Re: class

Printer Friendly PDF Format Subscribe to FFF Email Update Subscribe to Freedom Daily DONATE TO FFF Libertarian Class Analysis by Sheldon Richman, Posted September 20, 2006 Say the words "class analysis" or "class conflict" and most people will think of Karl Marx. The idea that there are irreconcilable classes, their conflict inherent in the nature of things, is one of the signatures of Marxism. That being the case, people who want nothing to do with Marxism quite naturally want nothing to do with class analysis. So it ought to be of interest to learn that Marx did not originate class analysis or the idea of class conflict. These things have their roots in radical liberalism, or libertarianism, predating Marx's writings. Indeed, Marx himself paid homage to the originators, a group of historians in post–Napoleonic France who have been neglected by all but a handful of modern-day libertarians. (In this article I draw on four of those libertarians, the historians Ralph Raico, Leonard Liggio, and David M. Hart, and economist-historian Walter E. Grinder.) The names of the key 19th-century French historians are Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, and Augustin Thierry, whose publication, Le Censeur européen, was a hotbed of radical liberal thought. As related by Raico, Grinder, and Hart, Comte and Dunoyer were influenced by the important, but underappreciated, French liberal economist J.B. Say, whom Murray Rothbard lauded as brilliantly innovative, the superior of Adam Smith. (Comte eventually married Say's daughter.) Indeed, the seeds of a radical liberal class theory were to be found in the second and subsequent editions of Say's Treatise on Political Economy (first published in 1803), which reflected his response to Napoleon's military spending and economic manipulation. As Say wrote in another of his works, The huge rewards and the advantages which are generally attached to public employment greatly excite ambition and cupidity. They create a violent struggle between those who possess positions and those who want them. According to Hart, Comte and Dunoyer were struck by Say's view that services provided in the marketplace are productive — that is, useful — "immaterial goods" and that the entrepreneur, like the laborer, is a producer. Hart writes, A consequence of Say's view is that there were many productive contributors to the new industrialism, including factory owners, entrepreneurs, engineers and other technologists as well as those in the knowledge industry such as teachers, scientists and other "savants" or intellectuals. This is important to the issue of class, the purpose of which is to identify the exploiters and exploited. As everyone knows, Marx, at least in some of his writings, thought only workers were industrious, with owners of capital belonging to the exploiting class (with the state as its "executive committee"). He placed owners of capital among the exploiters because of his labor theory of value (inherited from Adam Smith and David Ricardo): since the value of goods was equivalent to the socially necessary labor required to produce them, the profit and interest collected by "capitalists" must be extracted from workers' just rewards — hence their exploitation. If the labor theory of value fails and if exchange is fully voluntary, void of state privilege, then no exploitation occurs. (Marx's exploitation theory was later systematically refuted by the Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk.) Thus it is crucial to see that the thinkers from whom Marx apparently learned about class analysis put in the productive class all who create utility through voluntary exchange. The "capitalist" (meaning in this context the owner of capital goods who is unconnected to the state) belongs in the industrious class along with workers. Who were the exploiters? All who lived forcibly off of the industrious classes. "The conclusions drawn from this by Comte and Dunoyer (and Thierry) is that there existed an expanded class of 'industrials' (which included manual labourers and the above mentioned entrepreneurs and savants) who struggled against others who wished to hinder their activity or live unproductively off it," Hart writes. The theorists of industrialism concluded from their theory of production that it was the state and the privileged classes allied to or making up the state, rather than all non-agricultural activity, which were essentially nonproductive. They also believed that throughout history there had been conflict between these two antagonistic classes which could only be brought to end with the radical separation of peaceful and productive civil society from the inefficiencies and privileges of the state and its favourites. Thus political and economic history is the record of conflict between producers, no matter their station, and the parasitic political classes, both inside and outside the formal state. Or to use terms of a later subscriber to this view, John Bright, it was a clash between the tax-payers and tax-eaters. Political economy and liberty Hart stresses that Comte and Dunoyer's work took Say's analysis up a notch. Where Say regarded economics and politics as separate disciplines, with the latter having little effect on the former, the liberal class analysts saw that Say's own work had more radical implications. "The science of political economy was 'value laden' as we might say and implied quite specific policies on property, government intervention in the economy and individual liberty, something Say did not appreciate but which Dunoyer and Comte incorporated into their work," Hart writes. As both Hart and Raico point out, Comte and Dunoyer also absorbed much from another great liberal, Benjamin Constant, who had penned important essays showing that an "era of commerce" had replaced the "era of war" and that the modern notion of liberty — the private life — was poles apart from the ancient notion of liberty — participation in politics. As Hart puts it, Dunoyer was interested in the sentence "[t]he unique end of modern nations is peace (repos), and with peace comes comfort (aisance), and the source of comfort is industry," which nicely summed up his own thoughts on the true aim of social organisation. Raico has also pointed out that liberal class analysis is to be found in the writings of the Manchesterite peace and free-trade activists Richard Cobden and John Bright and of Herbert Spencer. He quotes Bright on the fight against the Corn Laws (grain import tariffs): I doubt that it can have any other character [than that of] ... a war of classes. I believe this to be a movement of the commercial and industrial classes against the Lords and the great proprietors of the soil. Indeed, Raico emphasizes, the Manchester School understood that war and other political intrigue were motivated by the political class's quest for unearned wealth. Such ideas were also present among other liberal thinkers, including Thomas Paine, John Taylor of Caroline, John C. Calhoun, Albert Jay Nock, and Ludwig von Mises. Class warfare and statism What is the upshot of this admittedly truncated overview? The government's coercive taxing power necessarily creates two classes: those who create and those who consume the wealth expropriated and transferred by that power. Those who create the wealth naturally want to keep it and devote it to their own purposes. Those who wish to expropriate it look for ever more-clever ways to acquire it without inciting resistance. One of those ways is the spreading of an elaborate ideology of statism, which teaches that the people are the state and that therefore they are only paying themselves when they pay taxes. The state's officers and the court intellectuals at universities and the news media go to great lengths to have people believe this fantastic story, including the setting up of schools. Alas, most people come to believe it. The role of war is to scare people into paying taxes for their own alleged protection and to keep the wealth flowing to the exploiters with a minimum of grousing. What can libertarians do about it? First, they must themselves understand liberal class theory. They must not shy away from it because it was hijacked by the Marxists. Second, they should use whatever influence they have to raise the class-consciousness of all honest, productive people. That is, the industrious must be shown that they are daily victims of the ruling political class. For further reading Hart, David M. "The Radicalism of Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer." Hart, David M., and Walter E. Grinder. "The Basic Tenets of Real Liberalism. Part IV Continued: Interventionism, Social Conflict and War." Humane Studies Review 3, no. 1 (1986):1–7. Liggio, Leonard P. "Charles Dunoyer and French Classical Liberalism." Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 3 (1977): 153–78. Raico, Ralph. "Classical Liberal Exploitation Theory: A Comment on Professor Liggio's Paper." Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 3 (1977): 179–83. Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation, author of Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State, and editor ofThe Freeman magazine. Visit his blog "Free Association" or send him email. This article originally appeared in the June 2006 edition of Freedom Daily.

On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 3:26 PM, nominal9 <nominal9@yahoo.com> wrote:

Marx stole his ideas of class and class analysis from French
libertarian

writers ....Bruce Majors

Interesting..... name some.....
These fellas below?
nominal9

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:French_libertarians
Category:French libertarians
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 Libertarianism portal
This category collects all individuals of French nationality that are
categorized as libertarians.

Pages in category "French libertarians"
The following 9 pages are in this category, out of 9 total. This list
may not reflect recent changes (learn more).

B
Frédéric Bastiat
C
Charles Comte
D
Charles Dunoyer
 F
Édouard Fillias
H
Sabine Herold
L
Henri Lepage (economist)
 M
Alain Madelin
S
Pascal Salin
Jean-Baptiste Say

On Oct 9, 2:42 pm, Bruce Majors <majors.br...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Marx stole his ideas of class and class analysis from French libertarian
> writers
>
> It is interesting that your blurb quotes Marxist economist Joan Robinson on
> how Marx's economic theories are incoherent
>
> In general Marxist academics often say Marx was wrong about THEIR field but
> right about some other field they don't know about (Robinson on economics,
> Kolko on history etc)
>
>
>

> On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 2:01 PM, nominal9 <nomin...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
> > 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
>

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>
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