Infinite are the arguments of Marxists. This very selective survey needs references.
A first difficult is that everybody knows Marx has something to do with the Soviet Union. Many come to reading Capital with certain preconceptions. A couple comments in the book, for analytical reasons, contrast capitalism and feudalism and a post-capitalist economy with common ownership. But the book is about capitalism. The book contains expressions of outrage, often ironical. But is capitalism criticized for being unjust? And the labor theory of value, for Marx, is not about what workers should be paid.
I tend to read Marx as developing a theory for political economy, a theory about how capitalism works. But should such a thing as Marxian political economy even exist? "A critique of political economy" is the subtitle of of Capital. Maybe Marx is not offering a different theory to put in place of the existing theory. A similar argument arises over Sraffa. The subtitle of his 1960 masterpiece is, "A prelude to a critique of economic theory". Perhaps the formalism should lead to more concrete, institutial, and empirical studies. On the other hand, Marx says he is investigating the "laws of motion" of a commodity-producing society.
I take my next difficulty from some comments in David Harvey's Companion What arguments are logical, in some sense? What are describing history? It is obviously not all history, since otherwise the section on primitive accumulation would be towards the start. But the sequence of chapters on co-operation, manufacture, and modern industry are set in history. I do not mean formal logic or syllogisms by 'logic', but rather something like the unfolding of concepts.
Marx often postulates an ideal system, so as to address bourgeois political economists and Ricardian socialists. On the other hand, he often describes practices that deviate from such ideals. Which is which at any point in the text?
Does Marx ever present a complete description of his method? In the introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx distinguishes between the order of presentation and the order of discovery. In some of his correspondence, he outlines his book.
I tend to present (some variant of or critique of) Marx's political economy with mathematics. How much are those who have done such true to this approach? Some of the mathematics, such as Perron-Frobenius theorems, did not exist in Marx's day. Some find analytical marxists too willing to accept methodological individualism.
Then some background is very useful to understand what Marx is writing about. I might mention British political economy, Hegel's philosophy, and previous socialists.
There are some difficulties in the presentation. I have mentioned the last footnote in chapter 5. One then needs to read thousands of pages until Marx explains the transformation problem in volume 3. One might find it difficult to accept that Marx intends volume 1 to be something like a is first approximation.
This post echoes some themes in a recent working paper by Fabio Petri. Some confusions are probably my own.
Posts
2 comments:
Well said, a few comments.
"What arguments are logical, in some sense? What are describing history? It is obviously not all history, since otherwise the section on primitive accumulation would be towards the start. But the sequence of chapters on co-operation, manufacture, and modern industry are set in history. I do not mean formal logic or syllogisms by 'logic', but rather something like the unfolding of concepts."
It is interesting to note that in 1847 Marx criticised Proudhon for creating a model of capitalism based on a sequence of categories rather than writing a history of capitalism as all the categories acted at the same time (something Proudhon himself noted). The impossibility of writing about everything (and their history) at the same time is obvious enough and explains why Marx's long promised book on political economy did not appear until after he embraced creating a model based on categories.
I found this article useful: https://monde-nouveau.net/IMG/pdf/Proudhon_and_German_philosophy.pdf
Of course, Marxists say that Marx's method in 1847 was right AND that his method in 1867 was right, in spite of the clear differences in the two approaches. In practice, Marxists embrace the model building of 1867 -- for good reason, given the difficulties of the 1847 suggestion. That Marx could not do what be lambasted for not doing is significant.
"Then some background is very useful to understand what Marx is writing about. I might mention British political economy, Hegel's philosophy, and previous socialists."
Agree 100% with this, particularly the need to understand British Political Economy -- particularly Ricardo. When I first tried to read Marx, I could not understand what he was getting at because he was not clear on the difference between, and relation of, prices to exchange value. It was only reading Rubin's "Essays on Marx's Theory of Value" that it dawned on me what it was. Taking all this for granted, as Marx did, was clearly a mistake on his part -- he should have stated the assumptions and definitions of his model clearly and not assume that everyone had read Ricardo.
In terms of Hegel, Lenin said that "Capital" could not be understood if you had not read Hegel -- if so, then Marx was a terrible writer (as libertarian Marxist Paul Mattick put it, "It was a good thing that Lenin opened Hegel’s Logic. If he had not, there would not have been a true Marxist for a whole century"). If you are dependent on reading Hegel to understand "Capital" then it is a deeply flawed work -- although I doubt that Marx wrote it with that in mind!
In terms of "previous socialists", Marx is not reliable when it comes to those who he considered rivals -- Proudhon, obviously -- but in terms of British socialists, his account of them is better for they were dead or (mostly) forgotten. William Thompson is of particular note -- but I should note that Marx's account of John Francis Bray's ideas are flawed because he actually argued for central planning rather than the labour-note commodity exchange notion Marx said he advocated.
Anarcho
An Anarchist FAQ
I think one can find a number of cases where Marx castigates one of his fellow socialists and then says something resembling what he has mocked. And that this includes Proudhon. I have seem some try to make a distinction between Marx's recommendation for the use of labor notes in the Remarks on the Gotha Program and what others had previously said. But I forget the argument.
Post a Comment