On Sat, Nov 15, 2025 at 07:10 PM, Tom Walker wrote: > > On Sat, Nov 15, 2025 at 09:53 AM, Ed George wrote: > >> That is not an "immiseration thesis". > > Not in the sense that it posits the immiseration of an entire class, no. > It is, however, something that people can understandably project and > magnify into such. It does talk about the misery of a consolidated mass of > surplus population and contrasts their *misery* to the *torture* that they > would experience as labourers. The "tortured" are not necessarily > immiserated in the economic sense of not having werewithal for securing > the necessities of life. One might, however, feel that it is miserable in > another sense to undergo "torture in the form of labour." > > >
On my understanding Marx argues (in vol. I ch. 25) that, with mature capitalist production, there exists a permanent “surplus” population. This is unique to this social configuration; it doesn’t happen in pre-capitalist societies nor in capitalist social forms in their infancy. The size of this population is not fixed: it varies (Marx suggests) with the business cycle. The construction of this surplus population (the “immiseration”, so to speak, of a part of the proletariat) is, in this sense, a one-off event . This is not the sense in which people impute the notion of immiseration to Marx, in so far as it is argued that Marx held that as capitalist reproduction proceeds either the whole proletariat or some part of it will be driven into increasing degrees of misery, to eventually subsist at the bare minimum of the possibilities of human existence. Marx, post 48/49, doesn’t give this idea any credence; he explicitly opposes the view, central in Malthus, and present in (parts of) RIcardo, that the natural tendency of the accumulation of capital was the progressive deterioration of the level of material existence of the proletariat to bare subsistence level. So I don’t think it is helpful to call what the post 48/48 Marx sets out in Capital (and elsewhere) “immiseration” since what he sets out is different to what the word is commonly used to indicate. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#39272): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39272 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/116301050/21656 -=-=- 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/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
