I can't help but think we have missed two important things in this discussion:
First, in "Wage Labor and Capital," Marx explicitly made clear that the working class CAN improve their condition by organizing, striking and demanding higher wages. So the idea that he thought workers conditions would necessarily worsen empirically separate from the outcome of the actual, historical class struggle is not consistent with his whole approach. Indeed, the whole of chapter 10 of Capital, vol.1 on the working day is about how collective struggle could change conditions for the better AND, by putting that chapter right before the one on relative surplus value, he was showing how workers struggles are the engine of change in capitalist society. Immiseration, like all Marxist categories regarding capitalism, is a tendency, an examination of the logic of capital if the class doesn't intrude on that logic, which the real world, it always does. That said, secondly, when we look WORLDWIDE, at the hundreds of millions of workers in China, India, and the rest of the planet, who would deny that the Immiseration of the world proletariat is an empirical fact? Add to that the destruction of much of the once more comfortable living standards of US workers over the past 40 years, and the weakening of the European welfare states, and the Marxist argument that workers victories in capitalist society are always precarious because the relentless logic of capital is the other side of that same dialect of class struggle, holds up. Yet we must also recall, in that same vein, the huge strike waves in China, the three general strikes in India of between 100-150 MILLION workers in the last five years, and we get a clearer sense of how to evaluate Marx's predictive powers. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#39312): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39312 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]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
