ONE LAST TIME

The comments indicate that there is still some confusion about the status of the Labor Theory of Value, so I am going to make another effort at clarifying this matter. As I indicated, nothing in Marx’s analysis of exploitation requires or indeed is even aided by his appeal to the distinction between labor power and labor. All of the important propositions he suggests concerning necessary labor and surplus labor, propositions that can be given a rigorous mathematical demonstration, can be replicated for the corresponding claims about surplus corn value or surplus iron value. The real explanation for exploitation, as Marx knows and demonstrates over many important pages, is that by a long historical process workers are deprived of ownership and control over land, tools, raw materials, and even their skills, leaving them unable to behave in the marketplace like the independent commodity producers that classical economic theory mystifyingly represents them as being.

 

But could there not be a system in which there was no surplus corn produced or surplus iron produced or surplus cloth produced but in which only surplus labor was produced, and would not such a system demonstrate that exploitation is, after all, the capitalists’ appropriation of that surplus labor under the guise of profit? The answer is that there could be a system, rather bizarre though it would be, in which the only surplus produced was surplus labor, but it would prove nothing of the sort. What would such a system look like?

 

Well, if we assume that the capitalists also perform the labor of management, which is of course essential to any successful capitalist enterprise, then we would have a system in which all of the necessary workers, including the managers who were also capitalists, would eat a modest working-class diet, wear modest working-class clothes, and live in modest working-class homes. The physical surplus in the society would all be used to feed, clothe, and house a group of servants would wait hand and foot on the capitalists but, be it noted, would be eating the same diet, wearing the same clothes, and living in the same sorts of homes. This, we may suppose somewhat comically, would be the choice of Puritan capitalists who shunned excess and display and luxury. Some surplus workers could serve as lawyers enforcing the laws that supported the exploitation carried out by the capitalists. Other surplus workers could serve as priests explaining each Sunday to the workers that it was God’s will that only the capitalists should have servants. There could even be a few surplus workers who would write philosophy books demonstrating rigorously that the sort of arrangements in force in the society were exactly those that rationally self-interested agents would choose behind a veil of ignorance.

 

The economy would not grow, of course, because the entire physical surplus would be directed to supporting the surplus workers in their modest lifestyle. Different choices by the capitalists could result in a surplus of corn, iron, and cloth that could then be used to expand the magnitude production in the society, drawing, as Marx observes, on the “reserve army of the unemployed.”

 

Notice, by the way, that in such a system the capitalists would have to work as managers because, surplus labor being the only surplus generated in the system, if the capitalists commanded their servants to cook them dinner the servants would have to reply that there was no corn to be had, and if the capitalists commanded their servants to make them new coats, the servants would have to reply that there was no surplus wool for their coats. So an economy that generated only surplus labor would be a rather odd state of affairs indeed but it is logically possible.

 

In this and every other economy that was generating any surplus anywhere in the system, it would, as can be mathematically demonstrated, be true that it took less than a unit of corn directly and indirectly to produce a unit of corn, less than a unit of iron directly or indirectly to produce a unit of iron, and so forth.

 

Marx did not realize this because he was so steeped in the doctrines of the classical political economists and because he lacked the mathematical tools that might have led him to a correct analysis, but his instincts were absolutely spot on. He identified the historical stripping from the peasants and early workers of the means of production as the essential precondition for the development of capitalism and he correctly stated that capitalism depends on the exploitation of the working class. If this last proposition strikes you as so obvious as not to be worth arguing about, seek out a friend who works in a modern Economics Department and see whether he or she will say, “oh yes, of course, everybody knows that.” Good luck! 

WEED WHACKING

T.J. asks the following question:  “when I (the capitalist) buy 8 hours of labor, I get more labor than is required to produce 8 hours of labor. So I get more than I pay for. But when I buy 8 bushels of corn, I only get 8 bushels of corn. Is it just that the algebra (which again, I don't understand) shows that when I buy 8 bushels of corn, I get more corn than is required to produce 8 bushels of corn? Maybe my hangup is that it just seems obvious that when I work for 8 hours, my boss makes more money from my labor than I'm going to spend housing and feeding myself, but it doesn't seem at all obvious that when I buy 8 bushels of corn, I could reproduce more than 8 bushels of corn from that input.”

 

The simple answer, T.J., is yes, exactly so.

Leaving aside the algebra, which I realize is for some people an obstacle, not an aid, to understanding, let us just ask this question: if it takes more than 8 bushels of corn somewhere in the economy directly or indirectly to produce 8 bushels of corn, how can the system possibly survive? In the next cycle of production, the system will have to be reduced in size and after several such reductions the system will go out of business entirely.

 

Intuitively, if you are measuring things in some commodity directly or indirectly required rather than in labor directly or indirectly required, the same truth is going to have to hold, namely that it will take less than one unit of any commodity required in the production process directly and indirectly to produce that unit if the system is to survive and flourish. In fact, with a little of that dreaded algebra, we can show that so long as in each cycle of production there is some physical surplus over and above what is required to run the system again at the same level of output for another cycle, then all of the labor values or corn values or iron values or X – values for any input X will have to be positive and for any X, the X – value of X will be less than one, meaning that there will be surplus X value generated in the system. What is more, and should be intuitively obvious, the X value of this physical surplus appropriated by the capitalists will exactly equal the surplus X value extracted from the direct X inputs into the system. All of those propositions that Marx intuitively grasped as true for labor turn out to be true for every input into the production process.

ONCE MORE, MARX

Prompted by a comment from Jerry Brown, I should like to return to the subject of the Labor Theory of Value. To many people who identify themselves as Marxists, the Labor Theory of Value plays somewhat the same role in their belief structure as is played by the doctrine of the Incarnation for Christians – if you give it up, you can no longer really claim to be one of the faithful. It is obvious from what I said in my recent series of posts on Marx that I do not share this view and although I have written about this before, I think it is important enough to return to the subject and spell out my views at greater length.

 

As I explained in my series of posts, what came to be called the Labor Theory of Value started life in the writings of Adam Smith as his attempt to explain what determined the customary or usual prices at which commodities sold in the marketplace. Smith was well aware that fluctuations in supply and demand would cause daily prices in the market to vary, but he noted that experienced buyers and sellers would learn that there was a usual or customary price for corn or cloth on which they could rely. He called this price the natural price of the commodity, or, using an 18^th-century synonym, its value. He was here introducing an idea that much later on came to be called the equilibrium price for a commodity. Smith then offered a very primitive explanation for the determination of the natural price or value of a commodity, namely the amount of labor it cost its producer. Smith had thus given birth to the idea of a labor theory of equilibrium price or, as he referred to it, a Labor Theory of Value.

 

Smith was aware of, but not able to come up with a solution for, several serious problems with this primitive theory. It fell to David Ricardo to solve the problem of rent or the price paid for the use of land and also to propose a brilliant solution for the problem of the accumulation of stock, what today we call capital. His notion of embodied labor enabled him for the first time to put forward a full-scale labor theory of equilibrium price or Labor Theory of Value. But there was a problem with this idea, brilliant as it was, and Ricardo knew it. The problem was that if different lines of industry exhibited varying proportions of capital and labor, then equilibrium prices would deviate from the quantities of labor embodied in the outputs.

 

It was at this point that Marx began his theoretical work. He believed he had a solution tgo Ricardo’s problem, but he chose to postpone discussion of it until volume 3 of Capital because he believed he had found a deeper problem in the traditional theory whose solution would reveal the mystified and ideologically concealed truth that capitalism rests on exploitation, not on free and equal exchange in the marketplace.  The problem, to put it quite simply, was that the classical political economists had no explanation for the emergence of profit. The key to Marx’s solution of this problem was his distinction between labor and labor – power, and with it the introduction of the category of surplus labor value, which, Marx claimed, is the real source of profit and the demonstration of the fundamental fact that capitalism rests on the exploitation of the working class.

 

No sooner had Marx put forward this dramatic critique and transformation of the classical theory of the political economists than economics as a discipline underwent a triple revolution. More or less simultaneously but independently of one another, Stanley Jevons in England, Carl Menger in Switzerland, and Leon Walras in France introduced the notion of marginal productivity, on the basis of which they undertook to explain equilibrium prices solely by referring to the relationship between demand and supply, putting entirely to one side any question of the quantity of labor directly or indirectly required for the production of commodities.

 

Smith and Ricardo became, in effect, curiosities put in a museum of outmoded ideas. Marx did not suffer the same fate. Quite to the contrary, he developed an intellectual following and then, mirabile dictu, a political following of revolutionaries who succeeded in taking over two of the largest countries in the world. The Labor Theory of Value ceased to be a brilliant but problematic explanation of the determination of equilibrium price in a capitalist market system, and became the esoteric doctrine of the Priesthood of the Temple. In some parts of the world, questioning the Labor Theory of Value got you stigmatized as a heretic, an unbeliever, even – God forbid – a liberal. In other places, it could get you killed.

 

Now I am, as I observed on the front page of this blog, an atheist. I do not believe in the Jewish God. I do not believe in the Christian God. I do not believe in the Muslim God. And I also do not believe in the divine revelation of the Labor Theory of Value. I do believe that capitalism rests on the exploitation of the working class, not as an article of faith but as the conclusion of a lifetime of study and consideration. I call myself a Marxist simply to express in a single word my admiration for the student of society who first articulated and defended this simple but fundamental fact of the modern world.

 

One might be tempted to say dismissively or disparagingly, “oh well, if that is all you mean when you call yourself a Marxist, all manner of people could say that without calling themselves Marxists.” They could, I suppose, but they don’t. It is quite remarkable how hard the world’s greatest Nobel laureate economists work to avoid acknowledging that capitalism rests on the exploitation of the working class, and if I were an old-fashioned Marxist, I might even say that it is no accident that the same people cannot bring themselves in their writings to utter the word “Marx.”

MUSICAL MEMORIES

Yesterday evening, a string quartet composed of members of the North Carolina Symphony came to the retirement community in which I live to give a free concert to us old folks. For the first time in 15 months, Susie and I entered the auditorium, suitably masked and appropriately distanced, and enjoyed an hour of first-rate live classical music. The principal offering was the last of Beethoven’s middle quartets, Opus 95. I could not recall whether I had played that quartet back in the day when I was the violist of an amateur quartet that met weekly in Amherst, Massachusetts. But when the ensemble played the dramatic opening phrase I recalled it quite well. As they continued on through the quartet, I began to have doubts whether I could ever actually have played the viola part in so demanding a work, so when I got back to our apartment I pulled out the music from my shelves and took a look. Sure enough, the viola part was covered with a blizzard of pencil markings that I had put in to guide me through the music. Needless to say, we did not play it as they did nor quite up to speed, but we did play it.

 

It is always nice to recall that chamber music was originally designed to be played in a chamber – a private gathering room or salon – not  in a concert hall. The cellist in our little amateur quartet was a woman who played with a rich full tone. She sat to my right in the traditional quartet arrangement and one of my greatest pleasures, as I worked my way through my part, was hearing her in my right ear.  It has always been a source of sadness to me that when I moved down to Chapel Hill I was unable to find a quartet to play with.

THREE MORE

Sidney Morgenbesser’s classic put down having been quoted, I will reproduce here two great stories from the Sidney legend which I tell in my autobiography, one of which, the second one, is not widely known.

Some months after the Spring of '68, Sidney was called for jury duty, and as luck would have it, he was tapped for a case involving alleged police brutality.  During the voir dire, the Assistant District Attorney assigned to try the case asked Sidney whether he had ever been treated brutally or unfairly by the police.  Sidney thought for a moment and said, "Brutally, yes.  Unfairly, no."  The ADA asked him to explain, and Sidney told the story of the attack by the TPF.  "And you didn't think they were acting unfairly?"  "No," Sidney said, "they were hitting everybody."  Sidney was a genuinely great man.

            While I am telling Sidney stories, let me tell one more that may not have made its way into the blogosphere.  A few words of explanation are required.  One of Columbia's best known professors at that time was the literary scholar Lionel Trilling.  Trilling was a New York Jewish boy who, before spending his entire career at Columbia, actually went to the high school [De Witt Clinton] at which my father taught for a while.  Despite his origins, he affected a cultivated WASP manner that, I imagine, he thought would be appropriate in an Oxford Senior Common Room.  Trilling was one of a number of Columbia professors who chose to focus their energies in the College rather than the Graduate School.  [That was an old rivalry for which I do not have time or space in these memoirs.]  One day, Sidney went to a cocktail party, at which he spotted Trilling holding forth in his best Oxonian style.  Sidney walked up and said, in a loud voice, "Ah, Lionel.  Incognito ergo sum, eh?"

            Now, this was pretty clearly a prepared bon mot.  Sidney, like Samuel Johnson, was not above lying in bed at night crafting a witticism that he would carry about with him until an occasion arose for delivering it.  As an author who does most of his writing in his head, I do not deprecate the practice.  Indeed, my favorite Oscar Wilde line is one that he never actually published, and that has come down to us only because someone present on the occasion had the good sense to record it.  I am referring, of course, to Wilde's immortal judgment on Dickens' Old Curiosity Shop -- "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."

ZINGERS

It is a lovely spring day here in North Carolina and I have finished my morning walk. I diverted myself during the long slog by recalling some lovely one-liners from the philosophical literature and I thought I might amuse myself and perhaps even amuse you as well by putting  them down in a blog post. Before I do that, however, I should like to offer my heartfelt thanks to those of you who have written truly generous compliments in response to my sometimes rather pathetic musing about the lifecycle and my current place in it. I do not think I could find words to tell you how much these comments meant to me. As I struggle, in Dylan Thomas’s beautiful words, not to go gentle into that good night but to rage, rage against the dying of the light, the thought that I have reached out and touched some of you warms me against the cold.

 

Now onto happier thoughts. Philosophers are by and large not known for their brevity but from time to time one of them gets off a line that stays in the mind, capturing in a few words a powerful and complex thought. I have some favorites, some of which I have quoted before but the very most favorite of all I think I have never actually quoted here. So let me get started.

 

I begin, as all philosophers must, with Plato. All of you will I am sure recall his great dialogue, the Gorgias, whose structure interestingly enough is exactly that of Book 1 of the Republic.  After disposing easily enough of Gorgias and Polus, Socrates confronts Callicles, to whom Plato gives some of his strongest arguments and most telling lines. Here is my favorite, delivered by Callicles shortly after he enters the dialogue:

 

“When I perceive philosophical activity in a young lad, I am pleased; it suits him, I think, and shows that he has good breeding. A boy who does not play with philosophy I regard as illiberal, the chap will never raise himself to any fine or noble action. Whereas, when I see an older man still at his philosophy and showing no sign of giving it up, that one seems to me, Socrates, to need a whipping!… Such a fellow must spend the rest of his life skulking in corners, whispering with two or three little lads, never pronouncing any large, liberal, or meaningful utterance.”

 

Skulking in corners, whispering with two or three little lads, is surely the greatest description ever given of the profession to which I have devoted my life. Only a philosopher as great as Plato would have the courage to put those words in the mouth of the character who is defending everything that Plato hates.

 

My second example comes from a text that I have frequently made reference to, the Preface to Kierkegaard’s brilliant short work, Philosophical Fragments. Virtually every line of the brief Preface is worth quoting but I shall restrict myself simply to this passage in which Kierkegaard gives voice to the intense seriousness with which he approaches philosophy:

 

“But if anyone were to be so polite as to assume that I have an opinion, and if he were to carry his gallantry to the extreme of adopting this opinion because he believed it to be mine, I should have to be very sorry for his politeness, in that it was bestowed upon so unworthy an object, and for his opinion, if he has no other opinion than mine.”

 

To lighten this post a bit after that desperately serious text, let me just mention a delicious question that appeared many decades ago on the Moral Sciences Tripos at Cambridge University. A few words are required for those of you too young to remember what epistemologists were fussing about 70 years ago. The centuries – long debate between the rationalists and the empiricists had at long last come down to a question of the role in empirical knowledge of something called sense data reports, which were supposed to be descriptions of the sensory perceptions on which, according to the epistemologists, all knowledge is based. Because it was widely believed at that time that each of us is unable actually to know what is in another’s mind, a good deal of ink was spilled (this was before computers) on the question whether there could be a private language in which sense experience would be described by the person who actually had that experience but who could not successfully communicate the experience to others. Wittgenstein blew up that debate with the argument that there could not be a private language and so theorists of knowledge moved on to other questions. Roughly at that time, some wit making up the final examination for Cambridge University undergraduate philosophy students came up with an examination question that captured the whole complicated kerfuffle in four words. His question was: “What were sense data?”

 

That is the ultimate inside joke.

 

Now on to my all-time favorite. It comes from a work published 370 years ago, the Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. Chapter VI of Part One has the rather elaborate title “Of the Interior Beginnings of Voluntary Motions; Commonly Called the Passions; And the Speeches by Which They Are Expressed.” The entire nine page chapter is well worth quoting but I shall restrict myself to my favorite nineteen words, which in scarcely more than two lines dispose for all time of the endless debates about what should be considered genuine faith and what a mere cult. I conclude this post with these words, which I have loved since reading them almost 70 years ago:

 

“Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed, RELIGION; not allowed, SUPERSTITION.”

 

 

THE ALL-VOLUNTEER ARMY

 David Palmeter observes that America paid a price for going to an all volunteer army, and he is quite right. Recall that the transition from the draft was in the first instance a consequence of the disaster of the Vietnam War which almost destroyed the discipline and effectiveness of the draft Army. The Defense Department ended the draft, improved the pay for the ranks, offered career opportunities to those who enlisted, and in that way enabled America finally to create the one thing it was missing on its way to becoming a full-scale imperial power: a professional army. America was now free to deploy troops endlessly for extended periods of time around the world without triggering the kind of social unrest and political turmoil that characterized the Vietnam era. With the adoption of that smarmy phrase, "thank you for your service," Americans could go about their business untroubled by the threat of actually having to serve in the military if they chose not to.  

If Americans want to impose their will on the world, they should have to belly up to the bar, put on the uniform, and take the risks themselves. I am sure it will strike most readers of this blog as odd that I am in favor of a conscript army but I really do not see any other way to get America to retreat from its imperial ambitions.

As tthey used to say in the part of Queens where I grew up, tuchas auf tisch.