One of the most laughable aspects of modern Marxism and left anarchism is their endless bloviating talk about how they allegedly speak for the working class.
First of all, there is the reality that Marxist or communist parties are virtually dead in the Western world (here, here, and here). There are no doubt more working class people voting for conservatives in the West than for far left Marxists (e.g., for the UK’s recent general election see here), and that won’t change any time soon.
Secondly, there is the blatant reality that Marxists and far left anarchists are badly out of touch with the working class on two important issues: open borders and mass immigration.
Far left anarchists these days seem to be militantly in favour of total open borders, an utterly insane policy, and even Marxists seem to be militantly in favour of unending mass immigration too.
Unfortunately, these things aren’t very popular amongst the working class (see here, here, here, and here).
The only apparent response from Marxists to this is to live in a fantasy world and pretend that these working class opinions don’t exist or working class people have been “duped.” That is not the case, however, and open borders impose severe economic, social and cultural problems.
Even worse, most mainstream left-wing labour parties and Social democratic parties – taken over by middle class cosmopolitans obsessed with neoliberalism and cultural leftism – are in favour of unending mass immigration too, and so working class voters with concerns about the economic, social and cultural impact of mass immigration have to go to the conservative side of politics to get any traction for their views.
This is a major reason for the rise of Donald Trump, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Sweden Democrats, the Danish People’s Party, the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV), the Freedom Party in Austria, the French National Front, and UKIP.
One of the most stark realities of the populist right parties is this: they have substantial working class support (see Evans and Mellon 2015: 3, 5). In Britain, the working class support for the neoliberal New Labour party imploded in the 1990s and 2000s, and many working class voters went to the conservatives, and then to UKIP (Evans and Mellon 2015: 4), not to the far left.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Evans, Geoffrey and Jon Mellon. 2015. “Working Class Votes and Conservative Losses: Solving the UKIP Puzzle,” Parliamentary Affairs
http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/04/16/pa.gsv005.full
Showing posts with label Marxists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marxists. Show all posts
Sunday, March 13, 2016
Monday, March 7, 2016
A Simple Challenge to Marxists on the Theory of Wage Determination in Volume 1 of Capital
To the Marxists everywhere, my simple challenge:
If not, and you think that Marx’s view was that wages tend towards the value of the maintenance and reproduction of labour (and, yes, this was Marx’s view: see here and here), then you need to explain the data on the soaring real wage in capitalism over the past 160 years.
The data in de Zwart et al. (2014) provide a useful summary of the long-run trend in modern capitalism, but for the real wages of building labourers from the 1820s to the 2000s. They provide decadal averages of the real wage of building labourers in Western Europe but expressed in the quantity of subsistence baskets of goods that the daily wage buys.
The long-run trend can be seen in the graph below (with data from de Zwart et al. 2014: 80, Table 4.4).
As we can see and beyond any doubt, real wages for building labourers have soared in the long run. Similar trends are apparent for other skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers, and for the average real wage, despite short-term regressive periods such as the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the stagnation to some extent in real wages in the neoliberal period.
Because we are dealing here with 160 years of data and the y axis has such a broad range, the graph above obscures the rising real wage in the 19th century.
We can see the 19th century trend in the graph below (with data again from de Zwart et al. 2014: 80, Table 4.4).
So even in the 19th century under gold standard capitalism the real wages of building labourers in Western Europe in terms of the number of subsistence baskets of goods was soaring.
Despite Marx’s theory, wages were not tending towards the value of the maintenance and reproduction of labour, which is clearly a type of subsistence wage.
As I argued here, under the logic of Marx’s own theory (if we accept for the sake of argument the concept of surplus labour value) but contrary to what Marx himself argued, capitalism actually has had a historical long-run tendency to reduce the rate of exploitation. One cheer for capitalism!
BIBLIOGRAPHY
de Zwart, Pim, van Leeuwen, Bas and Jieli van Leeuwen-Li. 2014. “Real Wages since 1820,” in Jan Luiten van Zanden, Joerg Baten, Marco Mira d’Ercole, Auke Rijpma, Conal Smith and Marcel Timmer (eds.), How was Life?: Global Well-Being since 1820. OECD Publishing, Paris. 73–86.
Is your view that Marx’s theory of wage determination in volume 1 of Capital that real wages in capitalism can and will rise above the value of the maintenance and reproduction of labour, and in the long run will keep rising, vastly improving the living standards of workers?If you say “yes,” then my refutation here of Marx’s view of a rising rate of exploitation in capitalism (from increasing surplus value extracted from workers) is vindicated.
If not, and you think that Marx’s view was that wages tend towards the value of the maintenance and reproduction of labour (and, yes, this was Marx’s view: see here and here), then you need to explain the data on the soaring real wage in capitalism over the past 160 years.
The data in de Zwart et al. (2014) provide a useful summary of the long-run trend in modern capitalism, but for the real wages of building labourers from the 1820s to the 2000s. They provide decadal averages of the real wage of building labourers in Western Europe but expressed in the quantity of subsistence baskets of goods that the daily wage buys.
The long-run trend can be seen in the graph below (with data from de Zwart et al. 2014: 80, Table 4.4).
As we can see and beyond any doubt, real wages for building labourers have soared in the long run. Similar trends are apparent for other skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers, and for the average real wage, despite short-term regressive periods such as the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the stagnation to some extent in real wages in the neoliberal period.
Because we are dealing here with 160 years of data and the y axis has such a broad range, the graph above obscures the rising real wage in the 19th century.
We can see the 19th century trend in the graph below (with data again from de Zwart et al. 2014: 80, Table 4.4).
So even in the 19th century under gold standard capitalism the real wages of building labourers in Western Europe in terms of the number of subsistence baskets of goods was soaring.
Despite Marx’s theory, wages were not tending towards the value of the maintenance and reproduction of labour, which is clearly a type of subsistence wage.
As I argued here, under the logic of Marx’s own theory (if we accept for the sake of argument the concept of surplus labour value) but contrary to what Marx himself argued, capitalism actually has had a historical long-run tendency to reduce the rate of exploitation. One cheer for capitalism!
BIBLIOGRAPHY
de Zwart, Pim, van Leeuwen, Bas and Jieli van Leeuwen-Li. 2014. “Real Wages since 1820,” in Jan Luiten van Zanden, Joerg Baten, Marco Mira d’Ercole, Auke Rijpma, Conal Smith and Marcel Timmer (eds.), How was Life?: Global Well-Being since 1820. OECD Publishing, Paris. 73–86.
Thursday, February 18, 2016
American Socialism and Mass Immigration
It’s surprising how many people have forgotten what the radical American left used to believe about this issue.
At a famous Socialist Congress that occurred in Chicago in 1910, American socialists adopted the following resolution:
A fundamental point: one of the major reasons why wages are so high in the West is that historically we have enjoyed a high degree of labour market protectionism, certainly after the late 19th century. That is to say, national borders stop immigration of huge quantities of cheap labour, so that Western labour scarcity helps to bid up the price of labour and hence real wages. This is just another example of how pure free trade and completely free movement of people from the Third World to the West are dangerous ideas largely contrary to the real world history of Western capitalism. (On a related point, a recent Bank of England working paper argues that years of mass immigration into Britain has tended to hold down real wages for semi- and unskilled British service workers forced to compete for jobs; see Nickell and Saleheen 2015).
This issue is extremely topical. In Germany (although admittedly the full details are not yet clear) there are plans afoot to create about 100,000 subsidised jobs in which private businesses may be able to pay wages as little as €1 an hour to employ migrants and have the rest of the minimum wage subsidised by the German government (see here). In other words: if you are a domestic unskilled or low-skilled German worker, your chances of getting a job will fall off a cliff as businesses can employ migrants for 1 euro an hour – even while German taxpayers dole out corporate welfare to private employers. Is that not a type of class war on the German working class? Is this not a recipe for driving ordinary German voters to the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party?
So where are all the open borders Marxists on this issue?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carlton, Frank Tracy. 1911. The History and Problems of Organized Labor. D.C. Heath, Boston.
Nickell, Stephen and Jumana Saleheen. 2015. “The Impact of Immigration on Occupational Wages: Evidence from Britain,” Bank of England Staff Working Paper No. 574, 18 December 2015
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Pages/workingpapers/2015/swp574.aspx
At a famous Socialist Congress that occurred in Chicago in 1910, American socialists adopted the following resolution:
“The Socialist party of the United States favors all legislative measures tending to prevent the immigration of strike breakers and contract laborers, and the mass importation of workers from foreign countries, brought about by the employing classes for the purpose of weakening the organization of American labor and of lowering the standard of life of the American workers.” (Carlton 1911: 352).Amongst these American socialists were many Marxists or reformist Marxists, but these days Marxists seem to be militantly in favour of open borders.
A fundamental point: one of the major reasons why wages are so high in the West is that historically we have enjoyed a high degree of labour market protectionism, certainly after the late 19th century. That is to say, national borders stop immigration of huge quantities of cheap labour, so that Western labour scarcity helps to bid up the price of labour and hence real wages. This is just another example of how pure free trade and completely free movement of people from the Third World to the West are dangerous ideas largely contrary to the real world history of Western capitalism. (On a related point, a recent Bank of England working paper argues that years of mass immigration into Britain has tended to hold down real wages for semi- and unskilled British service workers forced to compete for jobs; see Nickell and Saleheen 2015).
This issue is extremely topical. In Germany (although admittedly the full details are not yet clear) there are plans afoot to create about 100,000 subsidised jobs in which private businesses may be able to pay wages as little as €1 an hour to employ migrants and have the rest of the minimum wage subsidised by the German government (see here). In other words: if you are a domestic unskilled or low-skilled German worker, your chances of getting a job will fall off a cliff as businesses can employ migrants for 1 euro an hour – even while German taxpayers dole out corporate welfare to private employers. Is that not a type of class war on the German working class? Is this not a recipe for driving ordinary German voters to the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party?
So where are all the open borders Marxists on this issue?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carlton, Frank Tracy. 1911. The History and Problems of Organized Labor. D.C. Heath, Boston.
Nickell, Stephen and Jumana Saleheen. 2015. “The Impact of Immigration on Occupational Wages: Evidence from Britain,” Bank of England Staff Working Paper No. 574, 18 December 2015
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Pages/workingpapers/2015/swp574.aspx
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