Vejas Liulevicius: evaluation

Transcript context

…Despotic inroads against property. Did he elaborate on the despotic inroads? Dispossession, dispossession of the middle classes and of the bourgeoisie. In his model, humanity is never standing still, right? So he’d probably argue in this dynamic vision of how history unfolds that there’s always conflict and it’s always moving, propelling history forward towards its predestined ending. In the way he saw this climax was that as things did not stay the same, the condition of the working class was constantly getting worse and hence their revolutionary potential was growing. And at the same time, the expropriators, the bourgeoisie, were also facing diminishing returns as they competed against one another with more and more wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and more and more elements of what had been the middle class detached from the ruling class and being pressed down into the working class. For Marx, this is really a key part. I mean, it’s a key part of this whole ratchet effect that’s going to produce this final historical explosion. And in German, the word given to that process was verehlendung, which is very evocative. Elend means misery, so it’s the growing misery. When this gets translated into English, the results are never quite as evocative or satisfactory. The words that get used are immiseration or pauperization, meaning more and more people are being turned into paupers. But for Marx, that prediction is really key. And even in his own lifetime, there were already hints that in fact, if you looked sociologically at the really developed working classes in places like Great Britain or Germany, that process was not playing out as he had expected. In fact, although there had been enormous dislocations and tremendous suffering in the early chaotic, Wild West stages of capitalism and of industrialization, there had been reform movements as well. And there had been unions which had sought to carve out rules and agreements with employers for how the conditions under which workers labored might be ameliorated. Moreover, the middle class rather than dwindling and dwindling, seemed to actually be strengthening and growing in numbers or the appearance of new kinds of people like white-collar workers or technical experts. So already in Marx’s own lifetime, and then especially in what follows Marx’s lifetime, this becomes a real problem because it puts a stick into the spokes of this particular historical prediction. Can you speak to this realm of ideas, which is fascinating, this battle of big ideas in the 19th century. What are the ideas that were swimming around here?…

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