This is an adumbration of Marx's theories. I am just trying to stimulate discussion.
First of all let me put in my hedges and escape clauses by saying that, even though I somewhat frequently re-read the Manifesto and The Poverty of Philosophy, I have not read Das Kapital extensively since I was in high school. I am going to try to do my best here. I am drawing from sources that are not wellsprings of incontrovertible fact, namely memory and third-party analysis. The purpose is not for me to give an insightful analysis of Marx. The purpose is to stimulate my audience to talk about class struggle. Leftists are a self-critical bunch, and I always receive often fierce but sometimes fair criticism from my fellows on the left, particularly liberals and far more criticism than they have the moral or physical courage to leverage at the right, at least to the rightists’ faces. Liberals are often weaklings; weaklings who would rather in-fight than take on the right. But they know I’m basically on their side and not a determined opponent so they don’t shy away from letting me have. As always, it’s welcome—but it’s particularly welcome here.
I’m no expert on Marx, I never have been and never will be. I have been called a Marxist, and have sardonically referred to myself that way, but that is because I use the language of class struggle. I actually find myself much more in sympathy with Bakunin than Marx. In fact, I am in agreement with an instructor of mine that Engels had at least more potential as a scholar than Marx. Had Engels not spent his time, ironically as a capitalist of sorts, trying to support Marx, whose life ironically better resembled the life of the leisure class than that of the proletarian, as a full-time scholar. Were I a member of the International in Marx’s day, that may not have been true. I have the benefit of history, which has demonstrated the problems with Marxism in principle and especially in practice, particularly the peripheral ideas and all the rest surrounding the practice of a dictatorship of the proletariat—which ended up hijacked by Bolsheviks and became a dictatorship per se. But Karl Marx has given me a vocabulary with which to talk about my life, my place in my community, and its place in me, and all the social problems I see there. And for that I am forever in the little swarthy rapscallion’s debt.
When asking a question about the relevance of scholarship from another time and place, it is important to first put things in context, that is discuss the analogies and disanalogies between the times and places.
Marx defined most objects of inquiry in terms of their relations to the means of production. At the time the means of production were industrial machines and were too expensive to be owned by anyone but the wealthy class of capitalists. In our time and place, an advanced post-industrial economy, the means of production are all sorts of things, but primarily the microcomputer and its accoutrements: the scanner, the fax machines, the copier, &tc. These means of production are inexpensive and can be, and are, owned by virtually everyone who’s so interested. The capacity of the means of production is measured by processing power, and lack of access to it is not a problem that disadvantages the working class and middle class.
Still, Marx was politically astute and understood power relations between the dominant and the dominated, at least in his own historical context, quite well. His words are rousing, because they are predicated on something true: that material circumstances do cause ideological development. I think of Hegel as overrated, and am unsympathetic to the notion of a world geist, in addition to the notion of active forces of history or destiny of mankind. The problem is not that these philosophical commitments are holistic, the problem is that they do not identify phenomena which can be found to exist. But basing a true statement on false pretenses, or developing an overly elaborate theory around such a statement, does not render that statement false. And if it is a novel insight, it does not diminish the value of that insight entirely.
Let’s examine Marx’s theories briefly. The workers produce an economic surplus and from that the ruling class are afforded the means to exist in their state as a (to borrow a term from Veblen) leisure class. Marx does not seem to believe that ideas, law, and politics could truly operate as ends in themselves, or that the causal relationship between the thoughts of a society and the prevailing economic conditions could be more complex.
Marx also believes that social revolutions, which are the culmination of class struggle over a period of historical development, are caused by the tensions between an emerging economic framework and an existing institutional superstructure. He does not seem to consider that technological and human advancement in the mode of economic production are possible to a significant degree without altering or conflicting with existing institutional superstructures.
The American economy went from the dominant production economy to the dominant distribution economy, with the primary means of production changing from the industrial machine to the microcomputer, without a revolutionary change in the laws of property rights, taxation, or traditional systems of ownership. The dominant institutional structures, namely the joint-stock corporation and densely bureaucratic government departments, remained basically the same over this period. Changes in the institutional structure have been driven by the increasingly close interactions of the corporations and the governments.
The society did come to be dominated more by the centers of credit and exchange, and the increasing centralization of these private activities was facilitated by government involvement, but during this time the discussion of class struggle was muted. The increasing concentration of wealth into the hands of business executives and financiers occurred during a period of punctuated decline in the talk of "class struggle."
Revolutionary social change on the basis of class struggle should require as a necessary condition a sense of class consciousness, which technological advancements in the means of production have served to diminish. Bakunin seems to be correct that revolutionary social change is more likely to occur in areas of greater economic deprivation.
My treatment of Marx may be unfair, because he offered a theory of the revolutionary possibilities of a class of industrial workers and not a class of service workers. But I believe he intended for his theory to be ahistorical with respect to economic change. He does not seem to anticipate the transition from industrial economies to distribution economies (at least as we know them now).
My conclusion is that Marx as a social theorist is no longer relevant. However, discussions of Marx are productive because they do contain the language of class struggle. Furthermore, though Marx as a constructive social theorist may be an anachronism, Marx’s critique of capitalism remains relevant. Capitalism has led to the commoditization of labor or at least the view of labor and to some extent the resulting treatment of labor as a commodity. Also, as American corporations have become more profitable, the gap between income from profits, rents, and interest to income from wages has grown. Thus capitalists are extracting surplus value from workers at a higher rate. This has caused a sort crisis, though not a revolutionary crisis, as effective demand could not keep pace with production as credit markets tightened after a storm of mortgage and business defaults. We may need the language of class struggle to get the proletariat out of this crisis, which, along with the response to it, has shaken capitalism and American democracy at its foundations--even if only a few people want to talk about it.