http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/reading-capital.htm
Political economy is the system of thought forms within which people live by producing and exchanging commodities, and Capital demonstrated this – the whole universe of sweat-shops, insurance companies, industrial corporations, multimillionaires, famines and wars flows from commodity production. Within such a world, in the main, the concepts of political economy are valid to the extent that they are connected with practice rather than apologetic “Just So” myths. The struggle against capitalism is therefore the struggle against that world of a particular kind of inverted consciousness, one in which social relations between people take the form of relations between things. But in a letter to Kugelmann on 28 December 1862, Marx says of the soon-to-be-published book: “It is a sequel to Part I, but will appear on its own under the title, Capital, with A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy as merely the subtitle.” Marx worked hard to get the book noticed and criticised by the professional economists of his day, and clearly wanted to engage them in debate. In the letter to Kugelmann of 11 July 1868, he says: “... it shows the depth of degradation reached by these priests of the bourgeoisie: while workers and even manufacturers and merchants have understood my book and made sense of it, these ‘learned scribes’ (!) complain that I make excessive demands on their comprehension.” And while he was most interested in getting it to workers, criticising Lassalle for not working harder to encourage workers to read it, he certainly aimed at taking his fight into the recognised scientific circles. He believed (and with good reason) that his work engaged in a meaningful way with mainstream economic theory; it did not live in a parallel universe. Marx complained that he was being met with a conspiracy of silence, but history shows that Capital did get the recognition it deserved, and Capital haunts bourgeois economics to this day, like the ghost of its dead father. The point is that prices, profits, rents and so on are, in Marx’s scheme of things, merely surface appearances, like the froth and bubbles on the surface of the ocean, the forms of which tell us little about the main business of tidal shifts and melting ice-packs. Marx begins with the concept of bourgeois society and moves to more and more concrete concepts, that is to say, he reconstructs the concrete, the appearances, in scientific terms. In such an approach the effect of a drought in Australia on mortgage rates in the US, and so on, belong somewhere in Volume XX. They are not excluded, but it is the dynamics of class relations which are fundamental and central. So in summary, Capital remains an unfinished work and it seems unlikely that the job of finishing it to the point where it could provide a superior tool for management of government or corporate economic affairs will ever be completed, were it to remain the work of an isolated individual. Basically it is a practical task. With the partial exception of Boltanski, the theoretical work of critiquing political economy seems to have died with Marx. So far as I know, none of the “Marxist Economists” have critiqued the theory of marginal utility beyond denouncing it as an ideological apology aimed at discrediting Marx and demobilizing the workers’ movement (all of which may well be true, by the way). There have been a plethora of new economic forms of activity since 1883. Marx never knew Taylorism, which completely transformed work practices, the social division of labour and the composition of the working class. He never knew Fordism, which completely transformed the form of exploitation, the concept of a living wage, and the nature of working-class communities; he never knew the welfare state with its system of universal state-provided benefits, or Toyota-ism and its appropriation of worker cooperation for the benefit of capital, or the practices of franchising, out-sourcing, the practice of part-time working, and the export of manufacture to non-union industrial zones in far-off countries, or the inflow of economic migrants to the former colonial centres. All these represent transformations in political economy, not anticipated in Capital. Just one example: in Marx’s day, workers were basically locked in a large building to work under their own supervision for as long as the capitalist could force them to using the weapon of keeping wages at near-starvation level. This way of thinking is directly reflected in the categories of Capital because that’s how capital worked. But this is no longer the case in the countries where capital predominates. So those who read Capital to learn Marx’s “method” have a point. Even some very fundamental features of Capital may no longer be relevant. And what is more, it is fair to suppose that later development in the activity of capital must, in some sense at least, come closer to the essence, the truth of bourgeois society. The critic does not create thought out of thought; theory can only reveal what is already present in social practice. In the Grundrisse, Marx said: “... Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, ... in the theoretical method, too, the subject, society, must always be kept in mind as the presupposition.” So the job of Marx’s continuers begins with the latest developments in bourgeois society most especially insofar as the concrete sheds light on the categories of current economic theory and vice versa. It seems likely that such a continuing critique would continue to use the concept of value at its foundation, if we are to be true to Marx. In the letter to Kugelmann quoted above, in responding to a bourgeois critic of Capital, he observes: “The chatter about the need to prove the concept of value arises only from complete ignorance both of the subject under discussion and of the method of science. Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish. And every child knows, too, that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour. It is self-evident that this necessity of the distribution of social labour in specific proportions is certainly not abolished by the specific form of social production; it can only change its form of manifestation. Natural laws cannot be abolished at all. The only thing that can change, under historically differing conditions, is the form in which those laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself in a state of society in which the interconnection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products. ... “On the other hand, as you correctly believe, the history of the theory of course demonstrates that the understanding of the value relation has always been the same, clearer or less clear, hedged with illusions or scientifically more precise. Since the reasoning process itself arises from the existing conditions and is itself a natural process, really comprehending thinking can always only be the same, and can vary only gradually, in accordance with the maturity of development, hence also the maturity of the organ that does the thinking. Anything else is drivel.” So what is involved is the transhistorical necessity of every society making some arrangement or other for the distribution of the social labour and its products. This is what is contained in the concept of value. Implicit in the concept of value is the notion of the intrinsic equality of human beings. In an emphatically world economy in which capital based, for example, in the US, is manufacturing in India and drastically underpaying labour, we have an instance of price being less than value for long periods of time. But once ‘the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities [and] consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities’, there is a necessary tendency towards the equalisation of wages, which nonetheless may take centuries of war and revolution to exert itself. There are dozens of such problems that arise as a result of changes in the political economy of modern life, the solution of which are presupposed in a continuation of Marx’s work. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
