Saturday, April 21, 2018

Marx and the Millennials

Le Monde has an interesting piece on Marx and American Millennials. They note:

Quant à Bernie Sanders, comme le rappelle Jeffrey Isaac, « il ne préconise pas l’abolition de la propriété privée dans les moyens de production, ni l’expropriation des grandes fortunes. Il préconise le démantèlement des grandes banques, la mise en place d’impôts sur le revenu plus progressifs et le subventionnement public des soins de santé et de l’éducation – des choses pour la plupart assez courantes en Europe ». La jeunesse américaine n’est donc probablement pas en train de préparer la révolution, même si Seth Ackerman, de Jacobin, observe malicieusement : « Nos lecteurs et ceux qui se tournent vers le socialisme sont des jeunes gens éduqués, souvent très endettés, qui perdent toutes leurs illusions en arrivant sur le marché du travail. Or Lénine a bien insisté sur l’importance d’une avant-garde éclairée – et précarisée – dans le processus révolutionnaire. »

Marx basically see the world through mid 19th century mercantilism. However so do many Neo-Progressives. However Marx saw the proletariat as compared to the Neo-Progressives who see the "elect" making the decisions for redistribution.

Le Monde does often have great insight especially on American youth. This is worth following. BTW Vox also has an interesting piece as well. As the author notes:

Marx used the labour theory of value to demonstrate that the exploitation of workers is a necessary condition for profits (Yoshihara 2017). The normative term 'exploitation' is justified by the claim that profit arises from a system of domination in which the wealthy, as owners of capital goods, direct the activities and limit the choices of employees (Vrousalis 2013). Domination in this sense could be sustained by an autocratic state acting on behalf of a capitalist class, or through the exercise of market power made possible by limited competition in goodsmarkets. But Marx chose to study a more challenging question: how could the domination of labour by capital take place in a private, perfectly competitive, economy governed by a liberal state? His answer was based on what seems a strikingly modern principal–agent representation of the employer–employee relationship, arising from a conflict of interest over the amount of labour effort performed that could be resolved in an enforceable contract.  Marx stressed that the employer purchases the worker's time on the labour market, not the worker's work. The employee’s supply of effort to the production process is not secured by contract but was rather an “extraction” that “only by misuse could ... have been called any kind of exchange at all” (Marx 1939).