I seem to spend a lot of my time defending Marx, and in particular Marxist economics from my coursemates and friends. The main line of attack is (as you may have guessed) his labour theory of value as expounded in Capital Volume I chapter 1. Here Marx, correctly, distinguishes between use value (utility) and exchange value (price). He then argues that the sole determinant of exchange value is labour or more specifically “Socially Necessary Labour Time” (SNLT). [SNLT is the average amount of time required to produce an item in a particular society, assuming that the item is needed]. The big problem with this is that Marx here seems to treat utility as binary (as either wanted or not) which after even a brief examination of the real world it clearly isn’t.
Friends 1 – Marx 0
The problem is that once this has been established, people tend to just throw Marx out the window and deem his work on economics as not worthy of their time. This is a rather critical mistake. It is true that much of Marx’s writings are incorrect or rely on rather shaky assumptions. But then so do the works of Ricardo, Smith and Say. In fact much of these poor / shaky assumptions are shared amongst all of these authors, Marx having read all of them in detail and Capital being a critique of their stance. Yet nobody dismisses Smith like they do Marx, not even Ricardo is treated with as little respect as the work of Marx even though most of what they have written has long been discarded and only a few principles remain in use.
There are 2 reasons for this. One - the most obvious – is that Marx and his works are linked to USSR and Soviet era, where they were preached almost like the work of god and followed dogmatically until the very end. The fact is that his disciples refused to criticise or rectify or even just update Marx’s work while the followers of Ricardo and Smith did and developed significantly more accurate representations of capitalist society and trade. So in that sense Marx and Marxists has been left behind to wallow in the past, muttering about the “bourgeois economists” and “pseudo-science” and talking in louder and louder voices about the “Great Man” that was Marx.
Second – and the less obvious – is that once you throw out the prophecy of the communist revolution and the faulty theory of general equilibrium you are left with a discussion which is not in the same arena as the more traditional economist. Marx’s Capital is well known as having the subtitle “a critique of political economy” [what is now called economics]. However in the first translation into English (edited by Engles) from the third German Edition the subtitle was “A Critical Analysis Of Political Economy”. Now you may argue that I’m using semantics, that they both is essence mean the same thing. And you’d be right. But the difference is important, as the second title spells out exactly what Marx did. The value of Marx is not found in the sphere of Economics, it is found in the sphere of meta-economics. Too often people treat economics as given and the invisible hand of Adam Smith has too easily replaced the invisible hand of God in creating and legitimising a new world order. The work of Marx is an attempt to dispel this illusion of an almighty system which will bring goodness to all if only we’d obey the rules. His writings are an attempt to put things in context, to demonstrate that labour is the only way that value can be added to an object. That wealth is not created by trade but by employment. That our current social relations are historically limited and not universal. And most importantly, that this is only one way of organising society, that it is flawed and is dependent on exploitation through economic coercion. Where those that work receive less than they add and those that don’t work receive the rest.
Finally to show that things can change - but to what?
Nobody really knows……
No comments:
Post a Comment