Tuesday, September 26, 2023

MARX BOOK DAY EIGHT

Capital opens: with these words:  The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, appears as “an immense accumulation of commodities,”[its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.”

 

The principal verb of the opening sentence of Capital is erscheinen als, “appears as.” Marx chooses to begin his analysis of capitalism, and of the theories of capitalism advanced by his predecessors, at the level of appearances, thereby invoking the distinction between appearance and reality on which his entire theoretical enterprise depends.

 

The image conjured by Marx is a striking one. We begin with the marketplace, the sphere of circulation, where what we first encounter as we look about us are enormous heaps of consumer goods. At the most superficial level, capitalism is a cornucopia from which tumble in great profusion coats, shoes, carriages, loaves of bread, and bottles of wine.

 

We can compare Marx’s figure with Engels’s vivid description of the city of Manchester in his early book The Condition of the Working Class in England. Manchester, Engels tells us, “is a sort of architectural embodiment of the contrast between appearance and reality: The town itself is peculiarly built, so that a person may live in it for years, and go in and out daily without coming into contact with a working-people’s quarter or even with workers, that is, so long as he confines himself to his business or to pleasure walks… Manchester contains, at its heart, a rather extended commercial district, perhaps half a mile long and about as broad, and consisting almost wholly of offices and warehouses… The members of [the] money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts to their places of business without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left. For the thoroughfares leading from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are lined, on both sides, with an almost unbroken series of shops.”

 

What is a commodity?  “A commodity” Marx says, “is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another.”  The properties of a commodity in virtue of which it satisfies human wants are aspects of it as a natural object – its weight, colour, texture, potentiality for chemical interactions, and so forth. The commodity, qua natural object, possesses these properties wherever and whenever it exists. Magically remove a loaf of bread ten thousand miles or ten thousand years from the place where it has been baked and it will nourish as well. A coat will protect us from the elements under any social, historical, or ideological conditions. Hence it would appear, if we are hard-headed, sensible empiricists, that the natural properties of commodities are its real properties, and anything science can tell us about these real properties will serve to reveal their essential nature to us. In fact, however, this inference is merely the first of a series of misleading and mystifying inversions by which, in the realm of the economic, reality is made to change places with appearance.

 

The natural properties of commodities, the properties that first strike our senses as we window-shop along the shop-lined avenues of Manchester, are strictly speaking not properties of commodities at all. For, as Marx tells us, a commodity “is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”  Indeed, a commodity, strictly speaking, is not an object of sense perception at all. Ten yards of linen, qua cloth, can be seen, felt, cut, sewn, folded, packaged, and transported from a factory to a retail outlet. But ten yards of linen, qua commodity, cannot be seen, felt, or physically manipulated. For a commodity is a queer thing, a thing full of metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. Only the doubting Thomases of this world sniff the sacramental wine as the chalice is passed to them, expecting somehow that through the miracle of transubstantiation the sweet odour of wine will give way to the stench of blood.

 

But if commodities are not physical objects, what then are they? Or, to put the same question somewhat differently, in virtue of what are the linen, the coat, the corn, and the iron commodities? Here is Marx’s answer, which I shall quote at some length.

 

“If then we leave out of consideration the use-value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use-value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use-value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.

 

Let us now consider the residue of each of these products. It consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour-power expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things now tell us is, that human labour-power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are – Values.”

 

 

 

The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous labour, expenditure of one uniform labour-power.  The exchange value of a commodity – or, more precisely, the exchange value in virtue of which a commodity is a commodity, the exchange value that constitutes the commodity-ness of a commodity – is a crystal of abstract homogeneous social labour. The quantum of exchange value congealed or crystallised in each commodity can neither be seen nor felt nor smelt nor tasted. This homogeneous, infinitely divisible, non-sensory stuff, this value, is contained in the products of labour as a consequence of their being produced by workers hired by capitalists in a system of market exchange regulated by competition. In the production process, portions of this stuff congealed in previously produced commodities are transmitted or passed on to newly produced commodities. As the spindle turns, it smoothly, invisibly, magically passes on infinitesimal bits of its value to the thread that collects around it. When the spindle breaks and must be discarded, it is emptied of its crystals of value, exhausted, spent – unless of course, it has yet some resale value as a used spindle, in which case it will be found to have held back a little cache of its secret value to bring, as a dowry, to its new owner.

 

The passionate aim and single-minded purpose of the hard-headed businessmen from Manchester and Liverpool, London and Sheffield, is to accumulate as much of this transcendent ectoplasmic stuff as possible, as fast as possible. They want it, not for its attractive and gratifying sensory qualities – for it has no sensory qualities at all – but for its magical ability to increase in quantity. They want it, that is to say, so that they may get more of it, which they want in order to get still more. When they grow old and rich, these metaphysical entrepreneurs may decline into sensation, and cash in their crystals of value for inferior things of the flesh, for houses and clothes and rare paintings. But so long as they are young and vigorous, they shun all such temptations and pursue the holy grail of self-expanding value.

 

What can Marx possibly have in mind by advancing so manifestly absurd an account of the commodity? That he does consider this theory of “crystals of abstract homogeneous socially necessary labour” to be absurd is demonstrated by the language in which he chooses to expound it. The chapter on commodities, in which this extraordinary doctrine is introduced, is strewn with religious metaphors. Marx sets himself to trace the “genesis” of the money form of exchange value. As coats and linen change and exchange in a ghostly minuet, the linen, he says, “acquires a value-form different from its physical form,” an echo of the miracle of transubstantiation.

 

 “The fact that [the linen] is value,” Marx observes, “is made manifest by its equality with the coat, just as the sheep-like nature of a Christian is shown in his resemblance to the Lamb of God.”  Lest there be any reader so insensitive to even the broadest mockery as to imagine that this account of the inner essence of commodities is meant literally as a straightforward description of what makes anything a commodity, Marx breaks the ironic tone of his discourse momentarily, near the end of the chapter, to tell us that such talk is absurd, verrückt:

 

“If I state that coats and boots stand in relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of human labour, the absurdity [die Verrücktheit] of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, if the producers of coats and boots compare those articles with linen, or, what is the same thing, with gold and silver, as the universal equivalent, they express the relation between their own private labour, and the collective labour of society in the same absurd form.”

 

A word about the translation of Aveling and Moore.  They render die Verrücktheit  as “absurdity.” This is a perfectly fine nineteenth century translation, but twentieth century philosophers have, so to speak, given absurdity a good name.  It would be more accurate to translate die Verrücktheit as crazy, crack-brained, insane.

 

 It will require a good deal of analysis and exegesis to clarify Marx’s complex reasons for defining the commodity in this deliberately crack-brained way.  Let us begin with Ricardo’s claim that commodities exchange in proportion to the quantities of labor directly and indirectly embodied in them.

 

The farmer plants and hoes and weeds and reaps and brings to the market his baskets of wheat. The tailor cuts and sews and measures and fits and brings to market his coats. The labor performed by the farmer is nothing like the labor performed by the tailor. One works outdoors in the bright sun all day or in the rain, the other sits crosslegged in a shop. Clearly, if we are to think of the tailor and the farmer as exchanging commodities containing equal quantities of labor, we must abstract from the concrete particularity of the labors they perform. So it is not actual concrete laboring that is embodied in their products but abstract labor.

 

Now, no one performs actually abstract labor (with the possible exception of philosophers.) So already in this simplest example, we see that Ricardo’s formulation is covertly a good deal more mysterious than it seems.

 

But suppose there are a number of tailors in town cutting and sewing and stitching and fitting and bringing coats to market.  Most of them, we may imagine, are using the very latest techniques of tailoring – electric sewing machines, perhaps. But one old tailor, stuck in his ways, still makes coats in the manner of his youth, expending more labor on each coat then the other tailors because he has not adopted the new laborsaving techniques. When he comes to market, he offers his coats at a higher price, explaining that they required more labor for their production. The buyers, however, who are looking to buy coats are not interested in the particularities of his tailoring techniques.  They seek only the cheapest coat that fits them and suits their needs.

 

Let us look at this a bit more carefully. You will recall that when I set up my little equations for system C, I begin by constructing and then summing an infinite series of ever smaller bits of labor expended in previous cycles of production.  Very quickly and without much explanation I argued that in place of those infinite series we could set up and solve a system of simultaneous equations. However, suppose that over the time represented by that backward reaching series, there have been technical improvements in the production of corn or iron or wheat or cloth. In that case, the summation of those infinite series will be different from the solution of the system of simultaneous equations, for the infinite series will contain bits of labor expended at times when the techniques of production were less efficient than they are in the contemporary cycle, whereas the system of simultaneous equations represents the current level of efficiency in techniques of production.

 

In short, as Marx quite correctly says, but as Ricardo and the others seem not to have understood, the labor theory of value which they all adopted and endorsed implicitly states that commodities exchange in proportion not to the quantities of concrete labor actually expended in this or earlier cycles of production but rather in proportion to the quantities of abstract socially necessary labor expended on their production.

 

Let us explore this notion still further. Suppose a husband and wife both worked some years ago for the Ford Motor Company. The wife, we may suppose, worked on the production line making Thunderbirds while the husband worked on a different production line making Edsalls.  They were both efficient experienced automotive production workers, and each was working on a production line using the very latest techniques in automobile production. However, the wife was working on a production line making Ford’s most popular line of cars, while the husband, alas, was making Ford’s biggest mistake. Labor expended by the wife was embodied in the products she worked on at full value, while much of the labor expended by her husband, even though he was fully as efficient and competent a worker as she, conferred little or no value on the cars he helped to make, through absolutely no fault of his own.

20 comments:

  1. Re the last paragraph:

    If husband and wife were working with the same efficiency and skill, and if that (roughly) matched the average efficiency/productivity in the industry, then the amount of socially necessary labor time they contributed to the Ford and Edsall would be the same, and so would the two cars' value. That few people wanted to buy the Edsall, for whatever reason, did not affect the Edsall's value as that word is used in Marx's labor theory of value (at least as I understand it). The Edsall had little value in one colloquial sense of the word "value" because it was a flop with consumers, but that has no bearing on its value as a commodity (from the perspective of the LTV).

    If that seems absurd, then perhaps (?) it is one aspect of the "absurdity" that Marx says attends his definition(s). Absurd or not, however, Marx has to eventually get to the proposition that the value of the commodity 'human labor-power' is the amount of socially necessary labor time required to produce (the equivalent of) labor-power's subsistence (as the notion of subsistence is defined by the standards of the society in question). That proposition presumably can't be absurd according to Marx, because if it is then a key part -- albeit not the entirety -- of Capital vol. 1 would be undermined or, to put it less dramatically, called into serious question. Or so it would seem, at any rate.

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  2. If Marx was the first person to notice this, was it because it had already been put into practice?

    When you take your car in for servicing, the amount of labor allotted for each task (that is, the amount of abstract socially necessary labor) is written down in a reference manual, and that is the amount charged, regardless of the actual amount of labor expended on the task. (The least glamorous precincts of law work the same way.)

    I had always assumed that this sort of thing could be traced back to medieval guilds, but is it a 19th Century invention?

    W/r/t the value of the Edsel vis-a-vis the T-Bird, shouldn't its value as a commodity be measured from the prospective of the seller, viz., your local Ford dealer? Edsels can only be moved at below cost, while the T-Birds can be marked up.

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  3. Indispensable correction: At the most superficial level, capitalism is a cornucopia from which tumble in great profusion coats, shoes, carriages, loaves of bread, bottles of wine--and corn.

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  4. J.P.,
    For sure, the Edsel had less "value" to the local Ford dealer than the Thunderbird, but that had nothing to do with the cars' "value" in the labor-theory-of-value sense.

    If two models of a bicycle are manufactured, A and B, and they require the same duration or amount of average-productivity labor (socially necessary labor time) to produce, then they have the same value in LTV terms, even if it turns out, let's say because the ads for A are "cool" and catch on and the ads for B don't, that people only want to buy A. (At least, that's what the perhaps simplistic version of the LTV suggests, but that's the version that many are familiar with. There may be nuances I'm not taking into account.)

    One could try to relate this to the Smith/Ricardo distinction between the market price and the "natural price" of a commodity. The market price was determined by the daily fluctuations of supply and demand, whereas the natural price was where the price tended to settle over the long run and was (supposedly) determined by the amount of labor embodied, directly and indirectly, in the commodity. But in the case of the Edsel, the long-run price presumably did not match what Smith and Ricardo would have expected its "natural price" to be. It may be the case, though I'm not sure, that the phenomenon of products/commodities that aren't inherently defective but are, for some reason or other, commercial "flops" is a phenomenon that was not common before, say, the mid-19th century. In which case Smith and Ricardo would not have had to deal with that phenomenon or discuss it. (But since my knowledge of both of them is mostly second-hand, I'm just speculating on that point.)

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  5. You'd be suprised. Google "price Ford Edsel". They're worth less than a Thunderbird, but they're not giving them away these days.

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  6. s.w.

    Well, that's probably because nowadays they're collector's items, they are in effect antiques, no? So that's a whole other thing.

    p.s. I don't know the history of the Edsel or exactly why it flopped. I'm assuming it had something to do with its more superficial qualities, like its appearance, and not with basic issues of manufacture, like the quality of the engine or whatever.

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  7. LFC,

    As far as I recall, the Edsels just didn't catch on.

    It says a lot about the U.S. in the 1950's that people refused to buy a car that wasn't
    "cool".

    I imagine that by now there's another type of consumer of cars (I don't have a car nor do I drive) who buys quality, without worrying whether the car is cool or not.

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  8. I think there are different kinds of car buyers now -- some care about "cool," some don't.

    I live in a place where a car is, while not an absolute necessity, an enormous convenience. And of course the roads are very trafficked. One bothersome thing in the last several years is that it's become cool where I live for certain drivers, almost all of whom I think are young men, to take an ordinary car and "soup it up" with the result that on suburban thoroughfares around here there are a quite a few of these cars without mufflers making a lot of noise. In this respect it may be (?) like the 50s and early 60s coming back except maybe they didn't do it on main roads then. Anyway it's a public nuisance from my standpoint, but if there are laws against this (which there may or may not be, I haven't checked) they're not being enforced.

    Sorry, this comment has nothing at all to do with the post!

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  9. LFC,

    You appear to be a fellow noise hater.

    I'm fairly sure that you know that Schopenhauer, who hated noise, linked sensitivity to noise to intelligence.

    If you've never read Schopenhauer's essay on noise, do. He has a great sense of humor, which is clear in the essay, although not in the World as Will and Representation. I believe that his essay on noise is available online.

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  10. I don’t understand how a commodity can have a “value” that is determined prior to that commodity’s being placed into the stream of commerce. In the Bicycle A/Bicycle B example, before they are put on the showroom floor they may have the same “value in LTV terms” but aren’t those values are purely speculative?

    And if the one bicycle sells and the other doesn’t, then one has a negative sales value, and this must act to discount the value of the labor that went into it (as well as constraining the types of labor that can go into bicycle manufacture in the future, which must also affect the value of labor) … Right?

    I suppose you could look at the two bicycles as two examples of the same kind of commodity, but we’ve just said that they are different enough so that one sells and the other does not. (The definition of “commodity” in these discussions always seemed inconsistent to me.)

    FWIW, the 1958 “Edsel” was a new “brand”, not technically a “Ford”; it was ugly (de gustibus, etc.); it had some first year problems; and it was priced the same as a Mercury, which was already established as Ford’s upmarket brand. So: zero reason to buy this weird “new” zero-status car, which was obviously a worked-over mundane Ford. “Ford” was the low-status car at the time, made worse by the other, formerly low-status cars (Chevy and Plymouth) becoming technical superior: One HP per Cubic Inch! Fuel Injection! Cross-Ram Super Commando! etc.

    The 1958 “Square Bird”, on the other hand, was innovative, it was Ford’s first unit-body car, it was long and low (requiring the development of the famous Ford 9” rear differential), and it looked like a rocket ship inside and out. “Cool”? Yes, very! And if Robert McNamara hd stuck to making T-Birds and Lincoln Continentals, he wouldn't be languishing in hell ...

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  11. s.w. -- thanks. (I've read some Schopenhauer, not a lot.)


    J.P.,
    thx for the history re Edsel.

    In the Smithian and Ricardian view, which Marx shared in this respect, the value of a commodity and its price aren't the same -- not its day-to-day price at any rate. As the OP says, the exchange-value of a commodity, according to Marx, is "a crystal of abstract homogeneous social labour."

    As the OP notes, Marx called this absurd or crack-brained, but at some level he must have thought it correct -- if not, I'm not sure what becomes of the theory of exploitation as laid out in schematic form in Capital v. 1. (You can still think capitalists exploit workers without accepting Marx's *specific account* of exploitation, and indeed my strong impression is that that is RPW's position, but Marx does have an account of exploitation that does seem to depend on the "absurd" notion being, at some level, right. If RPW thinks otherwise, I guess he'll let us know that.)

    So if day-to-day price and value are not, in the tradition of classical political economy at any rate, the same, then the value of the Edsel (according to this view that Marx adopted in this respect) is not what someone was willing to pay for it in a showroom. Rather, the value (in a simplified sense) of it was the amt of socially nec. labor time it took to make, i.e., how long a worker of average productivity took to make the car.

    Let's say that's 35 hours (making up a figure). So the value of an Edsel was 35 hours of congealed "abstract" socially necessary labor. But how does that translate into "monetary" terms? Well, you could look at how much gold, say, could be mined and refined in 35 hours of socially necessary (i.e., average productivity) labor. Call it (making up a figure) 100 ounces of gold. Then the value of the Edsel would be 100 ounces of gold (or the dollar equivalent perhaps), *irrespective* of what price it fetched in a showroom on any given day.

    I'm not saying I agree with this approach, I'm just laying out my perhaps primitive understanding of what the labor theory of value (per Marx) entails. (Perhaps I'm wrong, in which case someone will correct me.) For now I have to leave this site for the rest of the evening. (after a postscript in next box)

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  12. P.s. Marx says commodities are "mysterious" partly because their value is not obvious just by looking at them or at the daily prices they fetch.

    From Capital ch. 1 (B. Fowkes trans.), emphasis added: "The production of commodities must be fully developed before the scientific conviction emerges...that all the different kinds of private labor...are continually being reduced to the quantitative proportions in which society requires them. The reason for this reduction is that in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products [I take this to mean the day-to-day prices], the labor-time socially necessary to produce them asserts itself as a regulative law of nature.... The determination of the magnitude of value by labor-time is therefore a secret hidden under the apparent movements in the relative values of commodities."

    He goes on a bit later to say that "the money form" "conceals the social character of private labor and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly." Then there appear the sentences about "the absurdity" of the statement that coats and boots are brought into a relation with linen (quoted in the OP). But while the statement may be "absurd," it's also a description, on one level, of what happens. The relation of coats and boots to linen, or to gold and silver, means that commodities are being exchanged (boots for gold or silver, say), but this exchange hides the "secret" that their value is determined by (abstract) human labor time. Underneath the relation of the boots to the gold is the "social relation" between individual workers, whose relation appears to them in an "absurd form." The next paragraph begins: "The categories of bourgeois economics consist precisely of forms of this kind."

    Make of this what you will, but as I read it, he's not saying that the LTV is absurd, but rather that the "form" of commodities exchanging for money is "absurd" because its effect is to hide the "secret" of how the value of commodities is determined, and thus also to hide the relations between human workers as "relations between material objects."

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  13. I'm curious to know, in a similar vein to LFC, why the point where we left off with the argument isn't simply a devastating objection to the labour theory of value?

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  14. The standard version of Prof. Wolff's "blintz" joke involves kreplach rather than blintzes. This makes better sense, since blintzes are cylindrical and so don't have corners to fold over. Also, I at least find it funnier to frame the boy's reaction upon the last fold as "Ayyy! Kreplach!" due to the more explosive sound of the word. The joke was well-known enough that I seem to remember one of my teachers, perhaps Cavell, in lecture warning us against having a "kreplach-reaction" to a certain line of thought.

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  15. Yesterday I stumbled (in the internet sense) on a fairly recent article in Review of Radical Political Economics by a philosopher (who was still a grad student at the time of publication).

    It was a quite well-written piece that aimed to defend how Marx dealt with the LTV and the so-called transformation problem (the issue of how values get translated into prices), which he addressed in vol. 3 of Capital. The article also made extensive reference to ch.1 of Capital vol.1 and criticized RPW's book _Understanding Marx_, whether fairly or not I'm not sure.

    Looking at this article has made me think I shd prob stop commenting on these Marx posts. I've never read v. 3 of Capital, I'm not familiar with the literature (much of it doubtless quite abstruse and technical) on the transformation problem, and even my reading of vol. 1 was a long time ago. I think the wiser path may be to let others worry about all this.

    Even the question of Marx's attitude toward classical (i.e. "bourgeois") political economy, as expressed in ch. 1 of vol. 1, and addressed by Prof. Wolff in his latest post in this series, is open to more than one reading (though, in line with what I just said, I'm not going to go into it).

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  16. Here's a recent interview with Brian Leiter about Marx.

    At one hour and 2 minutes he dismisses the labor theory of value and the technical Marxist notion of exploitation based on it, although he insists that workers are exploited in what we might call "the common sense version of exploitation".

    In the fifteen minutes that follow, Leiter outlines what he finds to be true and what he believes is false in Marx's writing. Worth listening to as well as to the first hour of the interview.

    Leiter says that his book on Marx will probably appear next year.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU0l_f8NWr4

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  17. While I'm (also) inclined to not accept the labor theory of value, it's worth noting that there are some Marxist/radical economists (and some non-economists) who defend it (and as I mentioned above, there is a technical literature that I'm not v. familiar with).

    The fairly-soon-to-be-published Leiter book is co-authored with a former student who wrote a dissertation on Marx under his supervision.

    p.s. The article I mentioned above is open-access, but I'm not going to link to it unless someone asks me to, partly because I'm not sure exactly what I think of it.

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  18. Interesting (to me) that Leiter, in the part of the podcast I listened to, mentioned Michael Heinrich as perhaps the most sophisticated (Leiter didn't use that exact word) defender of Marx's economics. I don't think I'd ever heard of Heinrich. (Nor do I know how widely shared Leiter's description of him is.)

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  19. LFC,

    For the record, Leiter does not totally dismiss Marx's economics: he writes off the labor theory of value, but not Marx's general description of capitalism.

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  20. Right, but the phrase "Marx's economics," at least as I use it and I think as some others do, refers to the specifics of Marx's economic theory. From the part of the podcast I listened to, Leiter thinks capitalism is exploitative in a colloquial sense of "exploitation," he thinks everyone who has to sell their labor-power to live or survive is "unfree" and a "wage slave" (to one degree or another), and he endorses Luxemburg's "socialism or barbarism" (though he didn't go into details and that came toward the very end).

    He clearly thinks Marx is a very important thinker w/ many insights (I also listened to his answer on whether historical materialism is "true"), but he does not, at least as I use the phrase, accept the key technical aspects of Marx's economics. (He said that what Marx was trying to do in Capital v.3 didn't "work."

    Since, in the probably somewhat primitive way I understand it, I also lean toward not accepting Marx's economics, that doesn't bother me. In short, I distinguish between "Marx's economics" and "Marx's overall critique of capitalism." One can find a good deal that is valuable in the latter while not accepting the former.

    And btw, unlike Prof. Wolff, who (I gather from past posts and writings) has his own account of exploitation that seems to go beyond the colloquial meaning of "exploitation," Leiter doesn't.

    Again, that doesn't bother me. I appreciate Leiter's skill and clarity in expounding his views, but I don't regard him as the fount of all wisdom on Marx, or on capitalism. I might view him as the fount of all wisdom on Nietzsche if I were interested in Nietzsche, which I'm not. (I suppose that could change, but it's unlikely to.)

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