The Ghosts of Karl Marx and Edward Abbey

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Monthly Review, March 2005
The Ghosts of Karl Marx and Edward Abbey
by Michael D. Yates

Michael D. Yates is associate editor of Monthly Review. For many years he 
taught economics at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. He is the 
author of Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global System 
(2004), Why Unions Matter (1998), and Longer Hours and Fewer Jobs: 
Employment and Unemployment in the United States (1994), all published by 
Monthly Review Press.
	
My wife Karen and I were on the road, traveling around the United States, 
for 150 days. We left Portland, Oregon on April 30, 2004, and over the next 
five months, we drove about 9,000 miles, through sixteen states. We visited 
thirteen national parks, seven national monuments, and towns large and 
small. We walked on streets and hiked on trails; we talked to people; we 
read local newspapers and watched local television stations; we shopped in 
local markets; and we observed as much as we could the economics, politics, 
and ecology in the places we stayed. What follows are some of my impressions.

The ghosts of Karl Marx and Edward Abbey haunt the contemporary United 
States. Marx needs no introduction to readers of this magazine, but perhaps 
Abbey does. Edward Abbey was born in 1927 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, a small 
town about thirty miles from where I was born. He spent some of his youth 
on a hardscrabble farm in the nearby tiny village of Home, Pennsylvania, 
but he lived most of his adult life in the desert and canyon country of the 
Southwest. He was a novelist, essayist, poet, and a radical 
environmentalist. Among his best works are Desert Solitaire, an account of 
a year he spent as a park ranger at Arches National Monument (now a 
national park) in Moab, Utah, and The Monkey Wrench Gang, the novel which 
inspired a generation of militant environmentalists.

Marx argued that capitalist societies tended to exhibit poles of wealth and 
misery, with each pole tightly connected to the other. This prediction has 
been dismissed by mainstream thinkers, who argue that while there might 
have been some truth to it in capitalism?s early years, the advanced 
capitalist countries have shown that all boats tend to rise on the tide of 
the system?s incredible economic growth. However, if we look at the United 
States today, nearly 140 years after the onset of full-scale capitalism in 
the 1870s, we see that Marx?s prediction still has a lot of life in it.

Marx was speaking of relative misery, that is, how those at the bottom 
compared to those at the top. Workers create profit by their labor, and the 
capitalists take this profit because they own the workplaces. If the 
workers are not organized, employers will squeeze more and more profit from 
their labor, and the workers will become relatively worse off over time. 
Growing inequality is therefore the consequence of uncontested employer 
power. Other things being equal, there is no limit to rising inequality 
except the natural limits imposed by the inability of workers to minimally 
sustain themselves. Of course, if workers are organized, both at their 
workplaces and politically, they can and have placed social limits on the 
growth of inequality.

Today, the power of capital in the United States is more and more 
uncontested. Labor unions continue to hemorrhage members, and they exert a 
very limited power politically. The state is more firmly in the hands of 
employers than it has been in seventy years. Property rights reign supreme 
in the law, and capital is pretty much free to do what it wants, whether 
that means firing workers trying to organize unions or moving operations to 
a low-wage venue in another country. Workers are becoming more insecure, 
without allies or organizations, and slowly but surely losing the social 
securities won by hard struggle many years ago.

The facts are readily available to show that relative misery is growing in 
the United States. We now have reasonably good data on the distribution of 
household income going back to 1913 (A household is a physical space in 
which people live, excluding institutions such as nursing homes and 
prisons). By 2000, the income share of the richest 1 percent of households 
was about 20 percent, its highest level since just before to the Great 
Depression. It has been rising since the mid-1970s when it was just half 
this high. The rise in the share of the richest .01 percent (a hundredth of 
the richest 1 percent) has risen even more dramatically, from well under 1 
percent of total household income in the mid-1970s to a little over 3 
percent today. Much the same can be said about the distribution of 
wealth?people?s stock of assets as opposed to the yearly flows of income 
they receive. The richest 1 percent of households own a third of the 
nation?s wealth, while the bottom 80 percent have just 16 percent, and this 
gap has been growing for at least two decades, although it diminished 
during the recent stock market crash.

full: http://www.monthlyreview.org/0305yates.htm

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