt Huber's and Leigh Phillips's "classical Marxist critique" of Kohei Saito <https://econospeak.blogspot.com/2024/03/matt-hubers-and-leigh-phillipss.html> for Huber. As a side note, the identification of Marx's avowed Prometheanism with his alleged "productivism" is a misreading of Marx's view and an anachronistic projection of Soviet images of Prometheus back onto Marx. For a correction of this misreading, I recommend Gary Teeple's article on Marx's dissertation (*History of Political Thought* , Spring 1990, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 81-118) and Walt Shearsby's "ANTI-PROMETHEUS, POST-MARX: The Real and the Myth in Green Theory" (Organization & Environment , March 1999, Vol. 12, No. 1 (March 1999), pp. 5-44). As you mention, Mark, the reduction of wage-labour hours is both explicit and implicit in degrowth advocates' headline strategy of reducing commodity production in the U.S. and Europe particularly. In that respect, I see them as potential allies. Paradoxically, the ecomodernist arguments are also compatible with work time reduction in that new green technologies will be *hypothetically* "labour saving." My criticism of actually existing degrowth discourse is that its "common sense" advocacy of shorter work time is theoretically impoverished and consequently equivocal. Shorter working time becomes just one item among others on a laundry list of demands that can readily be de-emphasized or dropped if it seems too much of a hard sell. Why I think it is import to have a theoretically-grounded advocacy of shorter working time is summed up in what Marx, in the "fragment on machines" called the "moving contradiction" of capital: "that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth." Cheers, Tom Walker (Sandwichman) -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#30621): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/30621 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/106436332/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
