Dialectic in the Hands of a Handwerker: Joseph Dietzgen and the Humble Beginnings of Dialectical Materialism

Engels once remarked to Marx that the “materialist dialectic, which for years has been our best working tool and our sharpest weapon, was, remarkably enough, discovered not only by us but also, independently of us and even of Hegel, by a German worker, Joseph Dietzgen.” The status of the dialectic, however, within what ought to instead be described as Dietzgen's inductive empiricism, is problematic. Dietzgen's work stands as a hitherto unacknowledged precursor to the Marxist ideology of Diamat. The first question is whether or not Marx's materialism ought to be conflated with Dietzgen's empiricism. Second, Dietzgen's efforts to establish a theory of human thought structured through the methods of the natural sciences requires critical evaluation. Although Dietzgen's works may anticipate some of the theoretical contours of Diamat, equating materialism with empiricism and rendering the dialectical method into a universal methodology on a par with the methods of the natural sciences, as pursued by Dietzgen, is a project that is perhaps not worthy of Marx's and Engels’ nominal veneration.

Worker Personality: Another Skill Bias beyond Education in the Digital Age

We present empirical evidence suggesting that technological progress in the digital age will be biased not only with respect to skills acquired through education but additionally with respect to non-cognitive skills (personality). We measure the direction of technological change by estimated future digitalization probabilities of occupations, and non-cognitive skills by the Big Five personality traits from four German worker surveys. Even though we control for education and work experience, we find that workers who are more open to experience, emotionally more stable and less agreeable will tend to be less susceptible to digitalization. We also find that future technological progress may not continue to hollow out the middle class as much as it did in the recent past. These results suggest that education and labor market policies should put more emphasis on children’s and workers’ personalities to strengthen their labor market resilience in the digital age.

Real Wages and Labor Productivity in Britain and Germany, 1871–1938: A Unified Approach to the International Comparison of Living Standards

Throughout the period 1871–1938, the average British worker was better off than the average German worker, but there were significant differences between major sectors. For the aggregate economy, the real wage gap was about the same as the labor productivity gap, but again there were important sectoral differences. Compared to their productivity, German industrial workers were poorly paid, whereas German agricultural and service sector employees were overpaid. This affected the competitiveness of the two countries in these sectors. There were also important differences in comparative real wages by skill level, affecting the extent of poverty.