Wednesday, September 13, 2023

MARX BOOK DAY FIVE

 In 1867, when Karl Marx published volume 1 of Capital, half a century had passed since the publication of Ricardo’s Principles, 91 years since Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations had appeared. The discipline of Political Economy had flourished for a century or more. Countless books had appeared contributing to this intellectual discipline. Some, like Ricardo’s Principles, were spare, elegantly written, academic treatises. A few, like Smith’s Wealth of Nations, were gracefully written, with lovely turns of phrase and witty metaphors. But Marx’s Capital was absolutely unlike anything that had ever been written about economic affairs and, I dare to say, was absolutely unlike anything that would ever be written again about society or economy. The first six or seven chapters, in particular, are utterly mysterious and seem to have more in common with the writings of Jonathan Swift or Charles Dickens. Marx ranged widely over the entire 2000 year history of Western literature. His text was filled with odd metaphors, mysterious turns of phrase, and puzzling passages.

 

Consider simply one example among many, chosen from the fourth section of chapter 1, which by the way, bears the mysterious title “the fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof.” Marx writes, “when I state that coats or boots stand in relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labor, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident.”   The German original of the last phrase is “so springt die Verrücktheit dieses Ausdrucks ins Auge.”  No doubt “absurdity” was a fine translation in the 19th century, but in the 20th century, sophisticated literary critics gave “absurdity” a good name – Theater of the Absurd and the like. A more accurate translation of “Verrückt” would be “nutty,” “crazy,” or “crackbrained.”   The text poses so many problems for even the sophisticated reader that that most raffiné of French Marxists, Louis Althusser, actually suggested at one point that students skip the first chapter, read the rest of the book, and then return to the beginning only after they had mastered the rest.

 

What in heaven’s name was going on? Marx had read everything that had been written about Political Economy in all of the modern European languages.  He had labored for years on the manuscript of his great work, tinkering with it so compulsively that his lifetime colleague and correspondent, Friedrich Engels, actually at one point started making bets with him about when he would finally publish it, offering to give him a dozen of bottles of wine if he would only bring the book to completion. Why could Marx not write about political economy as all of his predecessors had?

 

One theory is what I like to think of as the childhood polio explanation. According to this hypothesis, when Marx was a university student, a particularly virulent strain of Hegelism was raging pandemically in Germany’s university communities. Marx, on this view, contracted a nearly fatal case of it, and although he survived he was permanently intellectually crippled. As a consequence, he could barely drag himself from the premises to the conclusion of a syllogism and it was simply thoughtless and unkind to expect him to move about in the realm of ideas like Michael Jackson moonwalking across the stage or Fred Astaire tip tapping up a flight of stairs.  The English had a simpler version of this explanation: Marx was German and therefore could not be expected to write simply and clearly like an Englishman.

 

Fortunately for us, we have indisputable textual evidence that these explanations are wrong. In 1864, The International Working Men’s Association (referred to sometimes as the First International) was formed and Marx was elected to the Governing Council. The next year, a British workingman named John Weston delivered a speech to the Council in which he argued, basing himself on the theories of Ricardo, that there was no point in workers striking for higher wages because the result would simply be that the food and clothing they purchased would rise in price to absorb what they had gained from the strike. Marx decided to respond to Weston, and being Marx wrote a response so long that it took two meetings of the Council for him to deliver it.

 

Marx wrote the response in English. He delivered it in English. After his death, it was published in English as a little pamphlet with the title Value, Price, and Profit.  If you read that pamphlet, you will find that it is written as clearly and plainly as Ricardo’s Principles.  Indeed, save for the fact that Marx takes a different view of matters then Ricardo did, there is no significant difference between the texts.

 

So Marx could have written Capital à la Ricardo, as it were.  Why he chose not to is a question whose answer reveals in the deepest way, Marx’s understanding of capitalist reality.

8 comments:

  1. A small correction.

    Western Literature is a lot older than 2000 years, as you affirm above.

    A quick Google search puts Homer in the 8th century BC.

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  2. So, "capitalists" skim/have skimmed wage workers. (Was Robert Owen a capitalist?) They skim everything they ingeniously can imagine. Where is the political in political economy? How has money and status twisted regulation and adjudication (plus the academy, media, religion)? The market has always been regulated and adjudicated. You know, all these linear algebras and esoteric calculuses mean absolutely nothing without a model of reality. Seems like Marxists use von Mises' model. (Of course, you said Karl used the classical economists' model.) If it is illusory, where's a sound, functional one? Have you created one?

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  3. @ bspinozanow

    RPW has a set of lectures on Marx on YouTube. You might try watching them. You certainly don't have to agree w what RPW says, but at least it would perhaps forestall misrepresentations of his views.

    On another point, you write: "Seems like Marxists use von Mises' model." I assume you know who von Mises was, so what are you talking about? A bit of elaboration would seem necessary.

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  4. LFC: good to get a ripple. Of course, I have a model of the market, but seriously wonder why Marxist do not, have not created, as far as I know, a more real set of categories and relations than the illusory classical economists and people like von Mises and, oh my, F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman. Aside: I asked Economic Policy Institute what model of inflation does the Federal Reserve use, asked twice, crickets. Brother, I'm just trying to engage the really special man. Throwing stuff out. Hope he is well. 90? So sorry I did not Youtube sooner. (PS, watched all of Marx. Have several of his books on my shelf.)

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  5. Off topic. A reply to one of Professor Wolff's previous posts.

    The world of consciousness could just be a criminal reprogramming & assimilation taking place in another universe. Plato's Republic & Buddhist ideas of birth, death, & rebirth may be subterfuge for you to obtain that information needed to be truly conscience of why you are truly here for--in a surreal format to keep the true programming hidden from us. Maybe you are in a holonovel to repatriate yourself back to that universe you truly belong to? Maybe after the Day of Judgement that holonovel wakes you up & you return to full consciousness. And what if your rejection on that day will need you to live another life? While if you are admitted to heaven you can be repatriated & awakened to real life? Meaning you can walk out of the holonovel room. And what if the program for the holonovel has no safety setting for pain? Meaning if you fall you can have all sorts of injuries. But what is the key to you being repatriated? One must have a sense of empathy in life by helping through charity those who have suffered. Helping 'Our fellow sufferers,' through charity as Arthur Schopenhower said. Fail that and you must repeat the game. Go figure.

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  6. I once heard Bill O'Reilly say on FOX News that he would buy his way into heaven by putting into his will a clause for his wealth to go to charity. But like what Francis Bacon said in his Essays if you do that then you are really only being generous with money that doesn't belong to you anymore.

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  7. re: Widow’s Cruse

    Being, however, only derived from an advance of wages, that increase of their purchasing power must exactly correspond to the decrease of the purchasing power of the capitalists. —Marx (Value, Price and Profit)

    This is at odds with what Keynes and other economists found.

    The term widow’s cruse was first used in economics by John Maynard Keynes (1930, p. 139) in the presentation of his fundamental equations. Keynes argued that enterprise macroeconomic profits, as he defined them there, or what we would now call “business retained earnings,” moved up one-to-one with increases in investment and increases in consumption out of profits. Thus, Keynes argued that “however much of their profits entrepreneurs spend on consumption, the increment of wealth belonging to entrepreneurs remains the same as before. Thus profits, as a source of capital increment for entrepreneurs, are a widow’s cruse which remains undepleted however much of them may be devoted to riotous living” (p. 139). Keynes was then making a reference to the Old Testament story (1 Kings 17) in which a widow was assured that her barrel of meat and jar of oil would never be depleted.

    The analogy was later picked up by Nicholas Kaldor (1956), when he presented his Keynesian theory of income distribution and growth. Both Keynes (1930) and Kaldor (1956) assumed full employment. For both of them, lower propensities to save would lead to an increase in prices relative to costs, and this would entail higher profits in the static case of Keynes and higher profit share and profit rates in the dynamic case of Kaldor.

    In the meantime, another version of the widow’s cruse was put forward by Michal Kalecki (1942), without the full-employment assumption, based on adjustments through quantities (real output and employment) rather than prices. Kalecki’s equation reads that Profits = Investment + Consumption Out of Profits, under the classical assumption that wages are all spent.

    The widow’s cruse is the price-adjusting equivalent of the quantity-adjusting paradox of thrift.

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  8. Luigi L. Pasinetti did work in this area also. The following quote is quite surprising (emphasis in the original):

    Pasinetti presents an approach that is more complete but arrives at the same result. The most striking conclusion remains that workers can in no way influence the distribution between wages and profits. And the savings rate of workers still cannot influence the macroeconomic division between wages and profits, which is solely determined by the decisions of capitalists.

    source (opens up a pdf file): What Do We Know About the Labor Share and the Profit Share? Part I: Theories

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