All the world will be America ….

I don´t think you should read anything into it.

As “A” comment on Delongs blog:
“ indeed there seems to be a ritual requirement in the U.S. to have any mention of Marx paired with ‘he was wrong,’ the same way any mention of the Prophet needs to be paired with “peace be upon him” in Islamic countries.”

How do “card-carrying neoliberals” disagree with Marx on this point?

By paying at least minimal attention to history, and noticing that “convergence” doesn’t happen automatically, and requires well-intentioned and imaginative leadership, organized and politically energized populations, and a great deal of attention and sensitivity to local conditions? Which is to say, base-and-superstructure analysis is false.

There’s a difference between saying “neoliberalism is awesome” (de Long) and saying “neoliberalism is automatic” (not de Long). The first point of view is capable of observing obvious facts — for example, Russia sucks politically, and this is in large measure due to poorly-planned and executed liberal reform — and acknowledging their facthood.

In a shocking development is is possible to find a quote from Marx proving he was not able to correctly predict the future in every detail. Who knew?

Here’s Marx’s original quote in context.

Card-carry neoliberals don’t believe that the countries of the South will “catch-up” with the rich world. Rather, they believe that these countries will/should be integreated into the global economic system as junior, subordinated members — providers of commodities and sweated labor to the knowledge workers of the North.

@Lemuel Pitkin
Good point.
A true shibboleth of the card-carrying neoliberals?

Marxists in 1970 or so told me that the Vietnam War was about the opening of Asian markets. I disagreed and thought that the causes of the war were political and institutional, but I was probably wrong. In any case, there are many today who justify the war by claiming that it made it possible to open Asian markets.

They also talked about the reserve army of the unemployed and immiserization. People laughed at them and pointed at how the American working class was sharing in the benefits of development. But then the reserve army of the unemployed was globalized, and the institutional protections of the American working class were destroyed one by one, a process which is expected to continue.

11: of course he’s wrong, unless you’re going to argue that Russia, Britain, China, France and Japan all followed the same course of industrial development.

14: “They also talked about the reserve army of the unemployed and immiserization. People laughed at them and pointed at how the American working class was sharing in the benefits of development. But then the reserve army of the unemployed was globalized”

You surely aren’t suggesting that the globalised working class is getting more and more immiserated, are you? As in: considerable more misery now than in, say, 1970? good grief.

No, but the American working class is. Around 1960-1970 the prosperity of the American working class was used to disprove Marx, but since then the mechanisms causing and maintaining that prosperity have been dismantled, and it now looks like a politico-military historical blip.

At Sepia Mutiny I recently saw the claim that the top 10% in Indian society is not as economically well off (PPP adjusted) as the bottom 10% of American society. I didn’t believe it, but checking numbers suggested that it might be true. The Indian prosperous or wealthy class is tiny, and the Indian middle class really isn’t very wealthy. A family of four making $10,000 in the US is the poorest of the poor, whereas in India they’re doing pretty well.

When someone from the 19th century reserve army actually got a job, they personally became better off. But collectively that dynamic kept wages low for everyone.

From a universalist utilitarian point of view, this is all a good thing. Share the wealth. But the long-term consequences for Americans are pretty grim. With a declining or even a static standard of living, politics tends to become ugly, and we’re seeing that. For the two American parties to promote a universalist utilitarian trade policy, when a large chunk of their constituents were not part of the greatest number whose greatest good was being attained, but rather part of the lesser number whose good was being reduced (and theoretically compensatible but not actually compensated, per Kaldor Hicks), could only produce a large embittered and hopeless class and a poisoning of the political dialogue. Since we haven’t seen the worst yet, and since the optimistic prophets and economists have lost most of their credibility, I think that this makes progressive politics a very poor bet, in the US at least.

Of course the argument can be made, and in fact was made by radical thirdworlders of the 60s such as the Weathermen, that Americans are overfed and have it coming to them.

One of the reasons Mexico hasn’t taken off is that as soon as Mexican wages started to improve, jobs were offshored to Thailand or wherever. And Bangla Desh is still there, ready and waiting. (Mexico is not a poor country, globally speaking; PPP per capita it’s about in the middle of the pack).

So anyway, as a Kantian or utilitarian idealist I would feel a lot better about this if I didn’t happen to live here. But there is one other factor. The impoverished masses of Asia aren’t the main ones benefitting. Globalization has coincided with the concentration of global wealth in fewer and fewer hands and stranglehold of finance over everything else.

People here think they’re players, but they’re not. They’re just watching from the sidelines and making timid suggestions which will go unheard while the real players do what they do.

Marx was correct in one crucial respect: the internal contradictions of Capitalism will blow it apart. Look around you at the wreckage of the last financial meltdown, and guess what the next one will be like. Like cocaine-addicted lab rats, the plutocrats can’t stop until they kill their own system (and themselves).

I don’t see how being a neoliberal is the same as being a naive modernization theorist. Neoliberals believe that free trade, market institutions etc. are preferable . They don’t necessarily believe they’re inevitable.

It seems to me that you’re being ridiculously picky here. Obviously one can make the case that Marx was wrong by making increasingly fine-grained comparisons between different countries in order to show that they are different. But for the quoted sentence to come out as true, I think a broad similarity in industrial (or even post-industrial) civilizations is all that’s needed.

And you can just keep broadening that similarity until they all match, or until you hit chris’ truism of “industrialized countries are all alike, they have industry in them”. My point was that the quoted sentence is so vague that it’s vacuous to condemn DeLong for disagreeing with it (or indeed agreeing with it) unless you know what form that disagreement is going to take, and, since you haven’t heard his lecture, you don’t know that.

My own view is that the sentence is pretty hopeless in terms of predictive value: if you went up to a Russian in 1890 and said “I predict that the iron laws of development mean that Russia will grow to resemble Britain as it industrialises over the next half-century”, I do not believe that that Russian would be terribly impressed by your accuracy when you dropped in to see him again in 1940, even if you were to point out triumphantly that the Donbass, like the Midlands, now had a lot of steel mills.

One of the reasons Mexico hasn’t taken off is that as soon as Mexican wages started to improve, jobs were offshored to Thailand or wherever

Hasn’t taken off in what way? Economy’s been growing OK per capita, I thought.

IF they are preferable (because they deliver faster growth and prosperity) then they would probably also be inevitable, because those countries that failed to adopt would fall behind. The fallen behind countries might then either adopt or, perhaps needing help from more advanced countries, only be granted it on condition that they adopted ….

In its assumption of an unavoidable drive towards greater economic efficiency, that sounds a bit neoliberal itself, to be honest. What’s to stop an economically inferior system being perpetuated because it gives disproportionate benefits to the people in power?

I think you’re all wrong about this interpretation. Marx is simply saying that when you look at what is now called developmental history, you’ll see the same broad themes emerge, including rural flight to cities, concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands, and exploitation of workers, backed by state power in the service of capital. Generally speaking that is pretty much how it has gone in most cases of the transition from agrarian to industrial societies

That’s a really unhelpful sentence to start a comment with. Your interpretation is shared by probably a majority of people on this thread, including Chris B. Certainly by me.

“industrialized countries are all alike, they have industry in them”

They all have industry. Privately owned. Labor is provided by hired workers. Goods are traded in a market, in exchange for money. Yes, they are all alike.

Ajay are you arguing against (a) the global convergence thesis or are your arguing (b) that neoliberals don’t embrace the global convergence thesis?

Neither. I’m arguing that your attempt at a gotcha of DeLong is based on shaky foundations, because the sentence of Marx in question is so vague that it could be interpreted in a lot of ways from “obviously false” to “truism”, and unless you can give a bit more detail on a) what DeLong is arguing and b) what Marx was talking about, it doesn’t work as a gotcha.

Since my point was that neoliberals are more or less bound to adopt what Sebastian called “naive modernization theory” that’s not surprising.

What’s surprising is that you yourself seem to believe that a more economically efficient system would automatically spread and become universal. In 27 you argue that if free market neoliberal policies are economically more efficient then they will inevitably spread across the world – in short, you are backing the global convergence thesis. I don’t think this is the case.

The question of whether neoliberal policies are actually superior is a separate one, and I realise that you haven’t taken a position on this.

Private property, competitive markets, codified legal system, bureaucratization, mass media, political parties, elections, communications networks, high degree of urbanization, mass public education systems,

…not all of these are present in all industrial economies, either now or in the past.
And some of them are so incredibly vague that they have been shared by every civilisation in history. (“Communications networks”?)

All looks rather different from the ancien regime.

OK, now you’re apparently saying that the “ancien regime” didn’t have private property or bureaucracy or competitive markets or a codified legal system. That’s not true.

The net from 1992 to 2008, more than a decade and a half, is very little improvement. Yes, if you toss out the bad years, things do look better.

Most interesting about this thread is the title: “All the world will be America ….”

When Marx wrote, England was in fact “more developed industrially” than its rivals (fn1). Is that true for the US today? Doubtful. Is it a reflex to see America always in that way?

(fn1) And my understanding is that Marx wasn’t even considering the colonized countries of the South (which we now call “less developed”) here; he was writing about Europe, am I wrong?

Part of the list @34 has existed since the mandarins and the Code of Hammurabi, and part (the political parts in particular) isn’t universal in industrialized countries even today.

And some of the items suggested as “convergence” in this thread are so general they’re completely useless — even societies that explicitly forbid private property ownership have markets where goods are exchanged for money, they’re just illegal markets. That’s as much a “convergence” as all those societies where people eat, excrete, and sleep. And nobody has to look at a more industrialized country to see that their future contains private property being exchanged in markets, because even Third World countries already have that in their present, and have had it since ancient times.

Henri@45: Who are you asking that question of?

@Henri: actually, I have to admit that I fail to see how urbanization, capital concentration, state power utilised in the service of that concentrated capital to permit greater exploitation of labour can really be considered so broad as to be meaningless…. after all, you don’t see any of those things in largely agrarian societies; instead you tend to get feudalism.

I also can’t help that Fordism (which really got the ball rolling on the middle class in North America) has been brushed aside… perhaps because it was an innovation that came after Marx, and therefore can’t be used to beat on him. Can’t help but notice that Ford did it over the objections of his fellow plutocrats, also, too. Ford was a dick in many ways, but one risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater when you dismiss or ignore what he did, and what the effect was on the relative power of the US over the long term vs. the Rest Of The World(tm). Oh hey… take a look… since Fordism was broken, what’s happened to the relative power of the US since?

@49
Sounds good. Everyone’s heard the common American expression, “Too many Indians, not enough chiefs.”

More seriously, I thought everybody is a neoliberal now, so why shouldn’t a neoliberal accept the one-time leftist criticism of chauvinistic western/northern development theories (even if it hadn’t filtered to mere centrist liberalism a while ago)?

‘Country with more developed feudalism shows to the less developed the image of its own future’ – that would be true too. And, once you’ve accepted that these socio-economic stages are real, it even sounds trivial, doesn’t it?

“But apart from this. Where capitalist production is fully naturalised among the Germans (for instance, in the factories proper) the condition of things is much worse than in England, because the counterpoise of the Factory Acts is wanting. In all other spheres, we, like all the rest of Continental Western Europe, suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif!”

Umm… does that sound like a claim for uniform “development”? What Marx specifically says in the preface is that he derives his account of the “capitalist”- (the term post-dates Marx)- mode of production primarily from English sources and evidence, because England was then the most advanced level of its development, and thus the closest analogy to a “laboratory” available to political economy. And he is attempting to develop the “laws of motion” for such “modern societies”, i.e. the industrial commodity producing “base”, in which production is for the sake of realizing profit through exchange-value, rather than directly for use, (which is also a significantly a monetary production economy). And it’s those “laws of motion” that will increasingly take hold in other less developed societies and thus contain the *image* of their future development. Because those “laws of motion” entail the “imperative” of capital accumulation and exploitation, whereby capitalist production must ceaselessly expand, intensively and extensively, in order to maintain the “value” of capital through the rate-of-profit. Hence from its very inception and historical emergence, industrial capitalism is already a “global” phenomenon and, due to its “imperative” for ceaseless expansion which is the key driver of the whole system, will become increasingly globalized.

However, I fail to see how that rough thesis entails that the further, futural, projected development of industrial capitalism would occur somehow uniformly, always in the same manner, via the same pathways and on the same schedule. Marx is offering a generalized conceptual account of an industrial capitalist economy, an “ideal type” of such an economy, and its dynamics. Not a set of precise localized predictions based on deterministic “covering laws”, which, er, could scarcely be possible, given the intrinsic limits of the “evidence”. But Marx did in fact provide some conceptual means for considering uneven and alternate pathways of capitalist development, such as the distinction between “formal and real subsumption”, the difference between a sector, territory, etc. coming under the sway of capitalist accumulation and exploitation, while maintaining its more-or-less traditional, given form or m.o., and the reconstruction of that economy entirely in terms of the capitalist mode of production and accumulation process. And given the emphasis on the dynamic disequilibria characterizing his account of the crisis-ridden, but inevitable global expansion of industrial capitalism, a highly uniformitarian account would be hard to make out.

It’s not a matter of Marx having been 100% right or wrong. It’s a matter of having some acquantaince and understanding of the actual conceptual contents of his work, before spouting off about what an idiot he was.

oh, by the way, great blog title.

Well, quoted in context it looks worse. “Karl Marx was wrong” is not followed by any explanation of what he was wring about or why he was wrong about it. Just a list of points on which “we” agree with him. So maybe now that you’re here, you can amplify. How was Marx wrong, exactly?

@lemuel, that’s interesting. Though I don’t think those situations are symmetric, not even roughly. Heat sources produce very little ‘waste’ light, and what they produce gets mostly turned to heat in its vicinity anyway. And Elizabethans could probably use all the light they could get.

So the problem of a lots-of-light heat source is not that it is wasteful, but gthat it is misleading. It looks bigger than it is, it does not give you the warmth that its looks suggest.

“Henry Ford, who realised that by paying his workers enough to form an industrial middle class, he might end up less wealthy relatively speaking to his worker, but more wealthy in absolute terms.”

It’s a nice story about Ford and one that’s often told. It’s not all that accurate though (and certainly not the version of it which says that he was deliberately paying his workers enough to be able to buy the products they made).

These numbers are from memory but are broadly correct. In the year he introduced the $5 a day wage he was producing 200,000 cars. From a permanent establishment of 13,000 workers. His own workforces’ buying power was an irrelevance to his sales (and much more so after WWI when production soared).

What was relevant is that in the previous year he had gone through 50,000 workers to get that 13,000 permanent establishment. The $5 a day wage sharply cut his hiring and training costs as people stayed with him.

Oh, and it wasn’t in fact a $5 a day wage. It was $2.50 a day topped up with a bonus if you lived the American way (“American” as defined by Ford of course, no booze, gambling, living in sin etc etc). Women didn’t get the bonus unless they were the only earner in the household.

Ford’s insight was nothing to do with paying enough to create a market or a middle class. It was that by paying more than everyone else he got the cream of the crop and also managed to get them to stick around.

Which, since we’re discussing Marx, is exactly what Karl pointed out would happen. As long as there are competing capitalists competing for the profits that can be extracted from labour, as productivity rises so do those profits possible, meaning that those competing capitalists will bid up wages in order to get that labour they can extract profits from.

It’s monopoly capitalism (monopsony, a word invented later) that immiserates, not competitive capitalism.

Which leads to my favourite observation about this exploitation of labour. It’s the Soviet system, where the State was the monopsony purchaser of labour, that actually did manage to deliberately hold down wages so as to increase profits. Those supposedly following Karl managed to create exactly what Karl was warning against.

Karl Marx wrote that the “country that is more developed industrially… shows to the less developed the image of its own future…” Karl Marx was wrong. Nevertheless, past examples of globalization, marketization, industrialization, democratization, bureaucratization, et cetera do provide a set of benchmarks, contrasts, and perhaps—for those people making their own history but not as they choose today—models.

To be honest, feeding this into the ShorterTech Precis-O-Matic 3000, it looks like the summary is going to be: “Karl Marx was wrong. Nevertheless, Karl Marx was right”.

“But feudalism IS capital concentration and state power utilized in the service of that capital to permit greater exploitation of labor. Capital and labor are called “nobles” and “serfs” respectively.”
I think that a general problem regarding the apparent lack of “convergence” of capitalist societies is that we tend to project our world in the past and think that the past was more similar to us than it actually was.
For example, regarding feudalism: the “state” didn’t actually exist, since feudal relationships were private relationships of subordination. Something like the state began in renaissance cities and developed during modern age ut to the ancient regime, but that were in facts societis that kept a feudal superstructure ona a manifacturing (ie: capitalistic) basis; serfs were not labor because they could not sell their labor force, and most importantly nobles where not capitalists because there wasn’t a market to sell products to, so they couldn’t produce for profit.

Are you saying that any systemic analysis of socio-economic conditions is impossible? Things happen because of (cf. #4) “well-intentioned and imaginative leadership, organized and politically energized [for no apparent reason] populations”, culture, religiosity, etc.; it’s all random, accidental, it that it?

In every realistic situation, there are always a metric truckload of significant causal factors, and measuring these factors ranges from difficult to impossible. This is not a claim that everything is structureless and random, but rather the observation that there are too many important factors in action for neat and tidy little systemic explanations to work. You can’t say anything intelligent about the big picture without a mountain of data at hand, and that data is not going to be clean.

To be honest, feeding this into the ShorterTech Precis-O-Matic 3000, it looks like the summary is going to be: “Karl Marx was wrong. Nevertheless, Karl Marx was right”.

I would express it as “Karl Marx was wrong to make such a sweeping claim, but there’s some truth to be found somewhere in his general vicinity.”. Different nations’ histories develop in different ways for reasons idiosyncratic to those respective nations, so you can’t actually use a more-developed nation to predict the future of your own nation. But when your own nation’s history actually arrives, you will probably identify some similarities in retrospect, even though you couldn’t have reliably predicted in advance *how* your future would resemble the other society’s present.

I can’t speak for DeLong, of course, but that seems to me to be more or less what he’s saying too. It’s easy to find similarities in hindsight (indeed to some extent this is just data mining; *any* two human societies are likely to resemble each other in *some* respects, whether there is any connection other than both being made of human beings or not), but Marx is making a claim about *prediction* that cannot possibly be sustained.

On the other hand, john c. halasz appears to be saying “Sure, the literal meaning of what Marx said is wrong, but only a dummy would interpret Marx literally here, given the context of his other work”, which may be defensible on some level, but sort of seems like deliberately reinterpreting him with the benefit of hindsight in a direction that makes your interpretation less wrong than what he actually said. You don’t have to have an anti-Marx bias to feel distaste for such a practice (at least, I think you don’t).

A partly right and partly wrong statement can accurately be described as *both* “right” and “wrong” depending on which parts you emphasize, so it makes a great bone of contention, especially when it comes from a famous controversial figure like Marx. But if you actually *say* “Marx was half right!” “No, Marx was half wrong!” then you might spoil the fun by realizing that you’re not actually disagreeing.

@72:

Nope. If you’d bothered to actually read the German preface, Marx is quite aware of and emphasizes the limits of what he’s offering, he is specifically addressing the continental European context, the specific referent is just his “laws of motion of modern society”, and what he *literally* says is that the most advanced form of society is the *image* of the future of less developed societies. You don’t get to replace the actual contents of what Marx said with your own positivist-technocratic fantasy of social-scientific prediction.

Aside from which, 150 years later, Marx was something more than “half” right about the spread and dominance of capitalism across the world.

It’s a nice story about Ford and one that’s often told. It’s not all that accurate though

It’s generally told by people who haven’t a clue what ‘efficiency wage’ in economics is. Ford was paying efficiency wages.

(The example I was taught was Whole Foods: is it absolutely necessary its employees above-market wages, as Whole Foods does? No. Is it better for the business that they be paid well? Yes, because it’s Whole Foods, and not Wal-Mart.)

I would express it as “Karl Marx was wrong to make such a sweeping claim

But as Chris explains at 75 (much more patiently than I would have) Marx didn’t amke any such sweeping claim! He was talking specifically about Germany, and to a lesser extent continental Europe in general. People like you and DeLong can’t seem to help arguing with the imaginary Marx in your heads.

@77:

The problem is with your critical reading skills. How does “image” translate into “precisely specified model” or “photographic reproduction”? “Image” connotes something vague, not a Platonic Form. And likely Marx is being common-sensical here: as the “revolutionizing” process of capital accumulation takes hold in less developed societies, (partly, no doubt, from the transfer of investment surpluses from more developed ones), those societies enter into increase communicative contact with their more developed antecedents, and hence the image of those precedents influences the agents within that society. That is how to read the word “image” *literally*. And there is no strong and highly generalized claim to be derived from the mere use of that word.

As to “social science”, your idea of what such might entail is obviously not the same as Marx’. Marx specifically calls his work a “natural history”. Whether he is specifically alluding to Darwin or just to older versions of that topic, it’s not a highly predictive affair, but rather concerns the taxonomy of emergent and evolving forms and kinds. (I would guess that in his own mind, there was echoing his earlier counter-position to Hegel, that prior history is really “pre-history” and history proper only begins with that emergence of capitalism). That’s a distinctly limiting, as well as, delimiting move. (And BTW the “laws of motion” refers to Hegel and not to Newton). Marx is offering a map and necessarily a rough one, not a steering-wheel.

No one is arguing here that Marx somehow got everything “right”. He wasn’t, nor did he intend to be Nostradamus. And there are plenty of arguable criticisms that one could make of Marx’ work: that he perhaps was too economically reductive or deterministic, that he lacked an adequate account of the state and the political and the role they play in “development”, that he relied too much on a conceptual logic and its postulated “identities” in projecting unknowable future developments, that he perhaps under-estimated the self-stabilizing properties of “market economies”, etc. But it’s also not the case that he got things entirely wrong, and offered no compelling insights. Adventitiously and relativistically citing this or that hindsight detail ad hoc without knowing or addressing the actual contents of the work, however, scarcely serves as a critical procedure for sorting out those “rights” and “wrongs”.

But while you’re at it, why are you citing Sweden or Germany in discussing contemporary globalized capitalism, rather than, say, China, India, Mexico or Egypt?

It’s fair, of course, to ask (as some people here have) for a certain amount of specificity in Marx’s claim about convergence, but also only fair to acknowledge (as other people here have urged) that his claim referred to similarities of the largest, most general sort. Given Marx’s theoretical ambitions, it makes sense to formulate his claim in the terms and categories most distinctive of his theory. So perhaps one ought to understand him as saying, roughly:

1) An increasing proportion of the world’s population will make a living by selling their labor power rather than by producing for their own subsistence, as many still did in his time.

2) An increasing proportion of trade and investment will take place on globally integrated markets, rather than nationally self-contained ones.

3) Competition will force wages (and benefits) down (immiseration), a tendency countered to an unforeseeable extent by technological innovation (increasing productivity).

4) As the reserve of previously unexploited natural and human resources (ie, of primitive accumulation) diminishes, the rate of exploitation must intensify, or the rate of profit will have a tendency to fall. This tendency too can be countered by technological innovation, at least temporarily.

Put this way, it seems to me that Marx’s vision was spot on. But is this a good way to put it?

On the other hand, Taiwan or Japan might be good additional examples of countries that are highly industrialized without all becoming images of each other and the previously highly industrialized countries.

But of course they are, in marxist terms, images of each other and of the previously highly industrialized countries. Same relations of production.

No. Try using a German dictionary. ‘Bild’ cannot be accurately translated as ‘photographic reproduction’.

@81:

Nope. “Image” traditionally contrasts with “idea” or “concept”: it’s an indeterminate likeness, an analog pattern, a “physiognomy”, in contrast to something clear and precisely defined. There’s no reason to suppose that Marx wasn’t staying within that tradition. Your interpretation is anachronistic, as unwarranted as your facile assumption that the reading of words is acontextual and self-evident. (Of course, there were photos back then, though not nearly as pervasively as nowadays. Marx could have written “daguerreotype”, if he’d wanted to).

As for my interpretation being better than yours, well, that’s just the point: there are better and worse interpretation and no complex work is self-evident in its meaning. But your claims strike me as having little understanding and engagement with the actual contents of Marx’ work. As to the issue of the original post, developmental “convergence”, the line in question, and the whole preface in which it occurs, doesn’t provide a basis for claiming that Marx held to a strong and uniform version of such a notion. Rather his claim is a broad, but more limited one: that the capitalist mode-of-production with its “relations” and “forces” would increasingly spread and penetrate across the globe. But that is not a “linear” progress, but a “dialectic” process, always one step back for every two steps forward, with lot’s of twists and turns, and would occur at varying rates and in varying ways, depending of the geographical and historical conditions of the time. It’s hard to see how it could occur otherwise, both given Marx’ presuppositions and in general. And there is in that some general progress in the emergence of modern capitalist societies, if only technically. Such a broad, weak version of “convergence” is not only reasonable, but arguably true. So it’s not a matter of Marx having been simply flat-out wrong in his “prediction”.

Furthermore, it’s not clear to me what sort of predictions you think are possible of feasible in “social science”, nor that you grasp what Marx’ historical prognostications and projections amount to as “predictions”. They are not deterministic accounts of what will happen when and where and under what precise conditions, but rather outlines of general tendencies involved with the dynamics of the capital accumulation process. Whether Marx is right or wrong in the general outline of those tendencies and their interactions, deliberative reasons can be extracted from that account and assessed. It’s not soothsaying. But “Capital” is also a contribution toward the self-organized movement for working-class emancipation that it projects, intended to guide its response to the dynamics of capitalism, in terms of potential point of intervention. Hence much of futural course of events is in the hands of future agents, for whom it is impossible to predict any exact course of events. Marx might have been over-confident in his accounts of the tendencies, with his emphatic talk of “inevitability”, but they are nonetheless a set of future potentials, not deterministic predictions, which are beyond the limits of any such social “science”. (I don’t see how one can intelligibly read Marx without granting an implied account of and appeal to human agency, though, Lord knows, some have tried). One might reasonably “know”, for example, that a major financial crisis is imminent, but that’s different from knowing precisely when, where, and how it will break out, let alone what the range of responses to it might be. I suspect you might hold to a less limited account of what social science can accomplish, in the demands you make upon Marx’ “predictions”.

It’s fine by me if you want to play the game of comparative political economy, even ignoring any contributions that Marx or subsequent Marxian thinkers might have to offer. And if you want to indulge in retrodictions about the historical events of the subsequent 150 years, that’s easy enough. But neither amounts to a cogent criticism to sort out truth from error, rights from wrongs, in Marx’ body of work. For that you have to engage with its actual contents, rather than just imputing your own ideas, anachronistically, to it.

As to Red China, much of its developing industrial “platform” is FDI from MNCs, and it’s a major player in today’s global capitalist economy, however you might want to characterize its mysterious regime.

stras @71 wrote: DeLong is not a ‘smart guy.’ Like many in his field, he’s a dipshit with an almost comically unearned reputation for intelligence.

I don’t often read DeLong and I don’t like it that he deletes serious comments from his site (see C.B. above), but I’ve seen little or no evidence to support stras’s view of his intellect. I have heard DeLong speak in public on one occasion. I may not always agree with him, but I would not call him dumb. Could say more, but I’ll leave it at that.

I told all my friends the day Ronald Reagan was elected that it meant the world would be profoundly socialist in 100 years. I’m sticking with my prediction: only 70 years to go! I just don’t see how people are going to keep putting up with this crap. Nobody wants to worry about money and productivity won’t be a problem. We will all be gobbling cognitive enhancers and designing starships. The only real problems in the meantime are (1) a possible climate heat-spike that destroys agriculture, and/or (2) maniacs getting hold of nukes or nanotech and poisoning the whole place. But capitalism is an historical phase and the Enlightenment’s psychology is ultimately fractured and self-limiting. On his most important point, Marx hasn’t been proved wrong yet.

@20, I take DeLong to be suggesting that Marx and Fukuyama are both wrong, for the same reason. Which is why attempts to narrow Marx’s point in that quote fail to engage DeLong. Regardless of what Fukuyama thinks neoliberalism is not liberalism interpreted in light of Marxism.

What I think is missing in the discussion is the time scale involved. Marx didn’t say that all capitalist countries would be identical in a very short time, but that the development would be in that direction, because of the pressures of capitalist competition. And this is a process that seams to be is still ongoing. For instance, John Quiggin wrote a post a couple of month ago about how unemployment rates in Europe and North America were converging. And, while Germany and Sweden are different from the USA today, it’s not like if right wingers in Europe, including the current German and Swedish governments, are trying to make the countries more similar to the USA.

So the question is more if Japan are more similar to Britain today, than it was when Marx wrote this in 1867? And is it really unlikely that Kenya and Britain will be more similar in 144 years than the countries are today?

The main problem I see with it though are the interrelated issues of the South, the Senate, and race.

I think uniquely racial issues in America are being subsumed into Brazilian-style race issues outside the old South, and the old South as a cultural identity is itself slowly shrinking. The switching of Southern support to the GOP is often seen as a merely cosmetic and tactical move, but in fact it was coincidental with the end of the explicitly and exclusively “Southern” regionalist vote.

In any case, this is not my area of interest or familiarity; as a non-American, I have never been able to share its racial obsessions (both racist and anti-racist), because they are not universal, but uniquely American, problems; Mandela and Martin Luther King are not parallels.

Myles, I think you made an interesting argument about the potential for socialism in the US, but if you make an argument like that then you can’t avoid the racial issue–even if you don’t understand it or think it isn’t unique to the US. If you are interested Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote do an admirable job of explaining why the US doesn’t have a European-style Welfare State here:
http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/423__0332-Alesina11.pdf

(Future is used in the relative, rather than absolute, sense. The socialist future might have already occurred in an alternate universe, depending on how and when the contingent social conditions, such as the race-and-welfare society conundrum, have evolved.)

Isn’t Marx referring to his German or perhaps continental European audience only in that quote– not the whole less industrialized world, much less agricultural colonies?

Brad DeLong is certainly not this type of liberal, but liberalism has not been incompatible with social Darwinism, even in the case of John Maynard Keynes as John Toye has shown (it’s been ten years since I read his Keynes on Population though). Keynes does not even seem to have had the confidence of universal progress that Condorcet expressed. So not all liberals have believed that the rest of the world would industrialize, or was even capable of industrializing on the basis of science and rational methods.

Here is what will happen in the future, barring an environmental disaster: (1) the entire world will develop economically; (2) medical science will bring everyone up to the same cognitive intelligence levels; and (3) everybody is going to be sick to death of the same old 80-20 Pareto distribution of income and property.

I hardly should think this sort of masturbatory, make-believe fantasy merits a proper response. This is the sort of sheer delusion that makes me almost sympathetic to Toryism; well, not quite.

As I understand him, he’s merely pointing out that the present national/global distribution of wealth is so obviously irrational that it can’t possibly survive once a civilization has attained a certain level of literacy, leisure, and economic security.

I merely need point out (2) to you to refute any claims of sanity. The notion expressed in that point has only caused me to snicker. And if you take out number (2), then there’s no rational, material basis why (3) will necessarily happen. Smarter people are (approximately) more productive, and more productive people gain (approximately) more wealth. Number (1) may well happen, but on its own it’s also an entirely banal point.

The “pure” version of Marxism (as opposed to democratic socialism, or social democracy or whatever have you) is predicated on a notion of full, biological human equality, as Lee so revealingly wrote, “everyone up to the same cognitive intelligence levels,” that has no basis on any kind of objective or earthly reality, not to mention being incredibly sinister in its civilizational implications (a world with no differentiation in ability is, ipso facto, a world without culture or aesthetics).

And of course, being indescribably horrific in its implications for human autonomy. What if individuals don’t want to be genetically engineered to be equally as smart as ever other human. What if individuals are happy being, and choosing to be dumber? Shall we then abandon the entire Marxist project? I think it’s not entirely unfair to characterize Lee A. Arnold’s Marxist vision as being dependent upon a eugenicist vision, in the original meaning of the word.

And yes, points (1) and (3) can stand on their own as possible courses of history, but that’s not actually the argument Lee is making. Marxism is possible, perhaps even desirable or probable, but that’s not Lee’s vision; his Marxism is of an altogether different kind, and is more or less crackpot folk-Marxist Utopianism. If it were not the case, he wouldn’t have included point (2).

I take my words back about what the “pure” version of Marxism is predicated upon. I meant to say what Lee thinks pure Marxism to be.

(1) the entire world will develop economically; (2) medical science will bring everyone up to the same cognitive intelligence levels; and (3) everybody is going to be sick to death of the same old 80-20 Pareto distribution of income and property.

Umm, if we’re talking internationally, then 1) and 3) contradict each other. If the entire world develops economically (by which I assume you mean convergence, that China/Upper Volta/the USA are all at the same level of economic development) then we won’t have the same division of income that we have now. For that division of income is predicated on the point that various parts of the world are not equally economically developed.

If you mean an 80/20 split within specific societies, well, why won’t people put up with that? As they do now?

(Heading wildly off track I’d argue that income disparities are a great deal less important now than they ever have been. Being at the bottom of the income distribution in the UK does not mean being near death, it did not all that long ago. Being at the bottom of the UK income distribution now means having housing, education, health care (the last two certainly comparable to what 93% of the population is getting, the first of the three nearly so) plus a low income. Actual cash income just isn’t as great a marker of inequality of consumption as it used to be.)

Hm, p. 5 of the Marx-Engels reader says bourgeois society is characterized by antagonism, specifically for economic reasons. Arguably a neoliberal can’t accept this, and if a neoliberal can, then we need a new word for what we’ve been calling “neoliberalism.”

*because people started listening to HIS policy plans …

Tim @112: But if inequality of income doesn’t translate into significant inequality of condition, then why object to equalizing income?

Tim Worstall, Within democratic societies, people put up with the 80-20 distribution now for at least two reasons: the belief that it is fair to give the greater rewards to the greater abilities, and the existence of a large welfare state which meliorates the worst outcomes.

Standards of living rise for everybody, but I’m not sure that it is correct to say that “income disparities are a great deal less important now.” The last few decades saw a (minor) worsening in the distribution of incomes. At this moment, we are all presented with the enormous political question of the welfare state budgets. The recent bailouts of the entire financial system and most of its wealthiest actors were followed, in the U.S., by extending the tax cuts favoring the wealthiest. Now the Republicans have decided to balance the budgets on the backs of the teachers unions! I would argue that we appear to be heading into a new historical phase of greater unrest concerning income disparities, and it may be a long phase, unless the capitalists are smart enough to just shut up and pay their taxes.

Sorry! The last sentence of the first paragraph should read: “My preferred contemporary theory of democratic socialism, Michael Walzer’s in Spheres of Justice, building on Marx’s remark about “from each according … to each according,” argues that who produces how much doesn’t matter; goods, honors, offices ought to be allocated according to their telos (though he doesn’t use that word). “

I don’t know if it effects this late wayward discussion much, but I think it’s reasonably clear or likely that older Marx expected the transition to socialism to occur, whether peacefully or not, within a few generations of when he was writing, i.e. at much low levels of technological development than have since been obtained. Due to the “forces-of-production” having exceeded the limits set by the prevailing “relation-of-production”, of course.And some of his reasoning is fairly obvious. That oligopolistic concentration of production, which geo mentioned above, at high levels of technical efficiency and extensive scale means that production has already largely been socialized anyway, such that fully socializing it would be but a small step. And, economically speaking, it also means that competitive market-based pricing has largely been suspended and replaced by administrative mark-up pricing. But that prognosis and expectation has clearly failed, as capitalism has proven far more capable of sustaining technically efficient, but socially inefficient and wasteful, overproduction than Marx surmised, rather than being replaced by more deliberative guidance mechanisms, more in accordance with human and natural ends and limits.

Lee: As I understand Mill, he acknowledges great individual differences in ability but, because the web of causation — economic and other – is so thick and intricate, it is impossible to estimate individual contributions to the social product with any exactness. But beyond that, he was simply a humanist, and thought that as working-class literacy, organization, and self-confidence increased, the workers would impose a more just and rational social order, which might very well include markets and competition but would definitely include far less hierarchy and inequality, not to mention drudgery. I don’t know if that’s a theory or not. Certainly he expected enlightened folks like all (well, most) of us on CT to contribute our exhortations, for whatever they’re worth.

Having written this, apologies for going wildly of course again:

“Standards of living rise for everybody, but I’m not sure that it is correct to say that “income disparities are a great deal less important now.” The last few decades saw a (minor) worsening in the distribution of incomes.”

Indeed, but my argument is rather that changes in that distribution of income are less important now than they were. Tyler Cowen urges us to look at the distribution of consumption as being more important. With which I would agree.

But I would go further. Much further in fact. 100 years ago income differentials might mean the difference between no fridge and a fridge (sorry, don’t know when firdges were actually invented), or between sufficient calories and insufficient, between a car/carriage and Shank’s Pony.

Today income differentials in any of the advanced industrial countries means a difference between a generic fridge and a Smeg, sufficient calories and exotic calories, a second hand clunker or a new Merc. Income differentials, in terms of physical standards of living, just aren’t as important as they used to be.

And I did get rather angry with a report on wealth differentials a year or so back in the UK. Bottom 10% have £8 k in assets, top 10% £800k, leading to a wealth difference of 100:1.

Numbers they go to by entirely ignoring the existence of the welfare state (that is, they measured wealth before the influence of taxes and benefits, not after). Yer average bottom 10% er in the UK has access to social housing for life at a preferential rent. This is an asset, of course (worth some £60k on average). They deliberately excluded the State pension, including only private pension accruals, in their calculations of wealth. That State pension of course has a value as an asset: £40k maybe? Etc, etc, etc. The wealth differential simply isn’t as large as it was portrayed, for we all have an asset of great value: that very welfare state itself.

“Tim @112: But if inequality of income doesn’t translate into significant inequality of condition, then why object to equalizing income?”

I don’t object to some equalizing of income. Or wealth. I do object to two things: 1), discussions of how much equalizing there should be without a calculation of how much we already do and 2) the idea that complete equalizing is either desirable or possible if we are to continue to have incentives.

As Smith has been used above, I’m entirely happy with Smith’s idea about how muc redistribution there should be. The linen shirt example (a linen shirt is not an essential, but if you live in a society where not being able to afford one makes you poor then not being able to afford a linen shirt makes you poor in the eyes of that society). We even have a good estimate in the UK of what the linen shirt means in the UK today: from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a pre tax income of £13,800 or so a year. Which is actually where the “living wage” number of £7.60 an hour comes from.

I’m just fine with that as a goal: redistribution until all have the standard of living implied by that number. The abolition of poverty if you like.

Where I argue is that few seem to note the next point. The current minimum wage (£6.00/hr ish) would be, if income tax and national insurance were not charged on it, the same post tax income as that £13,800 would be post tax. So we can eliminate poverty among those who work full time full year simply by not taxing the poor so damn much: by making the personal allowance equal the minimum wage.

Just fine by me: indeed, the think tank I’m a part of (the Adam Smith one) advocates this as policy. Yes, even if taxes have to rise elsewhere to pay for it.

“Also, McNeill notes that the places where revolution did happen – China and Russia – resisted industrialization and Marx’s more mild “working within the system” suggestions from CM. Just general food for thought”

I believe that Marx regarded his ten points as a description of communism, not as a milder “working within the system” version.

We don’t see those points as very revoluctionary (as the “public schools” point) mostly because our society became more socialist than it was in Marx’s times (wich sorta proves Marx right, imho).

But he wasn’t spot on with regard to point 3.

Thus that useful phrase “countered to an unforeseeable extent”. See, if you read it right, any state of affairs can be harmonized with that “prediction”.

That, of course, makes it no prediction at all. Even if it is fair to say that Marx hedged to the point of hardly saying anything definite at all, and not an ex post facto reinterpretation, that still leaves him hardly saying anything definite at all — in which case he’s not wrong, as such, but hasn’t really predicted the future either (if he was ever trying to do that in the first place).

Yer average bottom 10% er in the UK has access to social housing for life at a preferential rent. This is an asset, of course (worth some £60k on average).

Is it really for life? That is, if they become richer next year, are they still entitled to stay in the cheap housing if they choose, or are they booted out in favor of some other person/family that is poor that year? I don’t know the details of the UK system, but it seems to me that in the latter case, it would be misleading to describe what they have as an “asset”; it’s more like in-kind income provided to them only as long as they meet the conditions to continue receiving it.

But maybe this late in an only peripherally related thread is a poor time to bring up this sort of thing.

“Is it really for life? That is, if they become richer next year, are they still entitled to stay in the cheap housing if they choose”

Yes. It’s even (under quite restrictive rules) inheritable.

“Tim: That sounds pretty good to me. Does your think tank have the ear of the American government, by any chance?”

Sadly no….and for most of the British authors of this blog, it was an unhappy time when we had the ear of the UK government as well…..

dictateursanguinaire: “Marx has so far been wrong largely because we’ve significantly tinkered with capitalism. ”

We also had complete disruptions by two (2) world wars, the bad example of Marxism in the Soviet Union, and the rise of capital-owned, one-way mass media (radio and TV) to dispense its propaganda unilaterally and at leisure too. So maybe the 20th Cent. was just a diversion.

@ 129 & 132:

Nope. Marx did offer a highly specific account, from which highly generalized predictions could be derived, in terms of the dynamic interaction of specified tendencies. But it doesn’t involve a dependence on an absolute immiseration thesis. He did after all distinguish between absolute and relative “immiseration”,- (and, in fact, similar pairings are to be found throughout his work, such as, e.g., the difference between absolute and relative surplus-value). It’s obvious that, as productivity and output rise, real wages would also have to rise, in order to absorb such increased output. That is, in fact, to simplify a bit, one of the main points of LTV accounting: the aggregate “mass” of labor-values would amount to what is required to sustain full employment and wages sufficient to continuously sustain aggregate demand. (And BTW as output and productivity increase, labor-values don’t: if the former double, then the per unit labor-value has halved). So wages can and do and even must rise, perhaps even above their “value”, during boom phases, but capital accumulation and the “imperative” to maintain its “value” also increase. And Marx’ specific claim is that the asymmetry between distribution to wages and profits under capitalism will entail that a permanent “equilibrium” sufficient to sustain AD can’t be lasting obtained. In the early stages, absolute immiseration does obtain, as craft workers’ livelihoods are destroyed and peasants driven off the land, but, in later periods, standards-of-living do and can rise. “Absolute immiseration” then obtains within and across cycles only as a result of depressions. And it’s still an open question as to whether Keynesian demand management can fully counteract that tendency, even if it prolongs the lags by which it might take hold. But then again, though we now know more about economic policy than obtained in Marx’ time, it’s still a matter that what theories are formed and what policy options are “chosen” is very much dependent on the conflicting interests that they serve. And the failure to adopt optimal policy responses nowadays or the continuing rationalization of obviously failed policies is itself in need of explanation.

So your crude Popperian technocratic falsificationism, combined with your manifest ignorance of any actual Marxian contents, just amounts to a “social scientific” know-nothingism and nihilism: Marx must be obviously wrong, simply because you say so. Without specifying the ways in which he is wrong, or offering any alternative account.

geo @133:

Do you really think neo-classical economics offers precise, falsifiable predictions?