Historical Materialism

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Historical Materialism
by Justin Schwartz
03 February 2002 04:25 UTC



>
>CB: Before you get to that, isn't the burden on you to demonstrate that the
>theory alternative to Marx's explains what Marx's theory does ?  Justin and
>the AM's haven't quite proven that to everybody yet.
>


Well, Marx and Engels collected writings are 50 volumes.

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CB: Yes, but more conscious of the need to unite theory and practice than most intelligentsia, they made a lot of effort to state their whole theory in much smaller statements' then their whole body of work.

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 However, I think
I've made a tolerable start by showing how Marx's theory of exploitation,
the core of Capital I, can be resttaed without the LTV (this in my two
papers on exploitation), and by sketching how the theory of commodity
fetishim, the core of Marx's mature theory of ideology, can also be
statedwithout it (this in The Paradox of ideology). The papers are available
on line, and I think you have copies, Charles.

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CB: Yes, I am reviewing them again now. And of course , we have discussed these issues before when they came around on the merrygo round of this group of related lists. ( Hope the merry go round does go past before I finish something worth saying this time).

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So, since I put some years
into doing that, the ball is now in your court to show how I have failed.

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CB: Well, I'll take up the volley, although have commented repeatedly over the years of our exchange, for example on the "equality/liberty" issues.  I got " The Paradox of Ideology " from you almost ten years ago now, in regular mail correspondence. Your arguments are thick, in the sense a lot packed tight, so it rather than trying to discuss every issue that comes to my mind, I have tried to make comments on specific statements, to initiate an exchange.  One question I had on the paradox of ideology is that I don't think Marx and Engels fold all "theory" into "ideology" in the pejorative sense that they use it in _The German Ideology_ and elsewhere. So, that the theory of Marxism is not , paradoxically, unMarxist.

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Btw, for crisuis theory and the rest of the main line of Capital, see Daniel
Little, The Scientific Marx. Robert Brenner's book The Turbulent Economy
does the same with crisis theory. I will say, too, that in many years of
explaining Marx to students and others, I have never had to rely onthe LTV
for any core point; I mean, I'd try to explain it and explain Marx's
thinking, but then I'd restate it without the LTV. I still don't
understandwhat I'm supposed to me missing. (Sorry, Jim; I've read your
papers too, and remains opaque to me).

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CB: Yes, I was trying to focus in on LTV  in reading "In Defense of Exploitation " since it is a specific issue that came up here.

For starters , in the following. it seems to me that it is true that since "embodied socially necessary labor time" is equivalent to "value", one could substitute that phrase whenever Marx uses "value", it might work, but why not have a single word for this central concept ?  It's like force = mass x acceleration, but the theory doesn't improve by just using mass x acceleration instead of "force".

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2 Marxian Exploitation and Marxist Exploitation: The Issue of Unfreedom

Roemer defines Marxian exploitation as the unequal exchange of labour for goods (1986b, 260). A worker is exploited if and only if the amount of labour embodied in the goods she can purchase with her wage is less than the labour she expended to earn the wage. A capitalist is an exploiter if and only if the amount of labour embodied in the goods he can sell is greater than that (if any) he expended to acquire these goods. The notion of 'embodied labour' derives from the LTV. A commodity 'embodies' an amount of labour in that its value is determined by the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. Marxian exploitation is non-relational (ibid., 261). We can say only that C is an exploiter, W is exploited, not that C exploits W.


Is this an adequate understanding of Marx? And is it plausible as a conception of exploitation? Roemer's is what might be called a pure surplus (value) transfer theory, where the surplus (value) is the amount of embodied labour remaining after workers have purchased their consumption bundles with their wages. Capitalists appropriate the rest. If all value is due to labour, workers transfer the entire net (value of the) surplus to capitalists, and so are Marxian-exploited. In my terms, Marx's general theory of exploitation should be expressed in terms of surplus transfer. Value applies only in market economies where exploiters want the surplus for its exchange value. The notion of surplus transfer need not be understood in terms of embodied labour. We may take the surplus to be the quantity of stuff or value, however measured and whatever its source, produced above what is expended in the process of production, including what is consumed by the producers. Transfer is the appr!
opriation of that stuff or value by nonproducers. Nothing here depends on the difference between surplus and surplus value, so I henceforth suppress the reference to value.

Surplus transfer is only a pattern. It might come about unobjectionably, and thus may fail to be exploitative. Marx thinks that setting aside 'funds for those unable to work' in socialism or 'poor relief' in capitalism (1989, 85) is permitted or even required. A normative premise is needed to establish that some surplus transfer, e.g., from workers to capitalists, is exploitative. Roemer thinks that the premise must be about justice. For him the key question is whether 'people deserve what they get' (1988, 3). For Marx, though, the premise concerns freedom, not justice. This highlights the vital difference between Roemer's and Marx's notions of exploitation.