I'm playing a bit of catch-up here, responding to Fred's post from 13
March, in which he disagrees with the content of the "surprising
agreement" between Mike Lebowitz and me. And while I broadly endorse
Mike's response to Fred, I'd like to add the following.
Let me start from common ground. I agree with Fred that Marx in Vol
I deals exclusively with the capitalist mode of production, and
accept his criticism that my earlier arguments did not advertise this
point prominently enough. However, I would like to suggest that
Marx is manifestly doing more than simply describing capitalism as it
actually is; he's attempting to distinguish features which are
*incidental* to the logic of capitalist exploitation from those which
are *central* to it. Indeed, Marx announces as much in the closing
footnote of Ch. 5, which Fred cites at an earlier stage of our
exchange.
Unfortunately, Marx's arguments with respect to the *essential
irrelevance* of price-value disparities, and correspondingly the
*essential relevance* of the purchase and subsumption of wage labor,
are both clearly invalid. There are three major ways out of this
problem: a) by reconstructing Marx's value-theoretic account on
grounds not advanced by Marx; b) by tautology, i.e. by defining the
labor theory of value so as to presume the relevance of price-value
equivalence (and thus repairing Marx's failure to justify labelling
this condition as the "pure" case of commodity exchange) and/or
defining the capitalist mode of production as the purchase and
subsumption of wage labor (which gets around the central question by
begging it); or c) grounding Marx's account of capitalist
exploitation in alternative (e.g., historical-materialist) terms.
Fred writes:
> 1. I have emphasized on several occasions that Marx's subject from the very
> beginning of Capital is capitalism. Marx is not trying to explain the
> historical emergence of capitalism or derive the necessity of capitalism
> from general commodity production, but is instead analyzing actually
> existing capitalism ("modern bourgeios society" as Marx often called it).
I agree with this, and have never suggested that Marx was trying in
Vol. I to "explain the historical emergence of capitalism or derive
the necessity of capitalism..." I have insisted, based on Marx's own
words, that for Marx "analyzing actually existing capitalism"
involved distinguishing what is accidental to the process of
capitalist exploitation from that which is central to it.
> To quote just one brief passage (among many) in which Marx made this point
> (from the introduction on the "method of political economy" in the
> Grundrisse):
> Capital is the all-dominating economic power of *bourgeois society*.
> It must form the starting-point as well as the finishing-point [of a
> theory of bourgeois society; FM), and must be dealt with before
> landed property. (G. 107; emphasis added)
As an aside, I note that Marx in this passage justifies assigning
analytical priority to capital instead of landed property. But my
critique of Marx does not contradict this analytical priority. Note
also what the passage does *not* say: Marx does not suggest that
"bourgeois society" includes the purchase and subsumption of wage
labor as a matter of definition.
> Here it is clear that the "capital" Marx was talking about is the capital IN
> CAPITALISM.
Same caveats as above.
> Gil claims that this limitation of the subject of the theory to capitalism
> "does not affect the logical structure of the argument" in any way. But how
> can it not affect the logical structure of the argument?
Here's how: 1) Marx characterizes price-value equivalence as the
"pure" case of commodity exchange. I criticize this assessment on the
grounds that Marx provides no basis for it other than reference to
obscure authorities (who don't define value in the same way he does,
by the way), and point out reasons to doubt this assessment. This
criticism in no way hinges on whether Marx intended to focus
exclusively on the capitalist mode of production in Vol. I.
2) Marx concludes Ch. 5 with the claim that "the transformation of
money into capital" must be explained on the basis of price-value
equivalence. He reaffirms this commitment at the beginning of Ch. 6,
where he justifies his (otherwise arbitrary---see below) focus on
purchase and sale of labor power explicitly on the basis of having to
explain surplus value on the basis of price-value equivalence. But
Marx's argument in support of this claim are manifestly invalid, and
this defect in no way hinges on whether or not Marx intended to focus
exclusively on the capitalist mode of production.
> It restricts the
> possible answers to the question being asked. When Marx asked the question
> in Chapters 5 and 6 - "how can capital make a profit?" - he was not asking a
> general question about all the various possible ways in which capital as a
> general category could make a profit in various different modes of
> production. He was asking a much more "historically specific" question:
> how can capital IN CAPITALISM make profit?
Indeed, his question was even more specific than that. Having
asserted, invalidly, that surplus value must be explained on the
basis of price-value equivalence, Marx asked, how can capital IN
CAPITALISM make a profit, given that all commodities exchange at
their respective values? He makes this stipulation quite explicitly.
> This limitation requires that
> the answer to this question must be an element of actually existing capitalism.
Yes, but "actually existing capitalism" allows a lot of leeway:
there are price-value disparities in actually existing capitalism,
and capitalists earn interest on loans to worker cooperatives in
actually existing capitalism. And forms of proto-industrial capital
were still quite common in the actually existing capitalism of Marx's
day. Yet Marx focuses on the purchase and subsumption of labor
power, and evidently rejects the rest as incidental. On what basis?
> 2. Marx's answer to his question follows simply and directly from his the
> labor theory of value presented in Chapter 1, which is the basic assumption
> of Marx's theory thereafter. ACCORDING TO THE LABOR THEORY OF VALUE, the
> source of additional value (and hence of suruplus-value) MUST be additional
> labor.
But this has never been at issue. *Of course* the source of surplus
value must be additional labor. This is a consequence of Marx's
definition of surplus value as self-valorizing value (rather than
redistribution of existing value), not the labor theory of value.
But circuits of capital which yield surplus value do not necessarily
depend on the purchase and subsumption of labor power, so this is
beside the point.
> WITHIN CAPITALISM,
> additional labor can be provided only by the purchase and consumption of
> labor-power. This is not a "leap" of logic, but is a simple logical
> deduction from the labor theory of value and the specification of the
> subject of the analysis as capitalism. I do not see any possible problem
> with this deduction.
Well, here's a problem with it: unless one *defines* the capitalist
mode of production as involving the purchase and consumption of
labor-power (in which case the "deduction" is valid *only* because it
is a simple tautology), it does not follow from any valid
value-theoretic premise that "additional labor can be provided only
by the purchase and consumption of labor-power." As a general rule
that is simply untrue. Furthermore, the grounds for demonstrating
the truth of this proposition, if it is not simply a tautology, are
historical-materialist, not value-theoretic.
Note further that Marx does not rest his argument on the tautology
that the capitalist mode of production includes the purchase and
consumption of labor-power as a matter of definition; he explicitly
rests it on the (invalid) claim that surplus value must be explained
on the basis of price value equivalence.
>And note that this argument is VALUE-THEORETIC; i.e.
> it obviously depends on the labor-theory of value.
I'd say rather that it's obvious that it does *not* depend on the
labor theory of value, other than invalidly. The stipulation that
surplus value must derive from additional labor stems from Marx's
definition of surplus value, not the labor theory of value. Any
insistence that such additional labor *must* be derived from the
purchase and consumption of labor-power stems from a tautology (or
else the historical-materialist grounds I've been emphasizing), not
the labor theory of value.
Bottom line: Marx singles out the purchase and subsumption of labor
power as the essential basis of capitalist exploitation, and in so
doing denies the essential relevance of (actually existing)
usury, (actually existing) proto-industrial capital, and (actually
existing) price-value disparities to this account. Putting aside the
invalid claim that surplus value must be explained on the basis of
price-value equivalence, and the corresponding invalid (or else
meaningless) claim that the latter represents the "pure" case of
commodity exchange, there is **no valid value-theoretic basis** for
this procedure.
And that's why the critical point underlying Mike's and my
"surprising agreement" continues to stand.
In solidarity, Gil