MARX AND THE MIDDLE CLASS

CONTINUING THE MARX STORY: CAPITALIST CLASS STRUCTURE

Once the bourgeois revolution takes place, a new class structure emerges with exactly the same issues as the last one. Note first that the bourgeois revolution did not help the lowest class at all. The peasants were still peasants after 1789, although their precise role in society was to change drastically during the course of the nineteenth century.  This lowest class had to be accommodated in Marx' vision, or he would have had to accept two non-revolutionary perspectives that he had to reject. On one hand he had to reject the Hobbesian/conservative approach which argues that class conflict is an inevitable, eternal feature of all social orders. 

Social and political life is an endless struggle  for power between haves and have nots, and there are no final accommodations. The powerful will generally prevail and in a sense should prevail because the only law of order in human groups is that superior power prevails. 

Power may be given to the people but the conservative has a suspicion that the people in general will misuse power, because they lack the ambition and talent of the natural born leaders, whose hard work and genius pushes society forward, creating opportunities for all. Societies run by the people tend to privilege averageness, focusing on giving everyone roughly the same irrespective of how hard individuals work and how much they contribute. This, in the eyes of the conservative, leads to a sluggish, less productive economy and an artificially egalitarian society that will inevitably falter, even for those who think they benefit from it. Society, for the conservative, should be run by the naturally powerful, not by the people, and class divisions are a necessary corollary 

The other view Marx has to  reject is bourgeois, what we would call liberal, progressivism. This view believes that class conflicts will ultimately be resolved, or at least softened, by a continual mutual progress by all classes. Classes are not ultimately enemies; their interests can converge and, in a democratic give and take in which all groups have equal access to the political process and thus to power, all segments of society will be able to voice their positions and be properly rewarded. Progress for all comes from mutual political cooperation and a willingness to compromise.

These are rough approximations of the positions that most of you occupy.  Marx rejects both because each one, in different ways, accepts that there are class distinctions but rejects the idea that this structure has an internal dynamic that requires a resolution through revolution. Both conservatives and liberals believe that class structure can be worked with. The conservatives believe that divisions are natural and inevitable and that as long as the 'better' people can stay in control, things will go well for everybody. Liberals believe that divisions are acceptable and that a shared political process allows people with different interests to meet their needs without denying or neglecting those of others.

Marx thinks that what both groups of theorists get wrong is that they assume that one can have a just idea of what different classes need when one is a member of a certain class. Especially those who belong to a dominant class deceive themselves into thinking that they understand their position vis a vis the other classes. But Marx believes that such accurate understanding is impossible, that one of the salient features of class membership is that one gets caught up entirely into the ideology of one's class.

Let's shift focus a little, to an analysis of the new class structure. Once the nobility are gone, there are two classes, the bourgeois and the workers, or proletariat. Here is how the set-up works. We have entered the industrial age. The fall of the nobility coincides roughly  with the rise of what Marx calls capitalism. Capitalism means a social/class structure in which class divisions are driven by the bourgeois' dedication to the accumulation of capital. Capital is in essence frozen labor, the time of a worker's life trapped in commodities, or objects produced.  

Let's  analyze this a bit: when a farmer grows a crop, say corn, the ears of corn represent the effort the farmer had to invest to grow those ears. When he sells the corn, or gives it to his lord or landlord, he receives a value for it. This sometimes in permission to keep occupying his farm. It is sometimes represented by cash. Cash, capital in its 'purest' form, stands in for what the farmer has put into growing the corn. The cash he gets represents what we think, or what the market thinks, the corn, and by extension, the farmer's labor, and time, are worth. 

Thus if a worker gets paid $10 an hour, this means that one hour of his life is worth that, has that value. If Manny Ramirez makes $15 a season, for 200 games, including preseason and  playoff games, this means he gets paid $75,000 per game. If an average game lasts 3 hours and Manny has to arrive 2 hours early, and leaves an hour after the game, for a total of six hours, Manny is pulling down $12, 500 per hour. He makes, in one game, more than most Americans make in a year. This is what he is worth in a capitalist system – over $200 per minute. 

How does this all work? Well, the nub of capitalism is that unlike the warrior/priest system, the capitalist wants to maximize profit, or create as much capital as possible. Rather than simply taking part of what the farmer grows, as the nobleman does, the middle class capitalist wants to get the farmer's crop so he can resell it. The dynamic here is different. The capitalist’s intention is not to consume and spend what the farmer gives him but to maximize the value of that product by reselling it for a higher price than he gave the farmer, thereby adding value to the corn. The capitalist’s job is simple: he has to buy the corn from the farmer for less than he can sell it for. When he does this by acting as a middleman he essentially ‘steals’ some of the farmer’s labor by selling for more than he paid. He pockets this excess, which he calls a commission but which Marx sees as, secretly, the frozen time of the farmer. So, the capitalist relationship is based on a secret form of theft. He always takes a little less than the thing is worth and accumulates the results of this into concentrated value which he can exchange for goods and services.

This whole system and relationship grow more complex and more profitable when the farmer moves into the factory. 

The capitalist owns the factory as well as the equipment in it. Marx calls these the means of production and the characteristic note of capitalism is that the capitalist controls the means of production. In the factory, the worker mixes his labor/time with the machinery and raw materials and makes products that belong to the factory owner. For doing this he is paid a wage. But for the factory to survive the wage the workers are paid, plus the cost of materials and plant, must all add up to less than the total amount for which that factory’s products are sold. This is what we call ‘profit’, and it represents, again, that part of the worker’s time/labor that the owner takes in exchange for allowing the worker to work and earn a wage.

Built into the structure of the capitalist society is the drive to maximize profit; this is what capitalists do, what they see themselves as called to do. Just as the nobles and priests create an ideology that ‘explains’ and justifies their privileged position, so, too, do the capitalists, who saw how the nobles deceived themselves, remain blind to their own self-deception. They tell a story in which they prevail because of hard work and talent, rising above the herd not because they happen to make things the nobles and priests want but because of inherent advantages over their fellows. So they create the ideological myth of their own superiority and invincibility, imagining, as did the nobles, that they represent a natural upper class and that the society they have founded will never change, only get more productive and more capital-rich. 

But just as in the case of the nobles and priests the capitalists are laying the foundations for their own destruction. Their very success, and their ideology, cooperate to doom them, in Marx’ eyes.  How does this work? Well, the capitalist has one thing in view: to maximize profit. So there is an inherent driving dynamic in capitalism, which all of us have seen in our lifetimes. Capitalists are driven to make the most possible product at the least possible cost. This requires that they pay their workers as little as they can get away with, and that they relentlessly pursue every technology that promises to cut labor costs by replacing workers with less expensive and more efficient machinery.

We have all experienced these aspects of capitalism as more and more American corporations offshore services and outsource production, replacing American workers with less expensive people in India, China, Mexico and other countries. As the labor-intensive, well-paid jobs leave they are replaced by lower paid service jobs in which people sell the imported products that they no longer make. 

And when factories remain in this country they are mechanized to the maximum, cutting labor forces to the bone and replacing workers with robots. 

Marx sees a disastrous and destabilizing outcome to these trends. He believed that in capitalist society the owners would, and must, eventually produce goods so efficiently that they would price their workers out of the market for buying those very goods. Marx saw it as an inevitable outcome of capitalism that it reduce its own workers to poverty so that the goods they produced would remain unpurchased - because all the workers who could have purchased them have been so impoverished that they can barely buy enough to survive. So, the capitalists create a system in which production is perfected, technology and social organization are highly developed, and the system cannot survive because its life blood - the selling of products to acquire capital - can no longer happen.