economics and sociology

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: economics and sociology

JKS suggests that Marx's sociology should be separated from his economics. I disagree.

Marx never made the economics/sociology distinction and it's a big mistake to ignore his method. That doesn't mean that he was right. Rather, it means that if you don't understand Marx's Hegel-flavored method (as with Jon Elster's MAKING SENSE OF MARX), it's hard to be accurate in one's criticisms.

But instead of dragging out the Hegel and boring those who see his work as totally out of fashion, tedious, mystical, and thus to be ignored, I just want to point out some of the roles that sociological matters play in Marx that are missed by the neo-Ricardian approach of, say, Howard & King's HISTORY OF MARXIAN ECONOMICS.

First, what is "value," anyway? To H&K, it seems to be simply a matter of how many hours of labor it took to create a commodity. But for Marx, it's a societal phenomenon: just because I take a long time to make a lamp doesn't mean that it has a higher value. The value of the lamp reflects the average for all of the lamps. Further, a lamp made yesterday may be worth less today ("devalued, because new methods introduced in society allow workers to produce lamps more quickly and efficiently. More completely, reading CAPITAL, it seems that "value" represents contributions to a latent community of direct producers. (On the latent community (not Marx's term), see the last section of ch. 1 of CAPITAL, vol. I.)

Now, I don't want to assert that my interpretation is "correct" here, but the point is that H&K totally ignore such interpretations, focussing on narrowly-defined economics. This one-sided and thus biased approach detracts from anyone's ability to use their book as a critique of Marxian economics.

Second, in CAPITAL volume I, Marx spends a lot of ink on examining the labor process, which is not simply a matter of combining "labor" and "raw materials" and "machinery" and "technology" to produce "output." It's a sociological process of authority and (sometimes) obedience, akin to a miniature planned economy. Further, when workers are part of a collective labor process, it's not individuals that produce the commodity and "value." It's the work-group as a whole, with the whole being more than the sum of its parts. (In the collective labor process, the latent community of workers referred to above becomes manifest, on a relatively small scale.)

This again is largely ignored by H&K. This again undermines anyone's ability to use their book as a critique of Marxian economics. That doesn't detract from the book's use as a survey of debates about more purely economic issues in Marxian political economics.

Jim