I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Wealth, I write about retirement, estate, and long-term care planning. And maybe I throw in a little bit of Marxism.
Each morning as I get up I begin to think about what I might write about. I consider what the category of the day is — Tuesday Book Club? Fun! Thursday Thinker? One of my favorites. Friday Flash, Saturday Reflections, Sunday Planning, or Monday Musings? Easy! Just write about whatever’s on my mind. And on Mondays I have the option of writing about money and investing, if there’s something interesting to cover.
When I get up and first realize it’s Wednesday, I start to drag. I don’t want to write about writing itself or about websites, I think!
Today, an article on Marketwatch about retirement caught my eye. I might write about that, I thought! And thus a new Wednesday category has been bored.
I added that piece about Marxism because as I was setting the new category up, I had a provocative Tweet lurking in my peripheral vision:
This is, of course, exactly what Marx suggested in Das Kapital, his foundational political economy text. In it, he argues that capitalism foundationally depends upon the exploitation of labor, whose unpaid work is the source of surplus value and profit that accrues to those owning capital — the means of production. This ruling class, the bourgeoisie, systematically exploit the working class, the proletariat.
But Marx was writing shortly after the Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), with the first volume of Das Kapital published in 1867. The capitalists in his time owned factories and machinery and buildings. The great financialization had not yet occurred, though of course, there were financial underpinnings to capitalism at that time as well.
According to Marxist economist Michael Roberts, some economists (Marxists among them) sometimes use financialization as a term to identify a “completely new stage in capitalism, in which profits mainly come not from exploitation in production, but from financial expropriation (resembling usury) in circulation.” On this view, according to Roberts, capitalism becomes increasingly unproductive and finance–not capital as Marx said–is the enemy of labor. Roberts appears to disagree with this approach as it “leads to the abandonment of the labor theory of value” and from there to reformist politics (rather than socialist or communist, I assume he means).
In response, the editors of the Monthly Review, in which Roberts’ comments appeared, argue that financialization does not necessarily lead to reformist politics and is an important area of inquiry:
Insofar as it is a central phenomenon in our time, it needs to be taken seriously and be subject to critique. Recognizing the reality of financialization does not contradict the labor theory of value since the latter is essential to understanding the laws of motion of capitalism, both in general and in relation to monopoly-finance capital in our time—which, in our view, is not a new stage of capitalism as understood in Marxian theory, but merely a new phase of monopoly capitalism.
I’m not going to wade into an argument among economists of any stripe, Marxist or otherwise, but I have found my own life more and more dominated over the decades by the financialization of our economy. I’ve lived through multiple crises that arose due to increasing financialization, most especially during the 2008 financial crisis, but also as a chronic pain the need to manage financial assets myself, like everyone must in a society in which retirement is dependent on how you accrue and grow your savings.
Marx suggested that over time the alienation of the proletariat from the fruits of their labor, which instead accrued to the bourgeoisie, would eventually lead to revolution, and then socialism, and finally communism. We’ve seen in China and Russia what a real-world supposed implementation of that looks like (this is nothing like what Marx foresaw, in my understanding).
When I say I’m going to write about Marxism sometimes in my Wednesday Wealth posts I’m not saying I’m becoming a communist or going to argue for the overthrow of the current U.S. political regime.
But I find it a useful entry point for thinking about what it is like to live at the beginning of the third millennium in the (post?) modern world.
The idea that artificial intelligence may lead to massive unemployment while the financial rewards accrue to only those who own data center bonds and artificial intelligence company stock means that maybe we need a new Marxism for the AI era.