If only Marxists actually understood Karl Marx

As Zoe Williams points out “late capitalism” is a phrase that seems to be replacing “neoliberal” as the unthinking caricature of the present day over on the left. There being a significant problem with this as an insult, or dismissive, as those using it seem to entirely misunderstand what Marx himself was thinking about when he muttered about capitalism, late or otherwise, and what was necessary before it was replaced:

In late capitalism, you should be grateful to the wealth creators to be paid at all. Plenty of people would do this for free. Experience, if it makes you more expensive, is just wasted overhead. True productivity is when everyone is paid the same minimal amount. Late capitalism is like arguing with a teenager. Its gambit on matters of fairness and dignity is “Why should I?” and its logical endpoint is “robots”. I can’t figure out whom I blame – maybe postmodernists?

Well, yes, something about robots. As Marx himself insisted. Capitalism, in his eyes, was all sorts of things one of them being extremely productive. So much so that at some point so much of production would be automated - robots - that the problem of economic scarcity in supply would be solved. This was a necessary precondition for the arrival of true communism where all could hunt in the morning - or is it afternoon? - and be philosophers in the evening. Because that problem of how to provide for material needs and wants was already solved by having the machines do it all.

Of course, if this does happen, as William Nordhaus pointed out (page 18 here), then wages do not approach zero. Quite the contrary, assume even that the capitalists who own the machines asymptotically approach 100% of all incomes in the economy then even under that condition real wages rise by 200% a year for everyone else.

We don’t, to be honest, think that this killing of economic scarcity is ever going to come to pass, not completely, for there will always be positional goods and human desires at least appear to be unlimited.

On the other hand in terms of human needs - shelter, sustenance and so on, even if not perfectly as yet - we do seem to have got a long way in defeating that economic scarcity. After all, a society devoting quite so many resources to something like critical race theory cannot be said to be entirely bereft of supplies of those more basic needs now, can it? If we were we’d still be striving to fill them instead of expending resources as we do.

At least as far as Marx was concerned late capitalism was a thoroughly good idea as a stage to pass through, a necessary one. Quite why so many bemoan it we’re not sure - unless it is of course that all too many self-professed followers of Ol’ Karl have failed to understand his actual points.