A thought-provoking analysis. I never considered myself a Marxist, although some of his observations were correct.
From the article:
Voting is no longer the test of inclusion. What is happening in the rich democracies may be not so much a war between the haves and the have-nots as a war between the socially advantaged and the left-out. No one who lives in poverty would not trade that life for a better one, but what most people probably want is the life they have. They fear losing that more than they wish for a different life, although they probably also want their children to be able to lead a different life if they choose.
Of the features of modern society that exacerbate that fear and threaten that hope, the distribution of wealth may not be the most important. Money matters to people, but status matters more, and precisely because status is something you cannot buy. Status is related to identity as much as it is to income. It is also, unfortunately, a zero-sum game. The struggles over status are socially divisive, and they can resemble class warfare.
This point chimed with me. The issue today is not that the poor are necessarily "starving to death" or living out in the cold. Some are, but the poor and working class in our society generally have some sort of shelter, food, and some measure of modern conveniences (electricity, TV, radio, phones). Public education is available to all, and most people know how to read and write, if only at a rudimentary level.
In Marx's time, they had children working in factories, where beatings and other cruelties were the order of the day. Many of the worst abuses of the era have since been outlawed and roundly condemned by the West.
But there is some truth to the idea that social inclusion and status are also important in our society, possibly even more so than mere basic sustenance. With mass media and communications technologies, people become more keenly aware of how much they're actually missing. It's not a question of "having" or "not having" stuff, but more a matter of being accepted and included in society as a true "equal."
Ryan, in his book on Marx, makes an observation that Marx himself might have made. “The modern republic,” he says, “attempts to impose political equality on an economic inequality it has no way of alleviating.” This is a relatively recent problem, because the rise of modern capitalism coincided with the rise of modern democracies, making wealth inequality inconsistent with political equality. But the unequal distribution of social resources is not new. One of the most striking points Piketty makes is that, as he puts it, “in all known societies in all times, the least wealthy half of the population has owned virtually nothing,” and the top ten per cent has owned “most of what there is to own.”
So, the disparities between the rich and poor are nothing new, although our political ideals of democracy, liberty, and civil rights
are relatively new. The article noted elsewhere that back in previous eras, the social and political order in society was mainly religiously-derived, dominated by the belief that people are born into whatever status they are in society. The disparities and inequities were chalked up to "God's will" and left at that.
But with the rise of modern democracies and ideals of political equality becoming the norm, it is presumed that there are no longer any artificial barriers to wealth and power. Many of the notions of "individualism" also came about during this time, with the implication that each individual is responsible for his/her own destiny. A common argument used these days is that it's the poor's own fault that they are poor, since we supposedly live in a land of limitless opportunities and roads to success. The view suggests that it's up to each individual to better oneself and take advantage of this limitless opportunity, and if they don't, it's their own fault.
I think this line from the movie
Goodfellas sums up the attitude of modern society and its notions of "equality" (edited for swearing):
"For us to live any other way was nuts. Uh, to us, those goody-good people who worked [lousy] jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, and worried about their bills, were dead. I mean, they were suckers. They had no [testicles]. If we wanted something, we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again."
And if the cops, judges, and politicians are all on the take, then this is the society we have.
This is probably not true of tribal societies, and it does not seem to have been true of the earliest known democratic state, Periclean Athens (at least, for the citizens). But inequality has been with us for a long time. Industrial capitalism didn’t reverse it in the nineteenth century, and finance capitalism is not reversing it in the twenty-first. The only thing that can reverse it is political action aimed at changing systems that seem to many people to be simply the way things have to be. We invented our social arrangements; we can alter them when they are working against us. There are no gods out there to strike us dead if we do.
The conclusion here makes sense, in that political action can override and change systems that some people assume to be "sacrosanct." We have to take the view that nothing is sacrosanct, that we humans control our own destiny, and no outside, supernatural force is going to stop us (or help us, for that matter). If capitalists like Henry Hill believe they can just take whatever they want, then there can't be anything wrong with taking it back from them.
