WHAT I HAVE BEEN DOING -- PART FOUR

In the second paragraph of his Physica, Aristotle distinguishes between "things which are more knowable and obvious to us" and things which "are clearer and more knowable by nature"  Physics, 184^a16-18.  Aristotle begins his discussion with things that are more knowable and obvious to us, and Marx, following Aristotle's example, chooses to begin Capital in the same way.  So it is that he launches his extraordinary investigation with an examination of a single commodity.  Only after he has fully plumbed the mysteries and mystifications of the commodity does he reveal to us the underlying "laws of motion" of capitalist economy.  Strictly speaking, I ought to lay my own story before you in the same fashion, beginning with the opening pages of Capital and much later arriving at the underlying economic theory in terms of which those opening pages can be made transparently clear.  But I am going to reverse this order of exposition, first summarizing as best I can the very complicated theoretical evolution from the classical political economists to Marx's own theory, and then returning to Marx's account of the surface mystifications that concern him in the opening chapters of the first volume of Capital.  What I have to say is so complex, and involves so many seemingly unrelated matters, that it will take me a good deal of time to "connect it up," as trial lawyers say.

Two central problems confronted Smith, Ricardo, and the other classical political economists.  The first problem was to explain how the annual product of the farms, mines, and factories is divided among the three great classes of society -- the landed aristocracy, the entrepreneurs, or capitalists, and the workers.  The second problem was to identify the causes and conditions of economic growth, as well as the obstacles to continued expansion of the economy.  Distribution and growth -- these were the focus of the concern of the classicals, and they were to be Marx's theoretical concerns as well.  "Class warfare" is thus not the invention of Marx and his followers.  It was the centerpiece of the work of Smith and Ricardo.  Neo-classical economic theory, by contrast, concerns itself with "the relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses," to invoke the famous definition of Economics offered by Lionel Robbins in his short but influential book, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science.  [1932] 

Smith and Ricardo recognized that in a market economy, the division of the social product is mediated by the prices of land, capital, and labor, which is to say by rents, profits, and wages, and that to explain these three prices, a general theory of price would be  required.  In the language of the time, what was needed was a theory of value.  Smith began the solution of this problem by suggesting that goods trade in the market in proportion to the amount of labor it takes to produce them.  That is to say, Smith offered the first version of what came to be known as the Labor Theory of Value.  But Smith himself recognized that his simple answer held true only in what he described as "that early and rude state of society which precedes both the accumulation of stock and the appropriation of land," a time when there is neither capital to earn a profit nor privately owned land to earn a rent.

It was David Ricardo who managed to take account of both of these complications.  The distortions in prices introduced by capital are to be explained, he said, by recognizing that capital goods -- machinery, tools, and the like -- are themselves the products of labor expended in earlier cycles of production.  The labor expended in making capital goods is then carried forward to be transmitted to the commodities produced with their aid.  Prices are determined by the totality of the labor expended in the present production cycle plus all of the labor expended in earlier cycles and, as he rather picturesquely put it, "embodied" in the present product.

Rent presented a particularly vexing puzzle, because land, unlike machines and other capital, is not produced.  It is, as it was popular to say in those days, a free gift from God, Who first created the world and then created the men and women who inhabit it.  In England at that time, all the available land had long since been taken out of the commons and appropriated by private individuals, who erected on that appropriation a lavish life style that they passed on from generation to generation.  If the rent paid to the landed gentry by entrepreneurial agricultural investors was truly a component of the price of the corn grown on the rented land, then that price could not possibly be determined solely by the labor directly or indirectly expended in the production of the corn.  In what is widely acknowledged to be the theoretical highpoint of the classical period in Economics, Ricardo demonstrated that rent is not a component of the price of corn, contrary to all appearances, but is in fact a diversion to the landlords of a portion of the profit earned in the marketplace by the entrepreneurs.

["Corn, " by the way, for those of you who are not aficionados of classical Political Economy.  is the British word for whatever is the most common grain of a locality.  The English settlers to the New World found that the most common local starch was maize, so they called it corn, and we in America have ever since been stuck with the word.]

A BRIEF REPLY TO COMMENTS

Before continuing my narrative later today, let me take just a moment to reply to several comments.  Chris, about my personal feelings regarding Marx the man, I should perhaps have said a bit more.  Heaven knows, I do not hold it against Marx that he was combative in argument and did not suffer fools gladly.  That sounds like a description of me, after all [as well as of Noam, who has a way of eviscerating critics who are, he thinks, just stupid.]  What turned me off was learning that Marx took advantage of the family servant, getting her pregnant, and mooched money from colleagues whose annual income was actually less than his own, so that his family could maintain a properly bourgeois lifestyle, and even treated his lifelong colleague, Engels, with coldness, brushing off the news that Engels' mistress, whom Friedrich loved dearly, had died, instead hitting Engels up for some more money.  Marx treated those who were closest to him exploitatively, and in my book that is not excused by the fact that he was, and knew he was, a world-historical figure of great importance.

As for Ricardo's style, clarity and precision is, I suppose, in the eye of the beholder, but I have found Ricardo's Principles to be a model to be emulated.

And now to the always vexing subject of Hegel.  I cut and pasted the link to the essay by Dussel, Ian, and tried to read it.  I really did.  I found it impenetrable [and not merely because it appeared to have been translated not too well into English.]  I guess it is like the symphonies of Mahler, which send some people into ecstasies of delight and leave me looking frantically for the exit.  I freely grant that Marx was deeply influenced by Hegel, but his style in CAPITAL is nothing at all like that of Hegel, and is, I contend, actually clear and down to earth, despite the fact that he is dealing with incredibly complex and difficult issues.

Finally, about electing the president:  Since I believe that Gore won the 2000 election and had the victory stolen from him by the Supreme Court, there has not actually been any one elected while losing the popular vote since 1888.  [Al Gore, not universally considered a humorist, used to open his speeches with a great line:  "Good evening.  My name is Al Gore.  I used to be the next president of the United States."]  I for one would be quite happy to do away with the Electoral College, either by Constitutional Amendment or by a gimmick like the one now being pushed.

WHAT I HAVE BEEN DOING -- PART THREE

It was at this point that I had a flash of insight, an éclaircissement, as the French put it.  Even though I knew very little about Marx's thought and even less about economic theory in general, I concluded that Marx had chosen his literary style because only by its means could he capture his complex understanding of the nature of capitalist economy and society.  There was, I thought, a union in Marx's writings of economic, mathematical, historical, sociological, political, and psychological ideas for the adequate expression of which only the language of Capital would do. 

Needless to say, this was not then, nor is it today, the common view of Marx's ideas and their literary form.  The  majority opinion, as I observed in Moneybags, has always been what might be thought of as the public health or childhood polio interpretation of Capital.  According to this reading, Marx as a young man contracted a nearly fatal case of the particularly virulent strain of Hegelism that raged pandemically throughout Germany during the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century.  Although he somehow managed to survive the illness, he was intellectually crippled for life.  Hence it is simply bad manners to mock him as he drags himself painfully, awkwardly from concept to concept in the realm of Ideas.  Rather we ought to marvel that he can traverse the distance from the premises to the conclusion of an argument, and we ought scarcely to expect him to ascend a ratiocinatio polysyllogistica like Fred Astaire tip-tapping his way up a flight of stairs.  The British version of this rather curious literary theory, put forward most notably by the doyenne of English Marxists, Joan Robinson, simply has it that Marx was German, and hence was unable to achieve the clarity and simplicity of Locke, Hume, Bentham, Smith, or Ricardo. 

I was having none of it, and decided to set out on a quest, however long it might take me, to discover an integrated reading of Marx that made room for his economic theories, his theory of alienated labor and commodity fetishism, his historical account of the rise of capitalism, and his anticipation of the eventual transition to socialism, and which explained as well exactly why he found it necessary to couch all of this in language so utterly unlike that of his predecessors or his successors.  I anticipated that this would be a lengthy undertaking, but I had reached a point in my life at which I was weary of writing and editing books of Philosophy, and as I was only in my middle forties, I figured I had plenty of time for the task.

That Fall, I happened to overhear a conversation between two graduate students standing in front of Thompson Towers, the home at UMass Amherst of the Economics Department.  They were talking about a book by someone named Sraffa, and although I had never before so much as heard the name, I immediately concluded that I very badly needed to read it.  It turned out to be a ninety-eight page monograph called Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, published by Piero Sraffa in 1960.  I bought the book and started reading it.

It was an extraordinarily difficult read.  Sraffa, who had begun life as an Italian economist and friend of Antonio Gramsci and had fled Mussolini to spend the rest of his days at Cambridge University, wrote with a spare prose completely devoid of the usual academic graces, footnotes, allusions, and hesitations.  It was as though a monk had been contemplating the infinite for an entire life and then had quietly, unhurriedly, drifted into speech, carefully uttering one perfect proposition after another.  Although the mathematics was quite simple, never rising above ordinary algebra, Sraffa tended not to bother to flesh out the intermediate steps between premise and conclusion, forcing me on occasion to spend a day or more on a single page reconstructing the argument.

With the unselfconscious hubris that has characterized my entire professional life, that same semester I organized a reading group on Sraffa for a small circle of economics students, some of whom were in my Critical Theory seminar.  At one of the sessions, a student came in and blurted out, "Herb says you can do the whole thing in three lines with linear algebra."  "Herb" was Herb Gintis, a senior member of the Economics Department and partner and co-author of Sam Bowles.  Bowles and Gintis were two of the five tenured radical economists whose simultaneous recruitment had transformed the UMass Econ Department into the center of Marxist economics in America.

By a happy accident, I was scheduled for a sabbatical leave in the Spring, only my second semester off from teaching since starting my academic career in 1958.  As soon as classes were done and grades submitted, I bought a Linear Algebra textbook and began working through it, a task that took me most of the month of January.  I now launched on an intense study both of the writings of Marx and of the modern reinterpretation of Marx's economic theories then finding expression in an ever growing series of books by a number of brilliant mathematical economists around the globe.

I bought a complete set of the works of Marx and Engels in English [my German was simply not up to plowing through thousands of pages of books, monographs, letters, and unpublished manuscripts] and began reading a healthy subset of the seemingly endless hundreds of thousands of words that Marx and Engels produced in their lifetimes.  I also bought a brilliant new biography, Marx's Fate, by a young historian then at Princeton, Jerrold Seigel.  I had had thoughts of casting my final product in the form of an intellectual biography, but reading Seigel caused me to change my plans.  The problem, to put it baldly, was that by the time I had finished Marx's Fate, I really did not like Marx very much as a human being.  Seigel made it clear that Marx, in addition to being the great theorist of exploitation, was a man who exploited those around him, emotionally as well as economically.  I lost not one whit of my respect for Marx's intellectual qualities, but I recoiled from spending as much time with him as would be required by anything resembling a biography.

As time went on, I found myself forced to branch out well beyond formal economic theory, philosophy, history, and literary criticism.  I even spent time studying the history of the development of index numbers and made a fruitful foray into the theory of Financial Accounting. 

The result of all this work was a grand vision of Marx's theory of capitalist economy and society, which I tentatively projected as a trilogy of books.  The first to be published, Understanding Marx, presented a simplified version of the reconstruction of Marx's economic theories carried through by Morishima, Pasinetti, Garagnani, Brody, Abraham-Frois and Berrebi, and others, together with my critique of Marx's Labor Theory of Value and some suggestions for its revision.  The second book, Moneybags Must Be So Lucky, presented my answer to the question with which I had started:  Why did Marx write that way?  The third volume of the trilogy was supposed to achieve the grand synthesis that would unite the economic theory with the literary theory, but the complete lack of attention paid to Moneybags so discouraged me that I turned to other things, and never wrote the final volume.  In a small way, this series of blog posts is my attempt to indicate how the argument of that third volume might have developed.

DEPARTMENT OF WEIRD NEWS

According to TalkingPointsMemo.com, a liberal blog, there is a new effort under way among Republicans to gimmick the presidential elections, now that the boomlet of efforts to get states to pass laws allotting electoral votes by congressional district has died.  It seems the new idea being pushed is to circumvent the Electoral College by getting enough states to pass laws allocating their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the popular vote, regardless of the outcome in the particular states.  The plan is to make these laws [which have already been passed in a number of reliably Democratic states] take effect as soon as enough states have passed them to add up to at least 270 electoral votes.

The demographic shifts now in motion in America are steadily increasing the size of heavily Democratic sub-populations, thus making it ever harder for the Republicans to win the popular vote.  The Republican Party has lost the popular vote in five out of the last six elections [including the 2000 Bush/Gore contest, in which Gore won the popular vote by 500,000.]

The purpose of the Electoral College originally was to protect smaller states from domination by larger states, and it continues to serve that function.  California, with a population in excess of thirty eight million, gets 55 electoral votes, so each of its electoral votes represents 691,000 Californians.   Wyoming, whose population is 573,000, gets 3 electoral votes, each of which represents 191,000 Wyomans.  Since the Republican strength is concentrated for the most part in low-population states [Texas being the striking exception], any shift to a system by which the popular vote chooses the president can only serve to diminish the influence of deep red states.

Am I missing something? 

LITTLE KNOWN FACTS -- BOB WOLFF VERSION

Henry Louis Gates, as I remarked a while back, has started emailing everyone in sight a series of "surprising facts' about African-Americans," heaven knows why.   So it occurred to me maybe from time to time I should publish my own list of surprising or little known facts.  Today's little known fact [little known only to the handful of Americans who do not regularly read the Bible] is the real meaning of the phrase "mark of Cain."  As the expression is used in common discourse, it usually refers to some sort of mark of evil, a sign that a person is bad.  But that is almost exactly the opposite of the original meaning, which, as all of you surely know, can be found in Genesis 3:12-15.

After Cain slays his brother, Abel, God drives him from his home and curses him, saying "a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth. [3:12] And Cain said unto the Lord, my punishment is greater than I can bear. [13] Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth, and from thy face shall I be hid; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me. [14]  And the Lord said unto him, Therefore, whoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.  And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him." [15]

So the mark of Cain is actually an early version of one of those suburban signs that say "these premises protected by Vanguard Home Security System."  "Vengeance is mine," as the Lord sayeth elsewhere. [Romans 12:19]

What on earth made me think of this? you may wonder.  Well, Susie had a bad time last night with her broken shoulder, and I got up to help her, rearrange her blankets in the reclining chair in which he is forced to sleep, and make her some breakfast.  Before making her coffee, I turned on the TV, and as it would happen, it was on a channel that was screening James Dean's famous movie, East of Eden.  What is the very next verse of Genesis?  "And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden."  [16]

WHAT I HAVE BEEN DOING -- PART TWO

What struck me most immediately and powerfully in my reading of CAPITAL is its extraordinary language.  Marx wrote in a style that bears no relation at all to any other works of  economics, sociology, political theory, or history that I have ever read.  Since the matter of Mark's literary style came to play a central role in my interpretation of his thought, it might be well to give examples, so that those of you who are not readily conversant with CAPITAL will have some sense of what I am referring to.  Here are two passages chosen from the first few chapters.

The first is taken from the opening paragraph of the famous Section 4 of Chapter I:  "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof."

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood.  Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.  So far as [a table] is a value in use [Adam Smith's term], there is nothing mysterious about it. ... But, as soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent.  It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than 'table-turning' ever was."

The second is from Chapter III:  "Money, or the Circulation of Commodities."

Because money is the metamorphosed shape of all other commodities, the result of their general alienation, for this reason it is alienable itself without restriction or condition.  It reads all commodities backwards, and thus, so to say, depicts itself in the bodies of all other commodities, which offer to it the material for the realisation of its own use-value.  At the same time the prices, wooing glances cast at money by commodities, define the limits of its convertibility, by pointing to its quantity.  Since every commodity, on becoming money, disappears as a commodity, it is impossible to tell from the money itself, how it got into the hands of its possessor, or what article has been changed into it.  Non olet, from whatever source it may come.

Defining prices as "wooing glances cast at commodities" is simply wonderful.  Marx loved the novels of Charles Dickens, and like Dickens, he achieves some his most striking literary effects by describing people as things and things as people.  Prices "cast wooing glances" at commodities, linen "officiates" as standard of value in its exchange with coats.  The phrase "Non olet," by the way, is a passing reference to a well-known story about the Emperor Vespasian.  In Vespasian's day [he was Emperor from 69 to 79 a.d.], Rome collected taxes from the public urinals.  One day, Vespasian sent his son, Titus, to collect the money, a task that offended his son.  When Titus returned, he flung the money at his father's feet.  "Non olet," Vespasian replied with equanimity.  "It stinketh not."  Money from whatever source does not bear the mark of its origin, the point Marx is making in this paragraph. 

CAPITAL is full of metaphors and literary allusions called down by Marx from two thousand five hundred years of European literature.  It also abounds in religious echoes.  Commodity exchange is described by Marx at one point as transubstantiation inverted, for whereas in the Roman Catholic rite of the mass, the substance of the bread and wine is changed into the body and blood of Christ while the accidents -- the taste and smell and look -- remain unaltered, in commodity exchange, the substance, which is value, remains unaltered, while the accidents -- the properties of the corn and linen, coal, and iron  -- change.

Those of you whose light reading does not regularly include the writings of Franҫois Quesney, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, or John Stuart Mill will have to take my word for it that Marx's literary style bears no resemblance to theirs, even though he conceives himself as writing in, and bringing to its highest development, the Classical Political Economy that they created.  What on earth can he possibly have thought himself to be doing?

WHAT I HAVE BEEN DOING SINCE THE LATE 70'S

I have been struggling for more than a week to write the paper I am to deliver in April at a Duke Political Theory Working Group annual conference.  My difficulty arises from the fact that I am attempting to summarize, in few enough pages to require no more than forty five minutes, an intellectual engagement with the writings of Karl Marx on which I have been engaged for almost forty years.  Out of frustration at the manifest impossibility of the task, I have decided to write what I wish to say for this blog, taking as many days and employing as many words as are necessary to complete the task adequately.  When I am done, there will be time enough to decide what to do about the conference.  [I am reminded of a young Derek Parfitt, who, when asked to write a twenty page paper for a seminar I was teaching at Columbia in the 60's, responded with a one hundred ten page defense of Act Utilitarianism.  I thought at the time that there was a certain admirable bravado about the performance.  It was, needless to say, a quite good paper.]

The work I shall attempt to integrate into a single coherent narrative has found expression in a number of books and journal articles, as well as in several unpublished essays.  Here is a list culled from the Bibliography of my curriculum vitae:

Books

1985.   UNDERSTANDING MARX: A Reconstruction and Critique of CAPITAL, Hardcover and Paperback Edi­tions, Princeton University Press.

1988. MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY: On The Literary Structure Of CAPITAL, Hardcover and Paperback Editions, University of Massachusetts Press.

Published Essays

"How to Read DAS KAPITAL, MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW, Winter, 1980, 739‑765.

"A Critique and Reinterpretation of Marx's Labor Theory of Value, PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC AF­FAIRS, Spring, 1981, 89‑120.

"Piero Sraffa and the Rehabilitation of Classical Political Economy," SOCIAL RESEARCH, Spring, 1982, 209‑238.

"The Analytics of the Labor Theory of Value in David Ricardo and Adam Smith," MIDWEST STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY, 1982, 301‑319.

"A Reply to Roemer," PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Winter, 1983, 84‑88.

"The Rehabilitation of Karl Marx," JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY, 1983, 713‑719.

"The Resurrection of Karl Marx, Political Economist," SOCIAL RESEARCH, 1986, 475‑512.

"Absolute Fruit and Abstract Labor; Remarks on Marx's Use of the Concept of Inversion," in KNOWLEDGE AND POLITICS: Case Studies in the Relationship Between Epistemology and Political Philosophy, edited by Marcelo Dascal and Ora Gruengard, Westview Press, 1989, 171‑187

"Narrative Time: On the Inherently Perspectival Structure of the Social World," in MIDWEST STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY, XV [1990], 210‑223.

"Methodological Individualism and Marx: Some Remarks on Jon Elster, Game Theory, and Other Things," CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 20, Number 4 [Dec., 1990], 469‑486.

Unpublished Essays

"The Future of Socialism"

"The Indexing Problem"

I grew up in a home that paid homage, or at least lip-service, to my grandfather's lifelong commitment to the cause of socialism, so I was inclined from the crib to be favorably disposed toward the thought of Karl Marx, but neither at home, nor in college, did I actually encounter any of Marx's writings.  My first serious exposure to Marx's thought was in 1960, when, in preparation for a Social Studies Sophomore Tutorial that Barrington Moore, Jr. and I were teaching at Harvard, I read Volume One of CAPITAL.  I read it very quickly, and made little or nothing of it.  In the next ten years I read, and then taught, some of Marx's early writings, most notably The Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which were then much in vogue.  I even placed a standing order with Blackwell's Bookstore in Oxford for each volume, as it appeared, of the magnificent edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels then being produced by a group of German scholars in East Berlin.  The lovely hardcovered volumes, with elaborate indices and appendices, cost roughly three or four dollars apiece -- priced so that working men and women could afford them.  They now adorn the shelves of my Paris apartment.

In the Fall of 1977, I offered a graduate seminar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on "Classics of Critical Social Theory."  [Fifteen students took the seminar, only two of whom were Philosophy students.  Those were the days when I was effectively closed out of the graduate Philosophy program by colleagues who thought what I did was, in their scornful expression, "not Philosophy."]  The seminar was devoted to the thought of Marl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Mannheim.  In preparation for the seminar, I re-read Volume One of CAPITAL, and this time, the experience was a revelation.