******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
"Marx's entire life's work is premised on the fact that workers have the capacity to organise to replace capitalism. Given that reality, that some Marxists feel the need to claim that the LTRPF 'leaves little to no room for the political' is slightly odd." Well it is odd, but it's the basis of fundamentalists' analysis. Here is Sherman writing in Foundations of Radical Political Economy (1987): ___ There seem to be in Marx two different views of values and prices that surface at different points in his work. On the one hand, Marx takes for granted the labor theory of value, which he took - and developed - from Ricardo. In this view, Marx sees certain inexorable laws of capitalism deriving from the labor theory of value. The notion of such inexorable laws derives partly from the classical economists and partly from Marx’s Hegelian tradition. The other view in Marx, which conforms more to the genius of his own historical approach, visualizes prices and wages as the result of human relationships and class conflict. Marx’s first view, the labor theory of value as the foundation for a set of inexorable laws, is followed by a group often labeled as fundamentalist, since they agree that the fundamentals of political economy are all presented by Marx. Three leading members of this group are Anwar Sheikh, Willi Semmler, and John Weeks, all of whom consider themselves to be “orthodox” Marxists - though they differ among themselves on some more minor points. Thus, John Weeks argues that Marx’s work is characterized by the “central role of the law of value and its most important manifestation, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This interpretation of Marx’s work...can be called…’orthodox’ Marxism.” The emphasis of Weeks (and Shaikh and Semmler) is on the acceptance and elaboration of the labor theory of value as found in their interpretation of Marx. It is an economic determinist view in that prices, profits, and wages are determined by impersonal economic forces and not primarily by class conflicts. The theory is stated in terms of the technology of commodity production rather than human relations: the value of any commodity is the inherent amount of socially necessary labor embodied in the commodity. Thus, Weeks even claims that Frederick Engels “completely misconstrued Marx’s value theory” because Engels emphasized that class conflicts determine profit and wage levels and, therefore, income distribution, whereas Weeks believes that Marx argued only in terms of the inherent value of any commodity, including labor. In Weeks’ view, class conflict cannot change what the theory of value has ordained. The fundamentalists then argue, as Weeks stressed in the quote, that the labor theory of value inexorably leads to a tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This is seen as Marx’s central contribution, and the sole cause of economic crises. In understanding capitalism...fundamentalists downplay any views based on class relations, lack of demand by exploited workers, or extensive monopoly. In this view of economics as a set of impersonal laws of value, coupled with their tendency to downplay messy phenomena like insufficient demand or monopoly power in setting prices, they are remarkably like the neoclassical economists [S.E.: indeed, latter day fundamentalist Andrew Kliman regularly cites the work of right-wing economists to argue against claims by other leftists that the worker’s share has declining; c.f. http://bit.ly/1Z1anSN and http://bit.ly/1FxJI8u and http://pages.citebite.com/v4j6x6x7j0qsh ]. When asked about the price of a ton of steel, both fundamentalists and neoclassicals will discuss the inherent value of the commodities (including labor) that went into it. Both treat labor as being like any other commodity, and neither discusses the human relationships involved. Bowles and Gintis argue that Marx himself, because of his classical and Hegelian background, sometimes remained in the fundamentalist commodity mode of thought (though he was its strongest critic at other times). Thus, Marx argued for socially necessary labortime as the value of any commodity on the following reasoning: First, Marx argues that every market exchange (under pure and perfect competition) must be the exchange of two equal values. Second, he contends that the value must be given by something contained in each commodity. Marx goes on to argue that, if two things are being exchanged there must exist in equal quantities something common to both. The two things must therefore be equal to a third, which is itself neither the one or the other. What is this mysterious something giving value to all commodities? Marx claims: “This common ‘something’ cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities...If then we leave out of consideration the use-value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labor.” The abstract and ahistorical approach of this argument (contrary to Marx’s usual historical and class approach) has led many radicals (or independent Marxists) to reject this argument - and has led some to reject the whole labor theory of value as wrong or irrelevant to current conflicts. Moreover, Marx does not really prove that no other quality is common to all commodities, because he starts with the classical view and does not think it necessary to argue it. Bowles and Gintis contend that Marx here was affected by the same belief in the inherent value of commodities that he so often attacked (and called “commodity fetishism”). “His treatment of the phenomenon of equal exchange may be considered Marx’s own flirtation with ‘commodity fetishism’”. Marx had still not liberated himself completely from the old view of value; he did not follow his own approach of political economy as science of human, class relations. This commodity approach left Marx open to many neoclassical criticisms, all of which fail if we view the labor theory of value as a class and relational theory of capitalist institutions. The Fundamentalist Interpretation of Marx on Exploitation The fundamentalist or orthodox argument is this: 1. Human labor-power (the capacity to work) is a commodity under capitalism, sold in the market. It is bought and sold like all other commodities at its long-run value, which is the amount of labor-time necessary to produce the worker. 2. The use (or use-value) extracted by the capitalists from this commodity, labor-power, is the expenditure of labor for a given number of hours. Those hours may be - and are under capitalism - far more than the hours required to produce the value of the worker (that is, wages). So the difference between the value of the worker (wages) and the value of the product (price) is the surplus value (or profit) going to the capitalist. This argument is very formal - it is not firmly rooted in institutional and human relations - and has several flaws: Labor power may be called a commodity if one wishes (that is a semantic or definitional question). But whatever it is called, Bowles and Gintis are correct that labor power is very different from the usual capitalist commodity in some very important respects relevant to this argument. Labor power is similar to the usual capitalist commodity in that is is bought and sold in the market. This fact often means degradation and alienation of workers and opens the door to unemployment, but is nevertheless a fact. Yet labor power differs from most things called commodities in several ways. First, in a pure capitalist system, all other commodities are produced by capitalists. Workers are not produced by a capitalist assembly line. Workers do consume some other commodities, but most of the labor going into the production of a worker is the unpaid love and care of a family. Second, all other commodities are sold by capitalists in market exchanges, governed by impersonal supply and demand. Not only is workers’ capacity to work (or labor power) not produced by capitalists, it is not sold by capitalists. The workers’ power to labor is sold by millions of workers - though capitalists, once they have bought labor power, may sell services. So the supply conditions of labor power are totally different than those of all other commodities bought by capitalists. For all commodities, Marx makes the argument that capitalist profit cannot be made by cheating. If a capitalist sells a machine to another capitalist above its long-run value measured in labor hours, then one capitalist makes an extra profit, but the other makes a loss. Therefore, in the aggregate, if one capitalist cheats another, no profit is made by the capitalist class. Yet a capitalist could make a profit by cheating a worker in some sense, so the process of exploitation vesus simple cheating must be further clarified. (pp. 99-103) ____ "If it were an inflexible "technologically determinant view of capitalism", it would have either been objectively disproved" In my mind it's been disproved theoretically (e.g. Harvey's comments in Limits to Capital pp. 176-189 and Michael Heinrich's two articles in Monthly Review [http://bit.ly/1VzbhBn]), although it's pointless trying to argue against all the empirical "proofs" that proponents of "the tendency" endlessly produce, since they all calculate the rate of profit differently (as Michael Roberts notes in his The Great Recession [p. 308]: "Kliman reckons it is foolish to try and develop ‘a Marxist rate of profit’ because there is no one agreed way of doing so. So he uses different measures for the rate of profit according to different purposes.") and vary amongst themselves in terms of the "correct" units of time for measuring the fall. Certainly there have been plenty of countervailing proofs showing no long-run rate of profit ( Joseph Gillman's The Falling Rate of Profit from 1957 and Sherman's The Business Cycle, in particular Chapter 12). The adherents of "the tendency" spend almost all of their time either on exposition of Marx's work and or on attacking anyone who would stray from the "fundamentals" of Marx (as they see them) and seeking to excommunicate from the church of marxism anyone who tries to analyze the dynamics of capitalism and its crises outside the phenomenon of the "rising organic composition" and the "tendency for the rate of profit to fall". Needless to say, Monthly Review is their favorite punching bag in this regard. But at least Monthly Review and other non-dogmatists like David Harvey spend some time investigating issues. If you take Marx's observation of capitalist dynamics in the 19th century as canonical without any possibility of adding to or amending those observations based on the present state of affairs, then I do not think there's much point to engaging in a discussion over this... On 9/30/2015 11:18 PM, John Edmundson via Marxism wrote: > ******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** > #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. > #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. > ***************************************************************** > > Shalva wrote: > > "I can't say that I've read much of Michael Roberts' non-blog work (or that > of the other new prophets of "the tendency" like Carchedi and Kliman), but > I have to agree with the old RPE critique (explicated best in Howard > Sherman's work) of their intellectual forefathers that "the tendency" is a > technologically determinant view of capitalism that leaves little to no > room for the political." > > If it were an inflexible "technologically > determinant view of capitalism", it would have either been objectively > disproved or we would be on an inexorable and rapid path toward the > overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of communism. Instead, the > 'LTRPF' is quite clearly described as just that, a *tendency*, and subject > to many countervailing forces, which makes for a fluid and unpredictable > world. It is precisely within that fluidity and unpredictability that the > "room > for the political" exists. > > Certainly there have been Marxists in the past, and I am sure there are > some today, who see these things in mechanistic and inevitable, rather than > dynamic and dialectical ways. That such people and views exist does not > disprove the LTRPF. > Cheers, > John > _________________________________________________________ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/shalva.eliava%40outlook.com _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
