Tag: Karl Marx

Does class make you rich, or other way around?

Class determines wealth except when it doesn’t, and thereby falls the Marxian analysis, says Joseph Schumpeter in his 1942 book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

“Obvious and indisputable” facts of history “do not show on the Marxian canvas” because of their “un-Marxian implications.” But Marx can’t ignore the “distant past” if he means to demonstrate class warfare as essential to the human condition. The problem is that

class positions, though in most cases reflected in more or less corresponding economic positions, are more often the cause than the consequence of [economic success]: business achievement is obviously not . . . the only avenue to social eminence and only where it is can ownership of means of production . . . determine a group’s position in the social structure. [italics mine]

In this which-came-first scenario, in other words, economic dominance — owning the means of production — has not always dictated lord-of-the-manner standing.

Moreover, becoming a capitalist (or proletarian) is not a “once for all” phenomenon. This is “not only utterly unrealistic . . . but it misses the salient point about social classes—the incessant rise and fall of individual families into and out of the upper strata.”

Nouveau riche and social climbers we call the up-and-comers, shabby genteel the once-up-now-downers.

“I’ve been rich, I’ve been poor,” said the red-hot-mama songstress. “Rich is better.”

Karl Marx on how people get rich

. . . reminds us of the Obama doctrine, as in (to business moguls) “you didn’t build that,” echoed (then walked back) by Hillary a week ago.

Marx’s definition of “primitive accumulation” of money as what’s achieved by “force, robbery, subjugation of the masses facilitating their expoliation, . . .  admirably tallied with ideas common among intellectuals of all types, says Joseph Schumpeter in his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. .” (Italics added)

Marx “contemptuously rejects the bourgeois nursery tale . . . that some people [become] capitalists by superior intelligence and energy in working and saving.”

He was “well advised to sneer at that story about the good boys [hard-working smarty pants]. To call for a guffaw is no doubt an excellent method of disposing of an uncomfortable truth, as every politician knows to his profit.”

However, “this [alleged] children’s tale . .. tells a good deal” of the truth.” In fact, “nine out of ten” cases of business success are accounted for by “supernnormal intelligence and energy,” says Schumpeter.

He’s worth our attention, writing as he did with flair and basing his analyses on 40 years of reading and thinking. He’s not blowing hard at Marx either. Indeed he defends him from some heavy-duty accusations, of which more later.