Reply #76: Thanks for a comprehensive reply

[muriel_volestrangler]

Yes, I hadn't realised that one or two of your comments were intended as sarcasm, so I mistook them for simple slogans that I felt were misjudging me. I wasn't offended, but I did think you were being simplistic, and so I thought less of your arguments for that. Sorry about that.

I think your phrasing has tended to imply that all worker/employer relations are theft - the start of your analogy was, with my emphasis:

the ultimate goal of all personnel policies is the extraction of maximum productivity for minimum cost -- not "fair" cost or "living wage" but MINIMUM cost -- and minimum cost enforced by an entire system of laws, courts, goon squads and police all intended to hold the worker in the most abject and servile bondage possible: our work stolen by an economic system now ever-more-brazenly structured from top to bottom

I hope you can see how the expressions that cover all cases, and the use of superlatives, can be read as a message that all employment is this theft, even if that was not what you meant.

I disagree with your functional definition of the "fair wage" or "living wage"; I don't think the two mean the same thing anyway. "Living wage" does have to take into account needs, and varies with circumstances - a living wage for a single person is different from that for one who is responsible for children. "Fair" implies a value put on the usefulness of labour, and will vary in different ways - a fair wage for a 16 year old with no qualifications or experience is different from a worker with a lifetime of relevant knowledge and expertise they have worked hard over the years to acquire. But your definition is of something else - a "pacifying wage" perhaps. While it might be useful in some discussions, I don't think redefining existing terms helps.

I agree that the New Deal did a lot to improve the conditions of the average American; and that things have stagnated in the last 3 decades or so. The median household income, adjusted for inflation, has risen slightly in the last 20 years, though most of the rise was during the Clinton years, whether through coincidence or due to him, I'm not sure. That could be because of increasing hours of paid work, primarily amongst women, though. But I think the stagnation may have been inevitable - after World War 2, the USA, with its infrastructure intact, and large natural resources, did very well out of the global economy, but it was surely inevitable that other countries would eventually recover and/or develop, and this would mean US products would become less competitive. The rich have maintained their growth because capital moves easily between countries; but that doesn't mean that the USA could have continued to prosper so much if they had been forced to keep their money in the USA. They may have taken to the few lifeboats available, but that doesn't mean they holed the ship.

Moving on to technology, you say "when the cheap oil is gone, there will be nothing to replace it save reversions to earlier technologies". I disagree. There are advances in solar electrical generation happening, for instance http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=116&art_id=vn20060211110132138C184427 , and the generation of liquid fuels from waste or biological matter, that can play a significant part in future energy usage. Many things will have to change - I agree that air travel and personal cars may disappear, with bicycles and public transport replacing them (I'm not so convinced that animal power will make a big return - it's not that efficient really, when we have other uses for agricultural land than sustaining large animals).

Your talk of an inevitable "collapse of civilisation itself" means, to me, the "stone age" scenario, which I don't think will happen - we have technology, which is rarely lost completely, and we have ideas about democracy and law which don't automatically get lost. I'm glad you're more optimistic than that - I had got he wrong impression from your earlier posts that you did expect the "stone age" scenario. I also don't think that future development will be anywhere as restricted as you do - while we won't have large amounts of raw material in the form of petroleum, biological material will still be available, and engines won't be limited to external combustion - electrical ones, and internal combustion of plant-derived liquid fuels will still be possible and useful. We just can't expect to have a huge one available for our personal use.

I certainly don't think your fears of theocracy will come to pass - this may be because you live in the USA, while I live in Europe (though I did live in the northern USA for a couple of years, and didn't feel there was any chance of fundamentalists getting real power there either). I think those who do want increased religious rule are clinging to a past they find comforting, but that their ideas will be, somewhat ironically, out-evolved - at the same time, they don't take environmental concerns seriously, and they will be out-competed by those who do. Fundamentalism is dying in Europe, and the Abrahamic religions have left large parts of the world, like China, more or less unaffected. Other parts, like South America, may be Christian, but do not seem to be turning fundamentalist at all - they look more and more secular or moderate. I don't think theocracy is Bush's purpose; I think he uses religion as a tool for getting Republicans elected. His primary aim is wealth for himself and his class.

And that brings us back to Marx. While I think there are some rich people, like Bush, who look on the world as 'us' and 'them', I don't think that all people currently with wealth and power around the world see life that way, and that the vast majority of us are in a spectrum of 'current prosperity', rather than classes in an endless struggle. Not accepting what appears to be a central premise of Marx, I see him, and his successors, as theorists, some of whose ideas are still useful and applicable to the present day and the future, but not an indispensable guide to the fate of civilisation.