2.3 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts cover a wide range of
topics, including much interesting material on private property and
communism, and on money, as well as developing Marx's critique of
Hegel. However, the manuscripts are best known for their account of
alienated labour. Here Marx famously depicts the worker under
capitalism as suffering from four types of alienated labour. First,
from the product, which as soon as it is created is taken away from
its producer. Second, in productive activity (work) which is
experienced as a torment. Third, from species-being, for humans
produce blindly and not in accordance with their truly human powers.
Finally, from other human beings, where the relation of exchange
replaces the satisfaction of mutual need. That these categories
overlap in some respects is not a surprise given Marx's remarkable
methodological ambition in these writings. Essentially he attempts to
apply a Hegelian deduction of categories to economics, trying to
demonstrate that all the categories of bourgeois economics — wages,
rent, exchange, profit, etc. — are ultimately derived from an analysis
of the concept of alienation. Consequently each category of alienated
labour is supposed to be deducible from the previous one. However,
Marx gets no further than deducing categories of alienated labour from
each other. Quite possibly in the course of writing he came to
understand that a different methodology is required for approaching
economic issues. Nevertheless we are left with a very rich text on the
nature of alienated labour. The idea of non-alienation has to be
inferred from the negative, with the assistance of one short passage
at the end of the text 'On James Mill' in which non-alienated labour
is briefly described in terms which emphasise both the immediate
producer's enjoyment of production as a confirmation of his or her
powers, and also the idea that production is to meet the needs of
others, thus confirming for both parties our human essence as mutual
dependence. Both sides of our species essence are revealed here: our
individual human powers and our membership in the human community.
It is important to understand that for Marx alienation is not merely a
matter of subjective feeling, or confusion. The bridge between Marx's
early analysis of alienation and his later social theory is the idea
that the alienated individual is 'a plaything of alien forces', albeit
alien forces which are themselves a product of human action. In our
daily lives we take decisions that have unintended consequences, which
then combine to create large-scale social forces which may have an
utterly unpredicted effect. In Marx's view the institutions of
capitalism — themselves the consequences of human behaviour — come
back to structure our future behaviour, determining the possibilities
of our action. For example, for as long as a capitalist intends to
stay in business he must exploit his workers to the legal limit.
Whether or not wracked by guilt the capitalist must act as a ruthless
exploiter. Similarly the worker must take the best job on offer; there
is simply no other sane option. But by doing this we reinforce the
very structures that oppress us. The urge to transcend this condition,
and to take collective control of our destiny — whatever that would
mean in practice — is one of the motivating and sustaining elements of
Marx's social analysis. .....
3. Economics
Capital Volume 1 begins with an analysis of the idea of commodity
production. A commodity is defined as a useful external object,
produced for exchange on a market. Thus two necessary conditions for
commodity production are the existence of a market, in which exchange
can take place, and a social division of labour, in which different
people produce different products, without which there would be no
motivation for exchange. Marx suggests that commodities have both use-
value — a use in other words — and an exchange-value — initially to be
understood as their price. Use value can easily be understood, so Marx
says, but he insists that exchange value is a puzzling phenomenon, and
relative exchange values need to be explained. Why does a quantity of
one commodity exchange for a given quantity of another commodity? His
explanation is in terms of the labour input required to produce the
commodity, or rather, the socially necessary labour, which is labour
exerted at the average level of intensity and productivity for that
branch of activity within the economy. Thus the labour theory of value
asserts that the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of
socially necessary labour time required to produce it. Marx provides a
two stage argument for the labour theory of value. The first stage is
to argue that if two objects can be compared in the sense of being put
on either side of an equals sign, then there must be a 'third thing of
identical magnitude in both of them' to which they are both reducible.
As commodities can be exchanged against each other, there must, Marx
argues, be a third thing that they have in common. This then motivates
the second stage, which is a search for the appropriate 'third thing',
which is labour in Marx's view, as the only plausible common element.
Both steps of the argument are, of course, highly contestable.
Capitalism is distinctive, Marx argues, in that it involves not merely
the exchange of commodities, but the advancement of capital, in the
form of money, with the purpose of generating profit through the
purchase of commodities and their transformation into other
commodities which can command a higher price, and thus yield a profit.
Marx claims that no previous theorist has been able adequately to
explain how capitalism as a whole can make a profit. Marx's own
solution relies on the idea of exploitation of the worker. In setting
up conditions of production the capitalist purchases the worker's
labour power — his ability to labour — for the day. The cost of this
commodity is determined in the same way as the cost of every other;
i.e. in terms of the amount of socially necessary labour power
required to produce it. In this case the value of a day's labour power
is the value of the commodities necessary to keep the worker alive for
a day. Suppose that such commodities take four hours to produce. Thus
the first four hours of the working day is spent on producing value
equivalent to the value of the wages the worker will be paid. This is
known as necessary labour. Any work the worker does above this is
known as surplus labour, producing surplus value for the capitalist.
Surplus value, according to Marx, is the source of all profit. In
Marx's analysis labour power is the only commodity which can produce
more value than it is worth, and for this reason it is known as
variable capital. Other commodities simply pass their value on to the
finished commodities, but do not create any extra value. They are
known as constant capital. Profit, then, is the result of the labour
performed by the worker beyond that necessary to create the value of
his or her wages. This is the surplus value theory of profit.
It appears to follow from this analysis that as industry becomes more
mechanised, using more constant capital and less variable capital, the
rate of profit ought to fall. For as a proportion less capital will be
advanced on labour, and only labour can create value. In Capital
Volume 3 Marx does indeed make the prediction that the rate of profit
will fall over time, and this is one of the factors which leads to the
downfall of capitalism. (However, as pointed out by Marx's able
expositor Paul Sweezy in The Theory of Capitalist Development, the
analysis is problematic.) A further consequence of this analysis is a
difficulty for the theory that Marx did recognise, and tried, albeit
unsuccessfully, to meet also in Capital Volume 3. It follows from the
analysis so far that labour intensive industries ought to have a
higher rate of profit than those which use less labour. Not only is
this empirically false, it is theoretically unacceptable. Accordingly,
Marx argued that in real economic life prices vary in a systematic way
from values. Providing the mathematics to explain this is known as the
transformation problem, and Marx's own attempt suffers from technical
difficulties. Although there are known techniques for solving this
problem now (albeit with unwelcome side consequences), we should
recall that the labour theory of value was initially motivated as an
intuitively plausible theory of price. But when the connection between
price and value is rendered as indirect as it is in the final theory,
the intuitive motivation of the theory drains away. But even if the
defender of the theory is still not ready to concede defeat, a further
objection appears devastating. Marx's assertion that only labour can
create surplus value is unsupported by any argument or analysis, and
can be argued to be merely an artifact of the nature of his
presentation. Any commodity can be picked to play a similar role.
Consequently with equal justification one could set out a corn theory
of value, arguing that corn has the unique power of creating more
value than it costs. Formally this would be identical to the labour
theory of value.
Although Marx's economic analysis is based on the discredited labour
theory of value, there are elements of his theory that remain of
worth. The Cambridge economist Joan Robinson, in An Essay on Marxian
Economics, picked out two aspects of particular note. First, Marx's
refusal to accept that capitalism involves a harmony of interests
between worker and capitalist, replacing this with a class based
analysis of the worker's struggle for better wages and conditions of
work, versus the capitalist's drive for ever greater profits. Second,
Marx's denial that there is any long-run tendency to equilibrium in
the market, and his descriptions of mechanisms which underlie the
trade-cycle of boom and bust. Both provide a salutary corrective to
aspects of orthodox economic theory.
i.e......Accoprding to Marx.... Capitalism is the actual "state
apparatus" for the Oppression of the "proletariat".... "Workers of the
World... unite".....
... Marx was an "Idealist" much like Hegel.... me , I prefer
nominalism.......
On Oct 9, 2:35 am, Bruce Majors <majors.br...@gmail.com> wrote:
> *The Great Society: A Libertarian Critique*
>
> *by Murray N. Rothbard<http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard-lib.html>
> by Murray N. Rothbard*
>
> DIGG THIS<http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbar...>
>
> *First published *in The Great Society Reader: The Failure of American
> Liberalism*, edited by Marvin E. Gettleman and David Mermelstein (New York:
> Vintage, 1967).*
>
> The Great Society is the lineal descendant and the intensification of those
> other pretentiously named polities of twentieth-century America: the Square
> Deal, the New Freedom, the New Era, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the New
> Frontier. All of these assorted Deals constituted a basic and fundamental
> shift in American life – a shift from a relatively *laissez-faire *economy
> and minimal state to a society in which the state is unquestionably
> king. 1<http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard40.html#_ftn1>
> In the previous century, the government could safely have been ignored by
> almost everyone; now we have become a country in which the government is the
> great and unending source of power and privilege. Once a country in which
> each man could by and large make the decisions for his own life, we have
> become a land where the state holds and exercises life-and-death power over
> every person, group, and institution. The great Moloch government, once
> confined and cabined, has burst its feeble bonds to dominate us all.
>
> The basic reason for this development is not difficult to fathom. It was
> best summed up by the great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer;
> Oppenheimer wrote that there were fundamentally two, and only two, paths to
> the acquisition of wealth. One route is the production of a good or service
> and its voluntary exchange for the goods or services produced by others.
> This method – the method of the free market – Oppenheimer termed "the
> economic means" to wealth. The other path, which avoids the necessity for
> production and exchange, is for one or more persons to seize other people's
> products by the use of physical force. This method of robbing the fruits of
> another man's production was shrewdly named by Oppenheimer the "political
> means." Throughout history, men have been tempted to employ the "political
> means" of seizing wealth rather than expend effort in production and
> exchange. It should be clear that while the market process multiplies
> production, the political, exploitative means is parasitic and, as with all
> parasitic action, discourages and drains off production and output in
> society. To regularize and order a permanent system of predatory
> exploitation, men have created the state, which Oppenheimer brilliantly
> defined as "the organization of the political means."
> 2<http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard40.html#_ftn2>
>
> Every act of the state is necessarily an occasion for inflicting burdens and
> assigning subsidies and privileges. By seizing revenue by means of coercion
> and assigning rewards as it disburses the funds, the state *creates *ruling
> and ruled "classes" or "castes"; for one example, classes of what Calhoun
> discerned as net "taxpayers" and "tax-consumers," those who live off
> taxation.3 <http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard40.html#_ftn3> And
> since by its nature, predation can only be supported out of the surplus of
> production above subsistence, the ruling class must constitute a minority of
> the citizenry.
>
> Since the state, nakedly observed, is a mighty engine of organized
> predation, state rule, throughout its many millennia of recorded history,
> could be preserved only by persuading the bulk of the public that its rule
> has not really been exploitative: that, on the contrary, it has been
> necessary, beneficent, even, as in the Oriental despotisms, divine.
> Promoting this ideology among the masses has ever been a prime function of
> intellectuals, a function that has created the basis for co-opting a corps
> of intellectuals into a secure and permanent berth in the state apparatus.
> In former centuries, these intellectuals formed a priestly caste that was
> able to wrap a cloak of mystery and quasi-divinity about the actions of the
> state for a credulous public. Nowadays, the apologia for the state takes on
> more subtle and seemingly scientific forms. The process remains essentially
> the same.4 <http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard40.html#_ftn4>
>
> In the United States, a strong libertarian and antistatist tradition
> prevented the process of statization from taking hold at a very rapid pace.
> The major force in its propulsion has been that favorite theater of state
> expansionism, brilliantly identified by Randolph Bourne as "the health of
> the state": namely, war. For although in wartime various states find
> themselves in danger from one another, every state has found war a fertile
> field for spreading the myth among its subjects that *they *are the ones in
> deadly danger, from which their state is protecting them. In this way states
> have been able to dragoon their subjects into fighting and dying to save
> them under the pretext that the *subjects *were being saved from the dread
> Foreign Enemy. In the United States, the process of statization began in
> earnest under cover of the Civil War (conscription, military rule, income
> tax, excise taxes, high tariffs, national banking and credit expansion for
> favored businesses, paper money, land grants to railroads), and reached full
> flower as a result of World Wars I and II, to finally culminate in the Great
> Society.
>
> The recently emerging group of "libertarian conservatives" in the United
> States have grasped a part of the recent picture of accelerated statism, but
> their analysis suffers from several fatal blind spots. One is their complete
> failure to realize that war, culminating in the present garrison state and
> military-industrial economy, has been the royal road to aggravated statism
> in America. On the contrary, the surge of reverent patriotism that war
> always brings to conservative hearts, coupled with their eagerness to don
> buckler and armor against the "international Communist conspiracy," has made
> the conservatives the most eager and enthusiastic partisans of the Cold War.
> Hence their inability to see the enormous distortions and interventions
> imposed upon the economy by the enormous system of war
> contracts.5<http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard40.html#_ftn5>
>
> Another conservative blind spot is their failure to identify *which
> groups *have
> been responsible for the burgeoning of statism in the United States. In the
> conservative demonology, the responsibility belongs only to liberal
> intellectuals, aided and abetted by trade unions and farmers. Big
> businessmen, on the other hand, are curiously exempt from blame (farmers are
> small enough businessmen, apparently, to be fair game for censure.) How,
> then, do conservatives deal with the glaringly evident onrush of big
> businessmen to embrace Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society? Either by mass
> stupidity (failure to read the works of free-market economists), subversion
> by liberal intellectuals (e.g., the education of the Rockefeller brothers at
> Lincoln School), or craven cowardice (the failure to stand foursquare for
> free-market principles in the face of governmental power).
> 6<http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard40.html#_ftn6> Almost
> never is *interest *pinpointed as an overriding reason for statism among
> businessmen. This failure is all the more curious in the light of the fact
> that the *laissez-faire *liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
> (e.g., the Philosophical Radicals in England, the Jacksonians in the United
> States) were never bashful about identifying and attacking the web of
> special privileges granted to businessmen in the mercantilism of their day.
>
> In fact, one of the main driving forces of the statist dynamic of twentieth
> century America has been big businessmen, and this long before the Great
> Society. Gabriel Kolko, in his path-breaking *Triumph of
> Conservatism,*7<http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard40.html#_ftn7>
> * *has shown that the shift toward statism in the Progressive period was
> impelled by the very big business groups who were supposed, in the liberal
> mythology, to be defeated and regulated by the Progressive and New Freedom
> measures. Rather than a "people's movement" to check big business; the drive
> for regulatory measures, Kolko shows, stemmed from big businessmen whose
> attempts at monopoly had been defeated by the competitive market, and who
> then turned to the federal government as a device for compulsory
> cartellization. This drive for cartellization through government accelerated
> during the New Era of the 1920s and reached its apex in Franklin Roosevelt's
> NRA. Significantly, this exercise in cartellizing collectivism was put over
> by organized big business; after Herbert Hoover, who had done much to
> organize and cartellize the economy, had balked at an NRA as going too far
> toward an outright fascist economy, the US Chamber of Commerce won a promise
> from FDR that he would adopt such a system. The original inspiration was the
> corporate state of Mussolini's
> Italy.8<http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard40.html#_ftn8>
>
> The formal corporatism of the NRA is long gone, but the Great Society
> retains much of its essence. The locus of social power has been emphatically
> assumed by the state apparatus. Furthermore, that apparatus is permanently
> governed by a coalition of big business and big labor groupings, groups that
> use the state to operate and manage the national economy. The usual
> tripartite *rapprochement *of big business, big unions, and big government
> symbolizes the organization of society by blocs, syndics, and corporations,
> regulated and privileged by the federal, state, and local governments. What
> this all amounts to in essence is the "corporate state," which during the
> 1920s served as a beacon light for big businessmen, big unions, and many
> liberal ...
>
> read more »
--
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.
No comments:
Post a Comment