Marx as “Revisionist”

D. Marx as “Revisionist”

Accurate historical predictions can, of course, follow from faulty engines of analysis. But from this perspective the Marxian enterprise was scarcely a success considering the upward trend in real wages carefully documented by Giffen (1904 [1883]), and the resilience, indeed expansion, of the middle classes. Here it is revealing to have in mind Eduard Bernstein’s challenge to several of Marx’s economic prognosti- cations, inter alia the “concentration” theme that property owners were growing smaller in number: “It is . . . quite wrong to assume that the present development of society shows a relative or indeed absolute diminution of the number of the members of the possessing classes. Their number increases both relatively and

Conclusion – A Recapitulation and Overview

absolutely. . . . Socialism, or the social movement of modern times, has already sur- vived many a superstition, it will also survive this, that its future depends on the concentration of wealth or . . . on the absorption of surplus value by a diminishing group of capitalist mammoths” (1961 [1899]: 48; also 212). He similarly rejected the related theme that the lot of the proletariat was progressively deteriorating, referring to the “altogether outworn idea that the realisation of socialism depends on an increasing narrowing of the circle of the well-to-do and an increasing misery of the poor. . . . [T]he misery theory has now been given up nearly everywhere, if not with all its logical conclusions and outright, yet at least by explaining it away as much as possible” (175–6). 19

Now to some extent Bernstein drew on Marx himself with respect to welfare improvement, for he refers to Marx’s recognition in Capital of the “physical and moral regeneration” of the Lancashire textile workers due to the Factory Act of 1847, which “signifies not hopelessness but capability of improvement in the condition of the worker” (207). And, he goes on, legislation “has not grown weaker but has been improved, made more general, and has been implemented by laws and organisations working in the same direction. . . . ”

19 On the matter of worsening cycles, Bernstein insisted that “[s]igns of an economic world-wide crash of unheard-of violence have not been established, nor can one describe the improvement

of trade in the intervals between the crises as particularly short-lived” (1961 [1899]: 79). He pointed to “the enormous extension of the world market, in conjunction with the extraordi- nary shortening of time necessary for the transmission of news and for the transport trade, [that] has so increased the possibilities of adjustment of disturbances; and [to] the enormously increased wealth of the European states, in conjunction with the elasticity of the modern credit system and the rise of industrial Kartels,” and suggested (largely against Rosa Luxemburg) that these phenomena has “so limited the reacting force of local or individual disturbances that, at least for some time, general commercial crises similar to the earlier ones are to be regarded as improbable” (80). Sensibly, Bernstein allowed that it was “impossible to pre-judge `a priori the ultimate relation of these forces to one another, or their development” (93); but he maintained that in the absence of “unforeseen external events . . . there is no urgent reason for concluding that such a crisis will come to pass for purely economic reasons. Local and partial depressions are unavoidable; general stagnation is not unavoidable with the present organisation and extension of the world market, and particularly with the great extension of the production of articles of food. . . . Perhaps nothing has contributed so much to the mitigation of commercial crises or to the stopping of their increase as the fall of rent and of the price of food” (93–4).

By contrast, we have Leontief ’s panegyric upon Marx’s “brilliant analysis of long-run tenden- cies of the capitalistic system,” namely: “increasing concentration of wealth, rapid elimination of small and medium sized enterprise, progressive limitation of competition, incessant tech- nological progress accompanied by the ever growing importance of fixed capital, and, last but not least, the undiminishing amplitude of recurrent business cycles – an unsurpassed series of prognostications fulfilled, against which modern economic theory with all its refinements has little to show indeed” (1966 [1938]: 78). Account should also be taken of the much more critical evaluation in Mason 1957: 23–32. Robinson 1980 (1968) provides a well-balanced evaluation of Marx’s hits and misses.

Wolfson 1966 applies the criterion that nonrefutable propositions are tautologous to the forecast of the end of capitalism. For an account of the “immunizing strategems” devised to protect the Marxian system against the failure of several of its predictions, see Blaug 1980: 31–59; also 1991.

481 Elliott notes a “crucial factor which prevented the mechanical working out of

D. Marx as “Revisionist”

Marx’s economic laws mit eherner Notwendigkeit (as Marx had put it in his preface to the first German edition of Capital),” namely “the pressure exerted by the trade unions in protecting the industrial workers. The trade unions were able to force the capitalists to pay the workers more than a subsistence wage (thus abrogating the Marxist ‘law’ which decreed that no commodity could be paid more than its ‘value’)” (Elliott 1967: 75). And Bernstein refers to “[t]he fight of the workmen organised in trade unions for the improvement of their standard of life [which] from the standpoint of the capitalist [is] a fight between wage rate and profit rate” (1961 [1899]: 135–6). Similarly with respect to shorter hours: “If the shorter day of labour does not directly cause a diminution in the amount of work done for the wage given hitherto – in many cases it is known that the reverse happens – yet it leads by a side way to an increase in the workers’ demands for better conditions of life, and so makes a rise in wages necessary” (137–8).

All in all, Malthus turns out to have been the better “prophet” in these respects, though – working within the classical tradition and eschewing appeal to inevitable outcomes which preclude policies designed to improve welfare – he did not purport to engage in prophecy. As for J.S. Mill, he was not prepared (he explained in “Chap- ters on Socialism”) to accept Louis Blanc’s insistence in 1845 on a necessary fall in working-class living standards under capitalism – “une baisse continue des salaries”: “the assertion is in opposition to all accurate information, and to many notorious facts. It has yet to be proved that there is any country in the civilised world where the ordinary wages of labour, estimated either in money or in articles of consump- tion, are declining; while in many they are, on the whole, on the increase; and an increase which is becoming, not slower, but more rapid” (Mill 1963–91 [1879] 5: 727–8). Even population pressure was no longer an “irrepressible tendency” con- sidering the rapid acceleration of capital accumulation, easier emigration – due to transportation advances and improved knowledge – and increased “prudence” (728–9). 20

Two questions must be addressed. Did Marx recognize the apparent predictive failure of his engine of analysis? And, if so, how did he respond? We have shown in Chapter 15 that he certainly came to appreciate improvements in general welfare experienced by British factory workers in the most advanced industries, referring indeed in Capital 1 to their “physical and moral regeneration” (pp. 456, 460), as Bernstein pointed out. This evaluation is interpreted by Marx himself as the out- come of legislative reform forced on the ruling class by working-class pressure, the “factory magnates” increasingly “reconciled to the inevitable,” all in consequence of modern industrial development. The original stance that effective reformist leg- islation, because a constraint on economic development, could never be tolerated

20 This was written sometime after 1869 and published posthumously in 1879. In his Principles Mill has it that only the labor ´elite was benefiting from growth, with “prudential” behavior

practiced by skilled workers alone (Hollander 1985: 456).

Conclusion – A Recapitulation and Overview

by the capitalist establishment is wholly reversed, social reform now represented as

a necessary characteristic of advanced capitalism. We have then in Capital 1 itself a clear indication of incipient “revisionism.” As for earnings, in the English case Irish immigration could for the moment be relied upon to keep a lid on working-class aspirations (9 April 1870; MECW 43: 474–5). Even so, there is some recognition in 1871 of at least the potential for real-wage improvement given the promise of greater success by local strike activity as a result of international cooperation, and in the proposals of 1880 (pertain- ing to France) for reform extending to Monday holidays, minimum wages, non- discriminatory pay between the sexes and employer contributions to insurance (Chapter 15, p. 461). The vision of an inevitable worsening of labor’s condition was dissipating. And this transformation cannot be explained away by resort to the emergence of strong unions, considering the firm denial in 1865 that unions could reverse the trend. Marx in fact was revising his orientation. 21

Marx’s revisionism with respect to working-class conditions constituted a threat to the prospect of revolution by an increasingly dissatisfied labor force. It has been recently asserted that had Marx indeed “enunciated an increasing misery doc- trine” his support for unions would have “lacked much rationale”; indeed, rising real wages were considered by Marx as “necessary to realize socialism” (Howard 2000: 1040). Now certainly Marx thought a well-trained, self-conscious, militant proletariat was essential to assure the collapse of capitalism, and that these charac- teristics were encouraged by capitalist development itself, including unionization. But this does not gainsay that increasing “misery” too was envisaged as a sine qua non.

We should certainly not forget the standard repost that any improvement in labor’s condition is a secondary matter so long as the exploitative wages system itself remained untouched. But this old refrain in no way negates the substantive fact of progress within capitalism on the welfare front that in the end Marx came to admit; and it in no way resolves the dilemma that progress under capitalism severely compromises the sought-after outcome. Bernstein spelled out the predicament facing Marx: “ . . . the general sympathy with the strivings for emancipation of the working classes does not in itself stand in the way of the scientific method. But, as Marx approached a point when that final aim enters seriously into the question, he becomes uncertain and unreliable . . . for instance in the section [of Capital] on the movement of incomes in modern society. It thus appears that this great scientific spirit was, in the end, a slave to a doctrine” (1961 [1899]: 210). This conclusion holds goods, as we have shown, with respect to a variety of issues apart from the real-wage trend.

Marx never properly resolved the dilemma (see Wolfson 1966: 189). But a lifeline was provided in effect by his “evolutionist” perspective of Capital 3 documented in

21 Engels in 1874 referred to labor’s sharing “the advantages of the immense expansion of its large-scale industry” at a time when England “ruled the world market” (MECW 23: 613).

483 Chapter 13. For the major alterations under way in industry structure were paving

E. Marx and the Moderns

the road to communism, the joint-stock arrangement constituting “the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of the capitalist mode of pro- duction itself ” (p. 406). We have then an instance of disintegration of the original structure, on a par with the greater willingness to allow for a return to uncertainty bearing in the industrial capitalist’s profit once that form of organization was seen to be under threat from joint-stock, cooperative, and nationalized ventures. Quite extraordinary is the circumstance that Marx was already aware of the industrial transformation at a very early stage, writing in 1858 of “[s]hare capital as the most perfected form (turning into communism) . . . ” (p. 406). We have here further evidence that Marx’s original project was constructed on an axiomatic foundation reflecting an empirical reality in the course of disintegration, and this according to his own account.

Here we should step back to allow perspective. Marx had quietly altered his evaluation of the forces at play undermining capitalist institutions. The cost of this transition was to render tenuous the original link between basic Marxian surplus- value theory, which pertained to the competitive world of industrial capitalism, and historical trends. As for the striking accounts of contemporary “globalization” (see Chapter 9, pp. 270–1, 276–8, 290; Chapter 4, p. 130; Chapter 14, p. 417), these had more to do with the “realization” than the “creation” of surplus value. And the understanding of a land-exhaustion propensity of capitalist agriculture (Chap- ter 4, pp. 124–5) is again an issue unrelated to the basic theoretical structure.