Re: Engels' (non)reply to Wicksteed

[michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

As I recall this devastating critique of Marx, Wicksteed concentrated on
Marx's lack of the theory of rent.  I suspect that he never saw volume 3.

>
> "'To-Day' has become a mere 'symposium', i.e. a review in which everyone
> can write for and against socialism. Next No. a critique of 'Capital'! I
> was supposed to reply to this anonymous writer, but declined with
> thanks."
>  -- Engels to Kautsky, Sept. 20, 1884.
>
> The critique in question was titled "Das Kapital. A Criticism by Philip
> H. Wicksteed". Does anyone happen to have an electronic copy of that
> article on hand that they could send me or know of the location of one
> on the web? I've already searched to no avail. Wicksteed's 1910
> textbook, "The Common Sense of Political Economy", contains the most
> extraordinarily ornate and long-winded discussion of what he eventually
> admits to being reluctant to call the market for labour. This discussion
> concludes with a bizarre five-paragraph tirade against the
> "lump-of-labour" mentality of the working classes, the point of which
> would seem to be that, "When we understand that local distress is
> incidental to general progress, we shall not indeed try to stay general
> progress in order to escape the local distress, but we shall try to
> mitigate the local distress by diverting to its relief some portion of
> the general access of wealth to which it is incidental."
>
> I can't help but get the feeling, reading Chapter 8 of Wicksteed's
> textbook, that the poor sot "meant well". Wicksteed seems to be engaging
> a characteristically Fabian "rhetoric of courtship" -- conceding the
> "economic" ground to the most reactionary and rapacious representatives
> of capital in order that he may, at the last instance, append a plea for
> enlighted compassion as the best way of combatting such "misdirected
> sympathies" and "anti-social ways". Seen in this light, the third way
> politics of Blair, Giddens et.al., is classic Fabianism reduced to its
> absurd (and Orwellian!) conclusion -- a rhetoric that absolutely
> identifies reactionary means with "progressive" ends.
>
> In other words, I regret that Engels didn't reply. I suspect that
> Wicksteed missed the point about the labour theory of value and
> demolished a straw man of his own construction.
>
>


--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx