Lee Harris: The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing
Part 3 – Immiserization (Policy Review, 2002)
Marx’s central claim to scientific realism rested on his theory of immiserization: capitalism, through a falling rate of profit, would inevitably impoverish the working class. Only widespread, worsening misery would give workers both the motive and the power to overthrow the system.
Without immiserization, Marx argued, revolutionary socialism remained mere utopian fantasy. If workers grew better off under capitalism, no rational basis existed for risking civil war to replace it with an untested alternative.
When Western workers did not become poorer — and in many cases became wealthier — Marxist theory faced a crisis. Later thinkers adapted the immiserization framework by relocating the site of oppression from domestic class struggle to global North-South relations, with the United States cast as the primary agent of worldwide exploitation.
This shift preserved the moral and analytical structure of Marxism while explaining its predictive failure in advanced capitalist societies.
Next: Part 4 – Immiserization Goes Global
