Varoufakis makes Marx's mistake- underestimating markets

Yanis Varoufakis has favoured us, in The Guardian, with another of those pieces which just insists that Marx was right. You know, sure, it's hasn't happened for 150 years and counting as yet but it's sure right around the corner today.

None of this should surprise a reader of the manifesto. “Society as a whole,” it argues, “is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other.” As production is mechanised, and the profit margin of the machine-owners becomes our civilisation’s driving motive, society splits between non-working shareholders and non-owner wage-workers. As for the middle class, it is the dinosaur in the room, set for extinction.

At the same time, the ultra-rich become guilt-ridden and stressed as they watch everyone else’s lives sink into the precariousness of insecure wage-slavery. Marx and Engels foresaw that this supremely powerful minority would eventually prove “unfit to rule” over such polarised societies, because they would not be in a position to guarantee the wage-slaves a reliable existence.

It's a fair old prediction, certainly. But a little earlier Varoufakis tells us:

While celebrating how globalisation has shifted billions from abject poverty to relative poverty,

That is, the wage slaves have done damn well out of the arrangement. As absolutely any examination of historical and current day living standards will tell us.

The reason why is, of course, that Marx underestimated the power of markets. Especially that for labour. He was aware of how it was monopsony - not that the word existed back then but this is what he meant  by monopoly capitalism - in the purchase of labour which would immiserate the workers. We've not have such monopsony, they're not immiserated.

Further, as long as we maintain a market economic system we're not going to have monopsony and thus we're not going to have the immiseration.

Markets are more powerful than Marx thought they were, than Varoufakis thinks they are. Which is why the working classes today are richer than any bourgeois of Karl's time, richer in fact than any bourgeois or even capitalist of any earlier era. That power of markets to ensure that the new created wealth of capitalism flows to us as workers and consumers is also why there's no coming crisis nor revolution.