The pitfalls of “everything is getting worse”
Until the late 1950s, with decreasing conviction, the official Communist Parties in western Europe promoted as a dogma the idea that working-class living-standards were falling because an iron law of capitalism made it so, and of course were worse than workers’ living standards in the USSR. CP writers were commissioned to select and shape statistics to “prove” that claim. In France, critical Marxists denounced this attitude as “misérabilisme”. Workers whose households had for the first time fridges, washing machines, TVs, central heating could not fail to conclude that the trade-union and...