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Karl Marx the Visionary?
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1. Class Struggles. After 1850 general economic
prosperity brought a gradual improvement in health and
living standards. However the disparity between the rich
and the poor increased. The rich got richer at a faster rate
than the poor. Among the British ruling elite, the
membership of that class remained remarkably stable. As
wages improved, the workers wanted better and better
wages. The workers began to compare their rates of
increase with that of the upper class. This comparative
social disparity created some feeling that a bigger slice of
the pie should be enjoyed by the very workers whose labor
created such profits. Richard L. Greaves, Robert Zaller,
Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Civilizations of the West (New
York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992), 744.
As Big Business grew bigger and profits mounted, too
many Americans felt they were not sharing sufficiently in
this growth. Two thirds of American workingmen were
receiving less than $12.50 a week in wages, eighty percent
of the people barely subsisted, and it was estimated that
1% of American families owned more than half of the
nation’s wealth. James Munves, A Short Illustrated
History of the United States (New York: Grosset &
Dunlap, 1965), 211.
In 1890, the national wealth was $65,037,091,197. The
United States had 63 million people. 11 million of its 12
million families lived on an average income of $380 a
year. Roger Butterfield, The American Past (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1947), 257.
The bourgeois comprised 15% of the population of the
industrial west. They derived their earnings from capital,
profit, rent, loans and investments. This included
millionaires with servants. Richard L. Greaves, 742, 744.
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2. Capitalism Results. It is especially the emergence of
the new middle class of office and service workers,
supervisors, managers, and technicians that has falsified
Marx’s predictions. He neither foresaw the ascendancy of
this class nor the emergence of fascism, to which under
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certain conditions this class would lend mass support. As
a prophet he proved singularly wrong when he expected
the industrial proletariat to rise against the bourgeoisie.
Instead of rising against it, members of the proletariat have
much preferred to rise into the bourgeoisie or into the
greatly expanded middle class. Henry William Spiegel,
466.
Karl Marx’s view of the growth of the industrial reserve
army of the unemployed gained considerable following
during the protracted period of mass unemployment from
which the world suffered during the Great Depression of
the 1930s. Since then, however, depressions have as a
rule been mild in the advanced countries. Public policies
have evolved that are designed to avert mass
unemployment. Henry William Spiegel, 475.
Karl Marx failed to recognize, however, that the large
corporation, while facilitating the concentration of control,
has at the same time been instrumental in diffusing
property among many small capitalists. Henry William
Spiegel, 475.
3. Wages. The proletariat has in fact not been exposed to
increasing misery. Instead, affluence and leisure have
spread among all classes of society in Western Europe and
North America. Some students of economic development
hold that the gulf between these parts of the world and the
underdeveloped countries has widened as incomes have
increased faster in the former than in the latter. But this is
not what Marx had in mind. His analysis was meant to
apply to class alignments within a given country rather
than to the alignment of poor and rich nations throughout
the world. Henry William Spiegel, 475.
The index of real wages in France increased from 55.5 in
1820 to 100 in 1900 and in Great Britain from 37 in 1790
to 100 in 1913. Because average real wages
approximately doubled, there was a significant rise in the
general standard of living. The majority of the population
of Europe was better off on the eve of the first world war
than they had been before the French Revolution. Editor
Carlo A Cipolla, Professor of Economic History at
University of California at Berkley, The Fontana
Economic History of Europe Volume 3: The Industrial
Revolution, 1700-1914 (Sussex, England: Harvester
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Press/Barnes & Noble, 1976), 176.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, the real
income of workers rose throughout the capitalist world. In
England the average real wage increased rapidly
throughout the 1860s and early 1870s. By 1875 it was 40
percent higher than it had been in 1862. After 10 years in
which wages sagged, they again rose sharply between
1885 and 1900. By 1900, the average real wage was 33
percent higher than in 1875 and 84 percent higher than in
1850. Most of the gains in real wages can be attributed
the advent of mass production techniques that permitted
the prices of many commodities consumed by laborers to
be lowered. As a result of new methods of producing and
labor's greater purchasing power, there was a fundamental
change in patterns of consumption. Workers began to eat
more meats, fruits, and sweets. Mass-produced shoes and
clothing, furniture, newspapers, bicycles, and other new
products came within the reach of many. Unquestionably,
the average worker’s lot improved substantially during the
period. E. K. Hunt, University of Utah, Howard J.
Sherman, University of California, Riverside, Economics:
An Introduction to Traditional and Radical Views (New
York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1990), 133.
4. Big Labor. Through trade agreements, collective
bargaining, political agitation, and if necessary, by strikes,
boycotts, and picketing, these increasingly powerful
organizations of workingmen in all countries strove for
improvements in wages, hours, working conditions, and
industrial security. And not without success." Francis J.
Tschan, The Pennsylvania State College, Harold J.
Grimm, The Ohio State University, J. Duane Squires,
Colby Junior College, Edited by Walter Consuelo
Langsam, Western Civilization: The Decline of Rome to
The Present (Chicago, Illinois: J. B. Lippincott Company,
1947), 1125.
Part of organized labor’s power was to strike. As a
counterbalance to the employer's ability to lockout, or
prevent workers from entering the plant until the
employer's demands were met, the employees could strike.
The workers could refuse to work until their demands
were met. Transportation industries were particularly
vulnerable to strikes. A work stoppage in any major
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sector could paralyze the economy. Richard L. Greaves,
765.
In the 25 years from 1881 to 1906 there occurred some
38,000 strikes and lockouts, involving almost 200,000
establishments and over 9.5 million Workers. Samuel
Eliot Morison, Professor of History at Harvard, And
Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of The American
Republic, Volume Two (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1962), 246.
5. Antitrust. The most obvious effect of monopolies was
to fix prices and wages and eliminate competition. In
theory, the role of the liberal state was to prevent this and
to keep markets free. The Sherman Act of 1890 stated,
"every contract, combination, or conspiracy in restraint of
trade is hereby declared to be illegal.” The Clayton Act of
1914 prohibited any merger or acquisition, horizontal,
vertical or conglomerate that would substantially lessen
competition or threaten monopoly. These firm sounding
pronouncements had little impact on trusts. The great
corporations and their lawyers could outlast federal
litigators and find or buy sympathetic judges and
legislatures to conform with their own interpretation of
their practices. Richard L. Greaves, 739.
In 1890, on the other hand, Congress attempted to restore
competition through passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust
Act, which declared illegal trusts and other combinations
that restrained trade. The U.S. Supreme Court favored
laissez-faire and consistently blocked both federal and
state efforts to regulate private business. The so-called
robber barons and their immense fortunes were practically
unscathed as they exploited the nation’s natural resources
and dominated its economic life. Harvard Sitkoff,
"History of the United States," Grolier Electronic
Publishing, Inc., 1993.
On March 14, 1904, was Northern Securities v. United
States the first of more than thirty antitrust actions begun
by Theodore Roosevelt administration. The Supreme
Court dissolved a holding company formed by means of
stock transaction to control four of the six railway systems
running from the Central states to the Pacific Coast. No
criminal prosecutions followed. Charles van Doren and
Robert McHenry, Webster's Guide to American History
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(Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam Webster, 1967),
347.
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