futurology/quiz

So, the "Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre " group at Britain's Ministry of Defence (sort of like a weaponised Long Sunday!) has issued their 90-page repourt on, uh, The Future. There's a summary in The Guardian, but here is the pivotally curious passage:

"The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx," says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: "The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest". Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the "sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism".

Discuss. Please focus on the following questions: is what they're describing "Marxism"? What is the single most self-contradictory claim above? Etc etc.

Comments

[voyou]

Presumably, this is due to the continuing semantic slippage whereby "middle class" now means "working class."

[19]

though interesting the Brit's MoD article is probably a poor jumping point for a discussion-
1. i tend to echo the equivocation on 'middle class' and 'working class,' and that those who decisively remark on either are ideologically motivated rather then showing political care for either of their "subjects"
2. though your cautious quotations mean something- which of the Marxism's ought we discuss? To start with the: popular German Ideology-Marxism's, the rarely read Capital-Marxism, not to mention the various canons and readings that proliferated for over a century, and still remain somewhat strong
3. i wait for the day when a group of intellectuals today reads slowly through a single chapter of capital- rather then attempting this conflated search. patience, however, seems less admirable these days
4. that last one can be ignored, just a somber lament

[va]

What, no worries over The Future of the Book? I'd also say the U.S., sitcoms, and Theory are conspicuous by their absence. But maybe the Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre gets to those in the longer version of their summary of the future.

[User]

This is freakin insane!

[Swifty]

There is Marx. Then there is fuzzy Marx. Fuzzy Marx is not a completely illegitimate way to think. It is distant from the full range of Marxists arguments. But it still employs important insights from Marx's work. So first let's take Marx. Why, according to him, is the proletariat the revolutionary class? It is not because workers are oppressed a lot. Lots of classes in history have been oppressed and had revolutions but have not produced all round liberation of humanity. Workers are the revolutionary class because the revolution they lead is not on behalf of a specific class interest. In Marx's account, the workers have been ground down almost to the level of the lumpenproletariat, and when they have a revolution it is not in order to promote a new, competing economic and political system but to destroy the class system root and branch, along with the state. The bit quoted above does not describe the middle class as propertyless. The report itself points out that the middle class has class interests. Thus any revolution a transnational middle class might take would not be the kind of action that Marx had in mind. But what if we think in a fuzzy Marx way? If we abstract from the mechanics of revolution that Marx predicted, we can still be interested in his overall claim that capitalism is ultimately headed for economic reefs. The question is, whether or not capitalism will finally produce a profound sociological split between the haves and the have-nots. But that split in itself is not enough. It must also be translated into a political force. This is a problem that Marx confronts: earlier class revolutions had been much more tactical and strategic precisely because the classes who led them had specific class interests they wanted to promote. To the extent that the workers had a class interest in 20th-century Europe it was reformist. To the extent that they didn't have a specific class interest to promote they were politically formless. The traditional Marxist picture of the middle class is of a group that flirts both with revolution and with reaction depending on what they are most afraid of at the moment -- workers who challenged private property or a dictatorial state that interfered in private life and the economy. But what might happen to the political thinking of a middle class confronted by globalization but not particularly worried about a workers movement? We don't know.

[Matt]

There is "compelling evidence" to indicate that climate change is occurring and that the atmosphere will continue to warm at an unprecedented rate throughout the 21st century. It could lead to a reduction in north Atlantic salinity by increasing the freshwater runoff from the Arctic. This could affect the natural circulation of the north Atlantic by diminishing the warming effect of ocean currents on western Europe. "The drop in temperature might exceed that of the miniature ice age of the 17th and 18th centuries."

In the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, allowing people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island.

"It could happen in 10 years," says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography Department. "Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse." And he is alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously. In a letter to The New York Times last April, he wrote, "Recall the coldest winters in the Northeast, like those of 1936 and 1978, and then imagine recurring winters that are even colder, and you'll have an idea of what this would be like." A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled "Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises," produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling freshwater, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions. The reason for such huge effects is simple. A quick climate change wreaks far more disruption than a slow one. People, animals, plants, and the economies that depend on them are like rivers, says the report: "For example, high water in a river will pose few problems until the water runs over the bank, after which levees can be breached and massive flooding can occur. Many biological processes undergo shifts at particular thresholds of temperature and precipitation." Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world's poor. During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that option doesn't work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. "To the extent that abrupt climate change may cause rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land, the inability to migrate may remove one of the major safety nets for distressed people," says the report.

[Matt]

People think global warming is all about fun in the sun; it may well be the opposite.

[Nate]

I'm not keen on the term "middle class" particularly in conversations where the term "working class" is used in a marxist sense. As far as I can tell, "middle class" gets used in a few ways. One is a cultural category to do with how certain work is esteemed and perhaps certain cultural behaviors, attitudes, etc taken as typical of the people who do this work. In this sense my mother in law the account is middle class in a way that my cousin the carpenter isn't, though the latter makes more money. A second is a certain level of money someone makes, against perhaps coupled with certain values held by people at this income level. A third is that of groups which are "between" the working and employing class - self employed people, doctors, bureaucrats etc - and whose job in part requires negotiating both arenas. A variant on this is the middle class as mediator between workers and bosses (professional arbitrators, some politicians, etc).

It seems to me that one could find examples of marxists (and organized groups of marxists who are relatively serious about marxism as part of a political project) who correspond to each of these senses, especially in leadership roles in formal organizations. In a sense this is what the idea of a labor aristocracy is naming, and is the basis for some criticisms of the role of some marxisms (particularly rigid and docrinaire ones) in perpetuating said aristocracies.

[Dave McDougall]

A shift toward a global, knowledge-based economy, where technology has largely democratized the means of production and petite-bourgois knowledge workers are the dominant economic engine? That's not the future, that's the present.