If Europe rearms by devoting 5 percent of GNP to Defence spending, while simultaneously seeking to make itself self-sufficient in various strategic industries, there is a good case for an expanded public sector with increased central planning. In other words, markets will play a smaller role in allocating investment capital. One could say that the Economy has become more 'Marxist', or 'Fascist', or subject to 'Command'. Is this what Varoufakis is getting at in his recent article for the Guardian titled- 'In an age of failing economies and a populist backlash, I’ll tell you what we need – Marxism'?
A young woman I met recently remarked that it was not so much the existence of pure evil that drove her berserk, but
the fact that she was mentally ill?
rather people or institutions with the capacity to do good who instead ended up damaging humanity.
Evil people have the capacity to do good. Hitler could have worked in a soup kitchen.
Her musing made me think of Karl Marx, whose quarrel with capitalism was precisely that – not so much that it was exploitative but that it dehumanised and alienated us despite being such a progressive force.
Everything could be said to dehumanise and alienate us. Try teaching. It will do your head in. But the same is true of having to write modish nonsense for a living.
Preceding social systems might have been more oppressive or exploitative than capitalism. However, only under capitalism have humans been so fully alienated from our products and environment,
Varoufakis is alienated from his own products- i.e. his shitty books. He is telling us that he writes that nonsense just to pay the bills. Still, as Finance Minister of Greece, he did a lot to ruin the Greek economic environment.
so divorced from our labour, so robbed of even a modicum of control over what we think and do.
Varoufakis has no control over his thoughts. This is because of Capitalism. Had he been lucky enough to be born in North Korea he would be able to control his own brain.
Capitalism, especially after it shifted into its technofeudal phase, turned us all into some version of Caliban or Shylock
Elizabethan Capitalism created both those memorable characters. It was a more feudal age but less technological.
– monads in an archipelago of isolated selves whose quality of life is inversely related to the abundance of gizmos our newfangled machinery produces.
Varoufakis has invented and owns lots of new-fangled machinery. Elon Musk is jealous of him. It isn't the case that Varoufakis is too stupid to be a tech-entrepreneur.
This week, alongside a host of other politicians, writers and thinkers, I will be speaking at the Marxism 2025 festival in London,
which is why he feels so alienated and miserable. He had wanted a Glastonbury gig. All his agent could get for him was some shitty Marxist festival.
and one of the questions that occupies me is the way in which young people today clearly feel this alienation Marx identified.
I'd feel alienated if I was delivering Pizzas I could not myself afford to purchase. But being unemployed might be even more socially isolating and psychologically damaging.
But the backlash against immigrants and identity politics – not to mention the algorithmic distortion of their voices – paralyses them.
Young Greek people want jihadi nutters to become the majority in their country. At the very least, Erdogan should rule their country.
Here Marx can re-enter with advice on how to overcome this paralysis – good advice that lies buried under the sands of time.
Marx was buried till Lenin came to power. It was Leninism which gave his stupid shite international currency.
Take the argument that minorities living in the west should assimilate lest we end up a society of strangers.
As opposed to a Province of the Caliphate?
When Marx was 25, he read a book by Otto Bauer, a thinker he respected,
because he was as stupid as shit.
making the case that to qualify for citizenship, German Jews should renounce Judaism.
His father had done so. He himself was baptized at the age of 6.
Marx was livid. Though the young Marx had no time for Judaism, indeed for any religion, his passionate demolition of Bauer’s argument is a sight for sore eyes: “Does the standpoint of political emancipation give the right to demand from the Jew the abolition of Judaism and from man the abolition of religion? … Just as the state evangelizes when … it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, so the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civic rights.”
Marx found it safer to make his demands from exile. Acting politically may mean having to run the fuck away from the authorities.
The trick that Marx is teaching us here is how to combine a commitment to the religious freedom of Jews, Muslims, Christians etc with the wholesale rejection of the presumption that, in a class society, the state can represent the general interest.
That rejection may involve running the fuck away from your country. States do solve collective action problems in the general interest. Some crazy people may say 'the State is very evil. The Post Office is actually just a cover for a paedophile ring.'
Yes, Jews, Muslims, people of faiths that we may not share – or even much like – must be emancipated immediately. Yes, women, black people and LGBTQ+ people must be granted equal rights well before any socialist revolution appears on the horizon. But freedom will take a lot more than that.
This silly man doesn't know that socialist revolutions appeared long ago. A guy named Stalin closed down a lot of Churches and Mosques and Synagogues and killed plenty of religious people. Stalin recriminalized homosexuality in 1934.
Shifting to the topic of immigrant workers suppressing the wages of local workers, another minefield for today’s younger people, a letter Marx sent in 1870 to two associates in New York City offers brilliant clues on how to deal not only with the Nigel Farages of the world but also with some leftists who have bitten the anti-immigration bait.
Marx persuaded the Americans to get rid of Jim Crow- right?
In his letter, Marx fully acknowledges that American and English employers were purposely exploiting cheap Irish immigrant labour,
Germans became the largest immigrant group.
pitting them against native-born workers and weakening labour solidarity. But for Marx it was self-defeating for trade unions to turn against the Irish immigrants and espouse anti-immigration narratives. No, the solution was never to banish immigrant workers but to organise them.
This would happen anyway, if workers could afford to pool their savings to create a 'strike fund'. This is a bargaining problem. If you don't have a threat point, you lose. Another way forward is to mobilise public opinion and make 'sweated labour' a 'repugnancy market' which can be curbed by legislation. If demand for labour is inelastic, workers can gain higher real wages or improved working conditions. This can create a virtuous circle of rising productivity and prosperity.
And if the problem is the weakness of the unions,
because labour demand is elastic
or fiscal austerity,
because tax revenue is insufficient and borrowing will create a 'crowding out' problem such that tax revenue falls in future years.
then the solution can never be to scapegoat immigrant workers.
Scapegoating is not a solution. But reducing labour supply can lead to higher real wages if demand is inelastic.
Speaking of trade unions, Marx also has some splendid advice for them. Yes, it is crucial to boost wages to reduce worker exploitation. But let us not fall for the fantasy of fair wages. The only way to render the workplace fair is to do away with an irrational system based on the strict separation of those who work but do not own and the tiny minority who own but do not work.
Very true. Why are retired people getting money from their pension funds which own shares in companies? Only workers should get money from the enterprise. The shareholders and the lenders should get nothing.
In his words: “Trade unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital.
They can chase away enterprises. Those who want to work can go and do so elsewhere. Hopefully, they will send remittances.
[But] [t]hey fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of also trying to change it.”
by killing the golden goose. The problem with running a trade union is that you can't collect union dues if everybody is on strike or the factories have closed down.
Change it into what? A new corporate structure based on the principle of one-employee-one-share-one vote
In which case the firm will cease to 'internalize externalities'. Everything will be outsourced. Thus Musk would be the contracted by Tesla to supply managerial services for hundreds of millions of dollars. Each janitor will be contracted to supply janitorial services for fifty thousand dollars a year.
– the kind of agenda that can truly inspire youngsters who crave freedom both from statism and from corporations driven by the bottom lines of private equity firms or an absent owner who may not even know he or she owns part of the firm they work for.
Youngsters will be very happy to learn that grandpa and grandma will no longer get a pension because their Pension fund now owns nothing. The problem here is that Institutional Investors will have sold out and invested elsewhere if they fear that a Socialist Revolution is around the corner.
Last, Marx’s freshness shines through when we try to make sense of the technofeudal world that big tech, along with big finance and our states, has surreptitiously encased us in.
There speaks the voice of paranoia. Government agents surreptitiously enter our houses at night and drain us of our precious bodily essence through aggravated acts of fellatio and cunnilingus.
To understand why this is a form of technofeudalism, something much worse than surveillance capitalism, we need to think as Marx would have of our smartphones, tablets etc.
They are a continuation of improvements in communications technology which date back to the invention of writing, printing, the post office, the telegraph, etc.
To see them as a mutation of capital – or “cloud capital” – that directly modifies our behaviour.
just as clothes and cars and cats modify our behaviour.
To grasp how mind-bending scientific breakthroughs, fantastical neural networks and imagination-defying AI programs created a world where, while privatisation and private equity asset-strip all physical wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset-stripping our brains.
Also your smartphone is sucking you off while you sleep. That's why you feel tired when you wake up.
Only through Marx’s lens can we truly get it: that to own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectively.
No. We must do stupid shit so that China ends up owning everything.
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