PART VIII: WHAT MARX GOT WRONG

A number of readers have raised important questions that I need to address, but before turning my attention to that I have decided to finish my exposition. I am sure it is clear that I have vastly more to say than I am putting into this little multipart essay – I mean, I have published two books and a number of lengthy articles on the subject. My purpose here has been simply to highlight my claim that it is possible to bring the literary criticism and the mathematical economics together in a fruitful fashion.

 

I am fond of saying that Karl Marx was the greatest student of society who ever lived and I genuinely believe that, but I do not think he was a prophet or messenger from God. He was a student of society, which means that he looked at the world around them, studied it as deeply as he could, analyzed it as best he could, got a great many things – important things – right, and of course got a number of things wrong. Today, I want to talk about what he got wrong or more broadly what he failed to foresee, because understanding those failures or inadequacies can help us to understand a good deal about the world in which we live.

 

As I see it, Karl Marx got four big things wrong or failed to foresee them. The first of these concerned how the capitalist class would evolve; the second concerned how the consciousness of the working class would evolve; the third concerned what would happen to capital; and the fourth concerned what would happen to labor. That is a lot of big things. Before I turn to them one by one, let me repeat that Marx got the very biggest thing dead right. He was right about it when he wrote and he is still right about it. One can express that one big thing in a simple sentence only nine words long and those nine words remain the most difficult nine words for the greatest economists in the world to comprehend. Here they are:

 

Capitalism rests on the exploitation of the working class.

 

The first thing Marx failed to foresee was that the capitalists, despite their vicious leave no prisoners competition with one another, would manage in a crisis to band together sufficiently to save capitalism itself. Marx was correct that the booms and busts characteristic of early capitalism would get worse and worse until there was a worldwide economic crash. But to put the matter simply in a phrase, Marx failed to foresee Keynes. He understood that the state was the executive committee of the capitalist class but he did not see that the committee would prove capable of pulling capitalism back from the brink each time its own self-destructive expansion and competition threatened its survival.

 

The second thing Marx failed to foresee or to appreciate was the power and permanence of the national, racial, and religious identifications that in the early days tended to set German workers against French workers, white workers against black workers, Catholic workers against Protestant workers, and all Christian workers against Muslim workers. In the second decade of the 20^th century, socialists like my grandfather confidently predicted that German and French workingmen would not willingly go into the trenches and kill one another for their capitalist masters. Indeed, at the beginning of the first world war, many socialists were pacifists, not out of religious conviction but out of a belief that workers would and ought to be united across national boundaries by their class position in the ever more international capitalist economy. One hundred years later, we are compelled to face the bitter truth that in the lives and passions of hundreds of millions of men and women worldwide, class solidarity is trumped by patriotic nationalism, religious fervor, or racial animosity.

 

The third thing Marx failed to foresee was that capitalism, as it grew in the way that he anticipated it would, would morph into shareholder ownership of capitalist enterprises. I have talked about this before on this blog and I will not go into any detail about something that is, after all, familiar to us all because it is the world in which we live. Since Marx insisted that the functioning of capitalism could not be traced to the personalities or desires or greed of individual capitalists but had to be understood systematically and structurally, his theory was well positioned to adapt to the new form that capitalism took, but he himself did not, so far as I know, anticipate the rise of the limited liability joint stock enterprise. The complete divorce in the general case (Jeff Bezos to the contrary notwithstanding) of ownership from managerial control is, looked at one way, the perfection and logical conclusion of the tendencies that Marx perceived in the earliest days of the development of capitalism, but of course he did not foresee how it would play out in detail.

 

And fourth – perhaps most important, to my way of thinking – Marx completely failed to see that a permanent steeply pyramidal structure of jobs, wages, and salaries would become the seemingly unalterable face of mature capitalism. When Marx was writing, capitalism was systematically destroying traditional crafts and guilds and breaking down structures of job knowledge and performance that had characterized the pre-capitalist era. The world that Marx was looking at seemed to be reducing the workers to an undifferentiated mass of semiskilled machine operatives who lacked both tools and skills in particular historical crafts. Indeed, it was this development which encouraged him to believe that class consciousness would grow as workers first in one factory, then in one industry, then in many industries, then in one nation, and finally worldwide would come to understand their common interest in uniting and confronting capital. But what happened in the 20^th century was the emergence of a steep pyramid of jobs and compensations. A manual worker making a barely survivable wage might, from an analytical perspective, occupy the same position in the structure of a capitalist economy as a middle manager of a large corporation making perhaps 40 or 50 times as much money, wearing a suit, getting fringe benefits, and so forth, but there was no likelihood whatsoever that the two of them would make common cause against their common exploiter. Indeed, as my two old University of Massachusetts friends and colleagues Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis demonstrated in a lovely mathematical essay, one could show that in the modern capitalist world relative exploitation had replaced absolute exploitation, so that not only did capital exploit its high paid employees, but they in turn relatively exploited employees further down in the pyramid of wages and salaries.

 

It follows from all of this that there is a very serious need not to reject Marx’s fundamental insight concerning the exploitative character of capitalism but rather to continue developing modern understandings of contemporary capitalism grounded in that fundamental insight and completely attendant to the realities of 21^st-century international capitalism.

 

This analysis, which echoes somewhat the analysis I offered in my essay “The Future of Socialism,” goes some way toward explaining to those of us still in mourning why socialism has not succeeded capitalism.

CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

Before I continue  mydiscussion of the thought of Karl Marx, let me offer a little expression of praise for the online version of the New York Times crossword puzzle. For about 13 months now I have been doing the puzzle online rather than on paper, as had been my custom for 20 years or more. The great virtue of doing the puzzle online is that the app keeps track of how you do day by day, week by week, month by month. As everybody knows who is addicted to the Times puzzle, it starts very easy on Monday, gets progressively harder until Thursday, which always has a special tricky gimmick in it, and then continues getting harder until Saturday. The Sunday puzzle is not harder, it is just longer – in difficulty it is roughly equal to the Wednesday puzzle. Today the app told me that I completed the puzzle in less than my average time but not as quickly as my best time. The app also purports to keep track of my global average of successful solutions but there is a flaw in the app which makes its calculation incorrect. I think I have successfully solved the puzzle roughly 95 or 96% of the time in the past 13 months but the app claims that my success rate is 99.5%. The problem is that when I fail and ask to see the completed puzzle so that I can find where I made my mistake, the app records that my streak of successful solutions is ended but then incorrectly treats the revealed puzzle as a successful solution. Oh well, nothing is perfect, but the New York Times puzzle online comes close.  On to Marx.

A DAY OFF

I took a day off from the extended comments I have been making about Marx because this morning I appeared as a guest in a freshman writing course at Cornell University where the students just got finished reading my little book In Defense of Anarchism.  It was a lovely experience and seeing them all on my computer on gallery view cheered me up no end. I have spent the last two weeks binge watching the trial of Derek Chauvin.  That has been somewhat depressing, I must confess

It is hard to be 87 years old and see what this country is becoming, but then Prince Philip just passed away at 99 so perhaps I will get to see a little bit more of what the better half of my fellow Americans can make of this place.

Tomorrow, I want to try to respond to some of the responses I have received both on this blog and in email messages to what I have been writing. 

PART VII THE IRONY HITS THE MATH

 

My Interpretation of the Thought of Karl Marx

 

Part Seven: The Irony Hits the Math

 

So Marx was wrong. The distinction between labor and labor power is not the key to understanding both the exploitation that lies at the heart of capitalism. But he is clearly right that the workers are exploited. Furthermore, he is clearly right when he claims that capitalism misrepresents itself as a system founded upon freedom for all including the workers. And he is right that capitalism manages both the mystify itself and, unlike the church, even to conceal the fact of this mystification so that both workers and capitalists and the economists who analyze their doings imagine wrongly that what goes on in the capitalist marketplace is free of the clouds of mystery that surround the altar and the throne.

 

It was also clear to me that the sophisticated mathematical reinterpretations of the classical school of Political Economy, while they were an enormous analytical advance on the arguments of Marx or Ricardo, completely failed to capture the mystifications of capitalism or the irony in the description of capitalism as a system of “free markets.” So I put to myself a question: is there some way of revising the mathematical analysis so that it preserves the power and clarity that had been achieved by the modern reinterpreters of the classical school while at the same time, in some manner of speaking, introducing the irony into the equations? No one had ever asked this question before, so far as I could tell. Indeed, no one had ever conceived it to be a question one could ask. But I had an idea.

 

Let us for a moment clear away the equations and ask what Marx is telling us about the situation in which 19^th-century English workers found themselves. He is telling us that by a long historical process the workers have been deprived of control over their own labor, they have been deprived of the tools of their labor, they have been deprived even of the skills which they use in their labor.  As part of what Marx memorably called “the reserve army of the unemployed,” the workers are compelled to accept the wages that the capitalists offer and to labor in the factories in the manner and under the conditions dictated by their employers. They do not have land on which they can grow their own food if they choose not to accept employment in the factories. They do not have looms or forges, spinning jennies or lathes. They have only their own bodies which day after day they apply to the tools and raw materials presented to them by their employers.

 

Now, in a free market, a competitive market, a capitalist market – so all the classical Political Economists agreed -- there is a single ruling rate of profit which is adjusted and regulated by the free choices that capitalists make to move their capital from sector to sector in pursuit of the largest return on their investment. If a capitalist who owns a factory that weaves woolen cloth observes that capitalists in the furniture business make a higher rate of return (and, let us recall, that in the classical school perfect information is assumed), then over time and with some adjustment that capitalist can cash in his investment in the woolen factory and shift it with to a furniture factory. To be sure, this is not a switch that can be made overnight for there is a problem with what is called “fixed capital,” but over time and more or less bumpily, the capital gets transferred to the new sphere of production. This has the double effect of increasing the amount of woolen cloth available in the market and decreasing the amount of furniture available for sale. Changes in the relative size of demand and supply alter the prices at which these goods sell which in turn reduces somewhat the rate of return in the cloth industry and increases it in the furniture industry. So by an unceasing series of such individual capitalist decisions and actions the profit rate is perpetually equilibrated. This is the familiar picture painted by Ricardo and his lesser contemporaries. The system of price equations representing the operations of a capitalist economy provides a mathematical model for this story of what goes on in the normal functioning of capitalism.

 

Now, since capitalism represents itself – or, more precisely, misrepresents itself – as a system in which the workers must be understood as producers of a commodity, labor, on a par with the furniture producer and the woolen cloth producer, a mathematical model of this economy must include an equation for the labor producing sector. Like all the other equations, this equation must include a profit markup.

 

Thus far the mystification. Ah, but the labor producers, unlike the furniture producers and the cloth producers, cannot shift their capital to a different line of production when they observe that it pays a higher rate of return, for their capital is nothing other than their bodies and the only way they can cash in their investment in their bodies is by… cashing it in, which is to say dying. This is nothing against capitalism, of course. Capitalism places no legal or other constraint on the choices of the workers. It is just an unfortunate metaphysical accident, perhaps laid at the door of Descartes if someone must be blamed, that the workers’ body and soul are inseparable this side of the grave.

 

Suppose we were to write a system of equations for an economy in which the workers genuinely are treated as free petty commodity producers of the commodity labor. And suppose we were to express mathematically this unfortunate constraint on the workers’ ability to move their capital into other lines of production, thus in a manner of speaking – and only in a manner of speaking – building the ironic treatment of capitalism as a free market system into the equations.  Well, because of the unfreedom of those condemned to produce labor, the rate of return in that sector may not be equal to the rate of return in the other sectors and so it must be represented by a different variable, which in my new system of equations I arbitrarily decided would be ρ or rho. What mathematical conclusions could we then draw?

 

Without troubling you overly with the mathematics, and, I might say, hardly surprisingly, it turns out that the total profit appropriated in the system by all of the capitalists exactly equals the profit forgone by the workers on their capital – their bodies – by the fact that they cannot shift that capital about in pursuit of a better rate of return and hence are forced to sell their output below what would otherwise be its equilibrium price. (Those who wish to see all of this demonstrated mathematically can take a look at my essay A Critique and Reinterpretation of Marxist Labor Theory of Value, archived and accessible by the link at the top of this page.)  In the world Marx was looking at rho was effectively zero.

 

And there you have it. In a simple model that abstracts for the moment from any number of complications that in a fully developed theory would of course have to be taken care of, you can see transparently the real root of capitalism’s exploitation of workers, an exploitation, Marx makes clear over hundreds of pages, that was grounded in a long historical process leading from late feudalism to the capitalism of 19^th century England.

 

This is just a beginning, quite obviously, but it is I think a good beginning for it places center stage in all of its complexity Marxist conception of the essence of capitalism and of the combination of theoretical and literary devices required to capture that complexity. Tomorrow I will say just a bit about how to develop this theory in order to make it come closer to fitting the reality of the capitalism we know today.

A WORD OF CLARIFICATION

When I referred in my last episode to linear algebra, I did not have in mind the little corn/iron price and labor value equations that I offered by way of illustration. I had in mind rather the Perron Frobenius theorems concerning the maximal eigenvalues of square nonnegative matrices. This material may very well be taught overseas in grade school, but I do not think it is covered that early in American schools. However, when I decided that I would present my little equations to my UNC Chapel Hill philosophy department graduate course in the spring of 2020, I was apprehensive about going through the real mathematics so I went online and googled around for a while. I came upon the official website of the North Carolina State Department of Education. There I found an elaborate table specifying what the State Department Of Education requires to be taught in every grade from kindergarten to 12^th grade in North Carolina public schools, in the areas of reading, spelling, writing, American history, biology, chemistry, physics, and also mathematics. With a little effort, I determined that the simple version of my mathematical analysis used only mathematics that is required to be taught in North Carolina schools in the ninth grade, and I told my graduate students that in a desperate effort to keep them in the course.

 

So, if you went to an American high school and made it through your freshman year mathematics course, you should not have any trouble with this part of my exposition. Those of you who want the full monte can consult my essay entitled A Critique and Reinterpretation of Marx’s Labor Theory of Value, accessible by clicking on the link to box.net at the top of this blog.

PART SIX THE MATHEMATICS SHOWS UP

                                                 My Interpretation of the Thought of Karl Marx

 

Part Six: Enter the Mathematics

 

(Several of the comments call for a response but I will postpone that in order to get on with my exposition.)

 

There is, of course, vastly more to be said about Marx’s views in volume 1, but I wish at this point to turn to the modern mathematical interpretation of classical Political Economy which I mentioned at the very beginning of this exposition. Unlike their modern descendants, the classical economists made almost no use at all of formal mathematics. Marx had a go at working out some numerical examples but mostly he botched it and it added very little to his explanation of his theories. When the modern mathematical re-interpreters of Ricardo and Marx undertook to translate their theories into equations, they had to formalize a decision that Ricardo and the others had made more or less without explicitly stating it.

 

In order to reduce the complexity of real economic activity to equations, economists must in effect choose between supposing that there is one dominant technique for the production of each distinct commodity and supposing that there are an infinite number of techniques for the production of each distinct commodity. To put this point as simply and formulaically as I can, they have to decide whether they are going to use linear algebra or calculus. The neoclassical assumption of an infinity of alternative ways of combining inputs to produce an output lends itself to analysis using calculus and the classical assumption of a single dominant technique of production for each commodity finds its most natural expression in systems of linear equations.

 

Linear algebra makes it possible to handle formally any finite number of commodities, each one represented by a single vector of inputs per unit of output. One can then manipulate what is called the unit input matrix to derive a variety of powerful conclusions. Since I may have lost many of you at this point, let me give a very simple example which will serve quite adequately to illustrate what I want to say. All this is laid out precisely and at length in my book, Understanding Marx.

 

Suppose we are talking about an elementary economy in which there are only two commodities, corn and iron. (What we call corn does not grow in England, of course, but the term “corn” was used by the English to mean “the dominant grain of a region,” hence the great debate in the early 19^th century in parliament as well as in the writings of the political economists over the so-called “corn laws” regulating the importation of grain from abroad.)  I have invented the following little corn/iron economy to illustrate what I want to say. Since I am now doing economics, there is no need for me to worry about the real-world relevance of what I am saying.

 

Suppose it takes 100 units of labor, 2 units of seed corn, and 10 units of iron to produce 300 units of corn. If we use the Greek letter l for labor value or quantity of embodied labor with subscripts indicating whether we are talking about the labor value of corn or the labor value of iron, and if we recall, what is essential, that direct labor must be entered at par since it is labor directly, not indirectly, contributed to the production of the output, then we can write the labor value equation for the corn sector in the following way:

 

                        100 + 2l_c+ 10l_i  =   300l_c

 

In words, this equation says that when producing 300 units of corn, the 100 units of labor directly applied in production and thus embodied in the corn output, added to the amount of labor embodied in the two units of corn used in production and the amount of labor embodied in the 10 units of iron used in production taken altogether equally amount of labor embodied in the 300 units of corn that are the output of the production process.

 

Using the letter p with appropriate subscripts to stand for the prices of corn and iron, the letter w to stand for the wage paid for the labor, and the Greek letter π to stand for the rate of profit, we can write the corresponding price equations for this little corn/iron model. The price equation in the corn industry looks like this:

 

                        (100w + 2p_c+ 10p_i)(1 + π)  =  300p_c

 

If I choose the appropriate input quantities for the iron sector and carry out a series of mathematical manipulations with which I shall not trouble you, I can demonstrate that the prices of corn and iron are proportional to their labor values, as Ricardo claimed, and also, what is really quite interesting, that these prices and labor values are independent of the wage and the profit rate, which vary inversely to one another, thereby also demonstrating the class conflict between labor and capital. All very impressive.

 

I spent a very great deal of time plowing through 10 or more thick difficult mathematical economics texts in each of which the theories of Ricardo and Marx were explored in excruciating detail. The big take away from all these books was that both Ricardo and Marx had been, contrary to the conventional wisdom, brilliant intuitive mathematical economists, much of whose theoretical work was sustained by this sophisticated 20^th century analysis.

 

But as I toiled away at my studies I noticed something curious and eventually troubling. There were symbols in the equations in these books for just about everything that Ricardo and Marx had talked about – symbols for quantities of inputs, symbols for quantities of outputs, symbols for prices of commodities, symbols for quantities of labor, and also the wages of labor, symbols for profit rates earned by capitalists. But nowhere in the equations could I find a symbol for Marx’s signature concept, labor power. Since in Capital Marx had made the distinction between labor and labor power the key to his solution to the central problem of the origin of profit, it seemed to me that any modern mathematical rendering of his theories should have somewhere a symbol for that central concept, but it was nowhere to be found. In effect, the mathematical economists I was reading, all of whom were extremely sympathetic to Marx’s theories, seemed to be saying that his story about the distinction between labor and labor power was simply, in Pooh Bah’s immortal phrase from the Mikado, merely “corroborative detail designed to lend an air of verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”

 

At this point a thought occurred to me. (Now, this is a sad tale but I feel compelled to tell it nonetheless.) Since there is no symbol for labor power, the distinction between labor and labor power plays no role at all in the formal analysis of Marx’s theories. To be sure, in the labor value equations the labor inputs are valued at par and in the price equations the price of labor has a letter, w, all its own, but the first is an assumption, not a conclusion, and the second is simply a notational convention. Could one write a set of equations that permitted us to calculate the iron value of labor and corn, rather than the labor value of corn and iron?

 

Iron value!? What on earth would an iron value be? Nobody ever talks about iron values or corn values but only about labor values. There might in fact be a distinction between labor power and labor and no corresponding distinction between corn power and corn or iron power and iron but if the distinction between labor power and labor did not enter into the equations then that would make no difference.

 

So I had a go at setting up some corn value and iron value equations and seeing what I would get. The first question – quite important – was whether one could always be sure in calculating iron values or corn values that when the equations were solved those values would be positive. After all, it would not make much sense to say that the amount of corn directly or indirectly required for the production of a unit of iron was negative! Well, a little mathematical manipulation (with some help from friends in the UMass economics department) revealed that so long as there was any surplus of any commodity anywhere in the system, all the corn values, or iron values, or labor values, or x-values in the system would necessarily be positive.

 

One of Marx’s most striking claims, demonstrated to be correct by the modern mathematical reinterpretations, was that the labor value of the physical surplus is exactly equal to the surplus labor extracted in the production process from the workers – a lovely mathematical demonstration of the fact of exploitation. But a little more manipulation with the equations demonstrated that this was also true for corn values or iron values. The corn value of the physical surplus was exactly equal to the surplus corn value extracted from the corn inputs in the system, and so forth.

 

In fact every single theoretical claim made by Marx in Volume 1 of Capital (all the claims in volumes two and three, for that matter) could be replicated using these nutty notions of corn value and iron value.

 

I was remarkably pleased with myself when I had reached these conclusions for I thought that I was the first person in the entire history of the discussion and commentary on the theories of Karl Marx to have even thought of this, let alone to have demonstrated it mathematically.  I told this story on my blog 10 years ago. Let me close this episode in my exposition by reproducing what I wrote there:

 

In 1981, I published an essay entitled "A Critique and Reinterpretation of Marx's Labor Theory of Value," in a journal called PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS. [I believe it is available on-line.] In that essay, I proved an extremely important theorem that shows that Marx was wrong to impute the exploitative capacity of capitalism to the labor/labor power distinction. I was, I firmly believed, the first person ever to realize the underlying logical flaw in Marx's argument, and to demonstrate it mathematically. The proof was not much from a mathematical point of view. Indeed, when I had first actually proved the theorem several years earlier, I was ignorant of linear algebra, and had used nothing but elementary algebra and some ingenious labeling moves. After the essay appeared [since I made the mistake of publishing it in a philosophy journal, almost no one read it who was capable of appreciating it], the brilliant, mathematically extremely sophisticated Marxist John Roemer published a reply and criticism in the journal in which, in passing, he pointed out that the same theorem had been published two years earlier by Josep M. Vegara in a monograph entitled ECONOMIA POLITICA Y MODELOS MULTISECTORIALES.

 

Sic transit gloria mundi

 

 

AN ADDENDUM BY WAY OF A RESPONSE

LFC makes the following comment: “Prof. Wolff has said that one of his aims is to "put the irony into the equations," but where is the irony here? I get the mocking language ("moneybags") and the element of mystification, but mockery and mystification aren't the same as irony. So where is it?” Once again, I am afraid that by rushing through my ideas too quickly I have neglected to include essential points, so instead of the next episode in this soap opera I will directly address LFC’s question. That will actually set things up for what I wanted to say next.

 

The central ironic utterance whose true meaning Marx seeks to expose is the phrase “free market.” In the era preceding the development of capitalism there was a complex network of constraints on economic activity. Guilds controlled the actions of master artisans and of the apprentices and journeymen in their establishments. Where a cabinetmaker could ply his trade, what prices he could charge for what he produced, what he paid to those working under him, these and many more aspects of economic activity were regulated by a mesh of laws, customs, and guild regulations. It was the elimination of these constraints that unleashed the enormous productivity of capitalism.

 

Thus the actions of entrepreneurs were free in the sense of being freed from traditional and other constraints. The workers too were free, or at least so it was said by the theorists and apologists of the new economic order. The workers were free to travel wherever they wished in search of work. They were free to bargain for wages in any way they wished, demanding more, refusing to accept the job that paid less, moving from city to city and from employer to employer without legal or other constraint. So it was that Marx described the marketplace as “an Eden of the innate rights of man… (where) alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.”

 

Thus far the apparent or superficial meaning of the phrase “free market.” But although the superficial meaning applied truly to the capitalists it was for the workers bitterly ironic. The deeper meaning was that the workers were indeed free – they were freed of the land on which they grew their food or tended their sheep. They were indeed free – they were freed of the tools of their labor. They were indeed free – they were freed even of the skills which they had acquired over long years of practice, for those skills were now built into the machines that they or their children tended. The workers were freed of everything save their capacity for labor and having nothing else with which to get their food, clothing, and shelter they were thus compelled to accept the wages offered by entrepreneurs or starve.  Their “freedom” was in fact slavery – wage slavery as it came to be called.

 

But Political Economy perpetuated the myth that workers, like their employers, were free men and women engaging freely in the production of commodities which they then freely brought to market and freely offered at any price they freely chose. Indeed, this myth was endorsed by the legal system, for just as the law forbade entrepreneurs to join together forming a “combination (of entrepreneurs) in restraint of trade,” so the workers were forbidden to join together into unions which the law construed also as “combinations (of entrepreneurs) in restraint of trade.”

 

There are other ironies in the standard descriptions of capitalism, including one that will play a central role in my mathematical analysis of the situation but it is this characterization of capitalism as a Free Market system that is the central unconsciously ironic utterance of all classical and neoclassical economic theory. In Capital, especially in the early chapters, Marx struggles first to give voice to and then to expose as meretricious the myth of the free market.  

 

I hope that these remarks begin to respond to the question posed by LFC. In the next one or two chapters of this saga I hope to enrich and deepen these insights and connect them up with the modern mathematical reinterpretation of the classical and Marxian Political Economy.