barnhart wrote: ↑Tue Nov 08, 2022 7:16 am
I would guess a modern Marxist might respond by pointing out the categories of
"proletariat" and "bourgeoisie" are not immutable but rather descriptive. People who act in ways that oppress are oppressive and those who are oppressed are not by definition "good", just oppressed.
Perhaps, "Good" and "Bad" as we understand them are nonsensical to a materialist and our attempt to translate the 'Oppressor-Oppressed' dialectic into our moral categories is a fundamental category error. I am curious though about your first statement, the part I bolded. You may be perfectly right, however I have always understood the Marxist categories of "proletariat" and "bourgeoisie", to in fact be something close to immutable. Indeed, Neto's anecdote about the Kulaks, which maps with quite a bit that I've read on other Marxist-inspired regimes, seems to suggest that Marxists see membership in the bourgeoisie class as a kind of indelible stain or 'original sin' that can never really be gotten rid of - even after reeducation. There's a quote in my head from Lenin I think but I'll be darned if I can find it that goes something like this: "Tell me a person's class, and I will tell you what kind of person they are." I may have made that up - but I am pretty that comes from one of the Marxist lights from last century.
barnhart wrote: ↑Tue Nov 08, 2022 7:16 am
Marxism has to some extent fallen victim to it's own success, we no longer live in a dickensian dystopia of unregulated industrialization capitalism where the masses are pressed to the knife edge of poverty because we chose (Marxist inspired) regulation instead. Now that we have integrated rights and respect for labor into the economy, we have more freedom to evaluate the productive and expansive nature of consolidated capital.
I wonder about this thought as well - inasmuch as I have always understood the labor/economic reforms of last century to be spurned by doctrinaire Marxists. Lenin for instance, has this to say about trade-unionism:
To belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology; for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism, and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy. - Lenin
I was also immediately reminded of my favorite (tongue-in-cheek) socialist, historicist; Howard Zinn. In his polemical "
A People's History of the United States" he suggested that the so-called Progressive reforms were nothing more than the "system" or might we say the bourgeoisie, self-correcting to stave off something like a socialist revolution and that the true socialists of the era despised the do-gooder Progressives and their reforms that were fundamentally conservative in scope and effect:
True, this was the "Progressive Period," the start of the Age of Reform; but it was a reluctant reform, aimed at quieting the popular risings, not making fundamental changes.
What gave it the name "Progressive" was that new laws were passed. Under Theodore Roosevelt, there was the Meat Inspection Act, the Hepburn Act to regulate railroads and pipelines, a Pure Food and Drug Act. Under Taff, the Mann-Elkins Act put telephone and telegraph systems under the regulation of the Interstate Commerce Commission. In Woodrow Wilson's presidency, the Federal Trade Commission was introduced to control the growth of monopolies, and the Federal Reserve Act to regulate the country's money and
banking system. Under Taft were proposed the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, allowing a graduated income tax, and the Seventeenth Amendment, providing for the election of Senators directly by popular vote instead of by the state legislatures, as the
original Constitution provided. Also at this time, a number of states passed laws regulating wages and hours, providing for safety inspection of factories and compensation for injured workmen.
It was a time of public investigations aimed at soothing protest...
Robert Wiebe sees in the Progressive movement an attempt by the system to adjust to changing conditions in order to achieve more stability. "Through rules with impersonal sanctions, it sought continuity and predictability in a world of endless change. It assigned far greater power to government . .. and it encouraged the centralization of authority." Harold Faulkner concluded that this new emphasis on strong government was for the benefit of "the most powerful economic groups."
Gabriel Kolko calls it the emergence of "political capitalism," where the businessmen took firmer control of the political system because the private economy was not efficient enough to forestall protest from below. The businessmen, Kolko says, were not opposed to the new reforms; they initiated them, pushed them, to stabilize the capitalist system in a time of uncertainty and trouble.
For instance, Theodore Roosevelt made a reputation for himself as a "trust-buster" (although his successor, Taft, a "conservative," while Roosevelt was a "Progressive," launched more antitrust suits than did Roosevelt). In fact, as Wiebe points out, two of J. P. Morgan's men Elbert Gary, chairman of U.S. Steel, and George Pcrkins, who would later become a campaigner for Roosevelt-"arranged a general understanding with Roosevelt by which . . . they would cooperate in any investigation by the Bureau of Corporations in return for a guarantee of their companies' legality." They would do this through private negotiations with the President. "A gentleman's agreement between reasonable people," Wiebe says, with a bit of sarcasm.
The panic of 1907, as well as the growing strength of the Socialists, Wobblies, and trade unions, speeded the process of reform. According to Wiebe: "Around 1908 a qualitative shift in outlook occurred among large numbers of these men of authority.. . ." The emphasis was now on "enticements and compromises." It continued with Wilson, and "a great many reformminded citizens indulged the illusion of a progressive fulfillment."
What radical critics now say of those reforms was said at the time (1901) by the Bankers' Magazine: "As the business of the country has learned the secret of combination, it is gradually subverting the power of the politician and rendering him subservient to its
purposes. . .."
The Progressive movement, whether led by honest reformers like Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin or disguised conservatives like Roosevelt (who was the Progressive party candidate for President in 1912), seemed to understand it was fending off socialism. The Milwaukee Journal, a Progressive organ, said the conservatives "fight socialism blindly . .. while the Progressives fight it intelligently and seek to remedy the abuses and conditions upon which it thrives."
It is hard to say how many Socialists saw clearly how useful reform was to capitalism, but in 1912, a left-wing Socialist from Connecticut, Robert LaMonte, wrote: "Old age pensions and insurance against sickness, accident and unemployment are cheaper, are better business than jails, poor houses, asylums, hospitals." He suggested that progressives would work for reforms, hut Socialists must make only "impossible demands," which would reveal the limitations of the reformers.
Did the Progressive reforms succeed in doing what they intended- stabilize the capitalist system by repairing its worst defects, blunt the edge of the Socialist movement, restore some measure of class peace in a time of increasingly bitter clashes between capital and labor? To some extent, perhaps.
All that is to ask, were the reforms Marx-inspired or bourgeois attempts to avert Marxism?
Affiliation: Lancaster Mennonite Conference & Honduran Mennonite Evangelical Church
