Monday, 6 July 2009

WHAT IF THE DIALECTIC IS BAD FOR THE PROLETARIAT

Marx's description of the dialectic in history is a not very heavily disguised lift from Hegel. It sounds persuasive. At any momemnt a society is defined by relations between classes. But these classes are not static (marx's real insight.) There's always one on the way up and one on the way down in the post-Classical western world. Feudalism is run by a warrior aristocracy. Under the pressure of a rising class of merchants who acquire money, feudal society gives way to bourgeois society run by capitalists.
Conrary to what his vulgar critics think, Marx LOVES capitalists. They break up the old stagnant order, generate huge investment and progress and are what makes the next step possible.
For Marx, likke most millenarians, that next step is the final step. It is the rise of the proletariat which at some point is powerful and resentful enough to overthrow the capitalist system.
But suppose the dialectic is different. Suppose there is a new class that Marx had not thought about which will actually be the next to take over.
One weakness in Marx's view is that he doesn't really take on board technological progress as opposed to capitalists using technology. This is less excusable for him than it it for Adam Smith writing over 50 years before. And it's a huge gap.
Because a great source of wealth and power comes from the intellectual property which generates Microsoft and the biotech companies and the royalties which Paul McCartney gets every time somebody legally gets a copy of his music or Manchester United earn on a replica shirt.
These people, not the working class have been the big winners of the past 20 years. For the fragmnentation of the production process means that you can design jeans in Paris, make them in China and sell them in New York. All those process except the design have been commodified. The spread of the WTO has meant that counties with cheap labour have decided to respect international agreements on intellectual property. And the US has seen an unholy alliance of lawyers and inventors spread the concept of intellectual property much further than ever before.
So the new class are the inventors and the enforcers, ticking up money every time anyone buys their wares.
MORE to come on this