From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Wed Nov 07 2007 - 12:28:57 EST
One other aspect of M's critique of Ricardo is actually Ricardo's overabstraction, his abstraction away from the concrete labor process. So Ricardo misses, was unable to theorize for reasons we should specify the epochal transformation of the concrete labor process from manu to machino facture and the related changes in the modes of surplus value from absolute to relative. That is he can't understand capitalism in terms of its unity of technical and value processes. Of the TSSi thinkers Carchedi seems most sensitive to this aspect of Marx's critique of Ricardo. For Marx Ricardo was both insufficiently and overly abstract. Marxists economists, inheriting the exchange orientation of their profession, have in general focused on M's critique of Ricardo's insufficient abstraction and this theory of cost price. This is also true of most TSSI thinkers. But that's only half the picture. Rod Beamish wrote an a very good intellectual history of Marx's conceptualization of the division of labor, labor process. I wrote this review ten years ago Beamish, Rob. MARX. METHOD, AND THE DIVISION OF LABOR. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. x, 196 pp., [1]. Beamish focuses on the method by which Marx came to theorize "capitalism's major period of revolutionary transformation: the emergence of machine-based, large-scale industry." (6) Beamish is elaborate about how such theorization required "simultaneously...a logical and an empirical dimension." In showing how Marx came to ferret out and analyze the mechanism that would sufficiently increase productivity to enable the transition from absolute to relative surplus value. Beamish shows that "in January 1863, while working with empirical material related to machinery, Marx finally drew out of it the conceptual framework needed to present the division of labor as a transitional dimension of production that led to machine production." By focusing on this method by which this mechanism was isolated and how exactly it served a transitional function, Beamish has provided us "an excellent opportunity to see how Marx's concepts evolved both logically, and in conjunction with empirical evidence." (7) It is indeed exciting to understand the relation between such concepts as absolute and relative surplus value and the empirical history of the division of labor and machinery. This book is really so chock full of insights and important developments in Marx's thought that it would require a lengthy summary of each chapter. Beamish introduces the reader to how Marx grapsed the historical determinateness of capital via a study of how the ancients' conceived the division of labor basically in terms of quality, use-value improvements, not in terms of the possibilities for the reduction of socially necessary labor time. In many important passages, Beamish shows how Marx's alienation problematic went through substantive changes as he better acquainted himself with the actual technical division of labor both during manufacture and machino-facture. He also shows how Marx came to distinguish and relate the social division with the technical division of labor and perfect his criticism of Adam Smith. In a difficult chapter "From Abstract to Concrete" Beamish acquaints us with Marx's careful reading on the history of technology which allowed him to grasp the distinction between a tool and a machine and on that basis fully analyze, as Marx put it to Engels, "the interconnection of human social relationships with the development of the material means of production." (Quoted in Beamish, p106)... In a very important section of the chapter "Final Form and Content" Beamish shows how Marx finally entered and studied the details of the hidden abode of production. In the previous chapter Beamish had already extracted from the 1861-1862 manuscripts this: "the increased productivity and complication of the total process of production, its enrichment, is thus pruchased through the reduction of labor capacity in each particular function to a purely barren abstraction--as simply property which appears in unvarying monotony in the same operation and for which the total production of capacity of the worker, the manifoldness of his abilities, is confiscated." (Quoted in Beamish, p. 109) Then in the following chapter, Beamish shows how through greater attention to empirical material Marx deepened this insight, drew from Adam Smith in the course of this critique, and still fundamentally transformed the bourgeois conception of the division of labor. Along the way, Beamish is able to relate this back to Marx's developing ideas about alienation and capital fetishism. It should be noted that such concerns are at the heart of Postone's monograph, to which Beamish's work is in many ways complementary. For example, Beamish discusses "how workers are prevented from developing their full human potential as they become one-sided appendages to detail tasks while simultaneously producing the social relations that oppose and exploit them." (154) But I do have a serious criticism of this book. In a word, Beamish tends to reduce Marx's conception of theory to an absract apprehension of historic specificity. In other words, Beamish seems most interested in grasping the distinction between manufacture and machino-facture and grasping that distinction in terms of abstract concepts. He puts particular attention for example on the concepts handwerkmassig (handicraft labor) and Gesamtarbeiter (collective worker) because these concepts allow Marx to distinguish manufacture from machino-facture: "In 1867, Marx presents more actual concrete material on the division of labor by drawing it from histories of machinery and technology rather than from various largely theoretical treatises on political economy. At the same time, however, he employed such new conceptual terms as handwerkmassig and Gesamtarbetier to encapsulate concrete trends leading woward the simplication of work tasks and the conglomeration of specialized tools under a single source of control. Within this theme, Marx deals with the transition from manufacture to large-scale industry, from the tool to the machine, from human-based, handicraft-like production to machine-like, industrial production, and from the collective workers in the workshop to the machine." (p.153) But Marx's study of the change in the technical conditions of production effected by the emergence of machino-facture only begins with the differences from the period of manufacture. And it is not enough to say that it makes possible the production of relative surplus value over and above absolute surplus value. Marx's goal is to theorize the tendencies in capitalist development to which the emergence of machino-facture gives rise. The point is not only to describe or even grasp a historical transition with a combination of abstract concepts and through empirical study of the actual mechanisms but to theorize the long-terms tendencies of the new stage of capitalism and in the process of doing so to develop the necessary concepts. In his analysis of the effects of machino-facture, Marx studied the changes it would bring in family structure (as women and children could now be exploited) and formulated new concepts to study the unique dynamics (the threat of *moral depreciation* of new machinery; the rise in the *organic composition of capital*; the growth of the *industrial reserve army of labor*; *law of tendency of the rate of profit to fall*; the speed-up of labor and other *countertendencies* to falling profit rate; and the growing importance of *fixed capital*, its tendendential overproduction and the dynamics to which that gives rise). All this arises only on the basis of a change in the technical division of labor; it does not belong to the period of capitalist manufacture. This is the real fruit that Marx's historical specification of machino-facture bears-- a theoretical analysis of the real tendencies of capitalist development which is now based on transformed technical division of labor, a transformation which Marx could have only grasped through careful attention to empirical materials. So Beamish is correct to emphasize the connections between abstract concepts and empirical research. My point is that Marx's concepts are more dynamic than Beamish recognizes. One other criticism would be in order: Beamish does not mention at all Marx's interest in the emergence of the international division of labor, as Marx came to see it as suited to the interests of the advanced capitalist nations. One wonders what preliminary research Marx had done in order to arrive at a non-equilibrium theory of the world market in the first volume of Capital. Rakesh Bhandari UC Berkeley Rakesh > Hi Anders, > Marx's critique of Ricardo includes the following: Ricardo did not understand the value form in terms of the mutually assuming/mutually exclusive rleation between relative and equivalent form; he did not understand how capital, not organic chemistry, provided capital with its most important limit; due to faulty abstraction and absence of mediation and lack of dialectics in general Ricardo did not theorize the dynamic consequencs of the immament contradiction, viz. opposed tendencies of regulation by price by law of value and the adjumsnt of prices to allow equalization of profit rate. > > At the same time Marx accepts Ricardo on following points: > > 1. A working day of a given length always creates the same amount > of value, no matter how much the productiveness of labor may vary. 2. Surplus > value increases as the value of labor (power) diminishes. 3. An increase or diminution of surplus > value is the result of, and never a cause of, a corresponding change in the magnitude > of the value of labor power." From William J Blake and II Rubin on Marx's > debt to Ricardo. > > I don't think the debate is about TSSI per se but about our understanding > of the significance of Marx's critique of Ricrado. > > TSSI, along with Geoffrey Pilling and precious few other Marxists, actually agee with Marx's critique of Ricardo. > > They think it's worth defending Marx's towering achievement. > > Rakesh >
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