From: Howard Engelskirchen <howarde-AT-wsulaw.edu>
Subject: RE: BHA: Marx and Locke
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 20:37:04 -0700


Heikki --

For me one of Bhaskar's enduring contributions is to have made broadly
accessible an understanding of Marx's analyses that goes beyond Lockean
theory.  That is, you can't make sense of what Marx is doing unless you give
him a realist reading and Hume's positivist legacy made that very difficult.
So I think if you reevaluate what Marx did open to the possibility that a
realist reading will take you beyond Locke, you'll be surprised.

Both Locke and Marx focus on ownership, as you do, but there is a
difference.  Marx begins with the social relations involved in the
appropriation of nature and constructs categories of ownership (and justice)
on that basis.  Locke begins with a juridical concept of ownership as a
question of rights.  Your references to ownership do seem to carry a Lockean
emphasis.  For critical realists the world is stratified.  Put Locke aside
and see if you can't get to an altogether deeper level of social analysis by
reading Marx's presentation of value from a realist perspective.

For example, Marx's analysis has nothing to do with Locke's theory of
justice.  For Marx justice is what corresponds to the reproduction of the
dominant relations of production of a given mode of production.  He is not a
moralist.  Thus he does not argue that workers are wronged because the
product is taken from them -- that is not what the labor theory of value is
about.  That sense of wrong, in fact, is implicit in capitalism, which is
why it can be rooted in Lockean origins.  That is, Marx shows that there is
implicit in capitalism a contradiction between an ideology of justice based
on commodity production abstracted from capitalist production (eg relations
of fairness generated by market relations taken as if the wage relation did
not exist) and an ideology of justice based on commodity production as
capitalist production.  But taking  this contradiction as the reason why the
system is wrong, Marx would characterize as a petty bourgeois move -- the
sort of thing Prodhoun did.  Instead Marx argues that the system is wrong
(the use of the word is a matter of deriving a moral conclusion from an
underlying contradiction) because although the substantive processes by
which nature is appropriated are social, the social relations within which
that appropriation takes place are private in form.  Private persons control
a social process for private ends.  Direct producers do not themselves, as
associated workers, control the means and processes of production.  If they
did so, the forms of distributing the product of labor would take care of
themselves.  

Neoclassicals love to appeal to the transformation problem, but the most
important thing to get transformed in prevailing treatments of it is what
Marx was trying to do and the tools with which he sought to do it.  The
simultaneous presence of the commodity as a commmodity and the commodity as
capital, for example, a distinction essential to appreciating Marx's
problematic, is never glimpsed.  I mean if you take a three dimensional
problem and transform it into two dimensions, or even one, you can conclude
all kinds of solutions are not possible.  Price formation, of course, is an
essential concern to the world of business under capitalism.  If I can
predict the price of stocks before tomorrow's close I profit.  But, to use
an analogy from law, as a social theorist I am interested in how the social
relation expressed by the rule of negligence gets reproduced, not who will
win any particular litigation over an intersection collision.

I agree that Marxism as a Lockean normative theory does not add up to much.
But Marxism as realist social theory explaining the causal tendencies at
work in the way the appropriation of nature occurs in societies dominated by
the capitalist mode of production is quite another thing.

Howard





-----Original Message-----
From: Heikki Patomaki [mailto:user-AT-nigd.u-net.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2000 1:32 PM
To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: RE: BHA: Radical Chains Indeed


Tobin is quite correct in saying:

>Re markets, I'm a little puzzled by the discussion, especially Howard's
>position, which seems to say that markets imply capitalism.  My
>understanding was always that the mode of production conditions the mode of
>distribution (not vice versa), and that there are and have been plenty of
>markets in non-capitalist societies (e.g. in classical Athens, where the
>dominant mode of production was slavery).  Money may be necessary in
>capitalism, but it's used elsewhere and a society is only capitalist if
>*labor power* is commodified, no?

IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THE CONFUSION STEMS FROM THE INABILITY
TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN MARKETS AND CAPITALIST OWNERSHIP:

Capitalism is constituted by absolute and exclusive private property, and
presupposes a market-based system of exchange. This is consistent with the
facts that in the really existing capitalism (i) state (or
inter-nationalised state structures) not only provides the infrastructure
and the regulatory framework of capitalism but also intervenes in many
other ways in the functioning of the economy, and (ii) intra-firm
transactions and planned transfer prices of big corporations account for a
substantial part of all global transactions. 

What is crucial is that capitalism is a system of ownership and control of
means of production; market is a system of economic exchange. Capitalism
presupposes markets, but not vice versa. Also in non-capitalist contexts,
economic exchange can be based mostly or largely on price-setting markets.
Moreover, as said, in capitalism, a major part of transactions occurs
within organisations, in a planned manner.	

THE CONFUSION IS ALSO DELIBERATE IN THE DISCOURSE OF THE
WASHINGTON CONSENSUS; TODAY, IT IS NOT ALL MARKET, IT IS 
RATHER ALL CAPITALISM.

HOPE THIS HELPS,

			HEIKKI


P.S.1. References to the Marx's theory of value makes me
somewhat puzzled. Basically, it seems to me that Marx agreed
with Lockean theory of justice, namely that the product of
work belongs to the person working. It is only that in
capitalism the capitalists take the surplus of the workers'
product, and this is the hidden secret of capitalism. In this
sense, Marx's moral theory was based on the doxa of capitalism,
or perhaps in a Rawlsian way, on the "overlapping consensus".
But that was the doxa of the 19th century.
	One of the very few things that the neoclassical 
economists got right was the criticism of the Lockean/Ricardian/
Marxian theory of value as an explanation of prices in the market
place. Thus the famous problem of transformation, that was
never resolved in the Marxist camp (some, such as Straffa,
inverted the neoclassical method, and tried to rewrite the
theory, but never succeeded in going beyong few interesting
provocations). Unless one comes up with a resolution of the
problem of transformation, it is very hard to see how
the labour theory of value could be anything but a purely
normative theory, NOT an exlanatory theory of price-
formation in a market economy.

PS.2. B.t.w., Roberto Mangabeira Unger's "Democracy Realized. 
The Progressive Alternative", Verso 1998, and its massive 
3-volume predecessor "False Necessity" (Cambridge University 
Press, 1987), discusses in great programmatic detail a 
democratic alternative to capitalism (some 1000 pages 
all together). Yet (even) it fails to address issues of 
global political economy seriously. Unger, too, says he is 
a scientific realist. I would love to see a critical 
realist engagement with this work and its silences (in 
fact, much more than an engagement with Hume).

PS.3. But I do agree, also with the Habermasians, that
there are many spheres of life in which there should be
no "market", whether capitalist or not. Capitalist markets
can destroy the society quickly -- as Thatcher wanted to
have it, and succeeded at least in the UK -- but there are 
many contexts in which non-capitalist markets too would be 
quite inappropriate.


At 11:06 AM 4/26/00 -0700, you wrote:
>Tobin and Colin --
>
>No, markets don't imply capitalism -- there are precapitalist markets and
>postcapitalist markets.  Markets do imply commodity production and Marx
does
>give a real definition of commodity production -- commodity production
>occurs whenever separate entities produce things useless to them which they
>exchange in independent transactions with other separate entities.  (The
>difficulty of the definition is in saying "separate" or "private" or
>"autonomous" simply.)  Where this exists you unleash the tendential forces
>which generate markets and money and, in the end, capital.  Of course, as
>Colin sugests there have historically been markets without money (though
not
>without commodities), but no one is suggesting that socialist emancipation
>will lead to a bartar economy.  
>
>As for your definition of markets, Colin, "a
>system which facilitates the exchange of objects (which are different from
>commodities)," everybody is entitled to their own opinion, as they say, but
>this sounds more like a pomo axiom than a scientific one.  It is certain
>that you could not present a scientific analysis of capitalism making use
of
>the category markets as you have defined it without ptolemaic contortions
>that in the end would come down to something like the definition I gave
>above.
>
>By the way, the quote Colin gives from MOM seems to me altogether accurate:
>"Emancipatory socialist action will involve transforming the market - more
>precisely, abolishing some markets,
>socialising and democratising others." (p.30).  It is certain that the
>transition to socialism involves exactly this.  But that doesn't mean
>markets are forever or that they would be part of a communist society.
>
>Howard
>
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Tobin Nellhaus [mailto:nellhaus-AT-gis.net]
>Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2000 5:12 AM
>To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: Re: BHA: Radical Chains Indeed
>
>
>Hi all--
>
>I'm not sure what is desired as a sustained critique of Hume, but there do
>seem to be some fair passages in both RTS and SRHE.
>
>Re markets, I'm a little puzzled by the discussion, especially Howard's
>position, which seems to say that markets imply capitalism.  My
>understanding was always that the mode of production conditions the mode of
>distribution (not vice versa), and that there are and have been plenty of
>markets in non-capitalist societies (e.g. in classical Athens, where the
>dominant mode of production was slavery).  Money may be necessary in
>capitalism, but it's used elsewhere and a society is only capitalist if
>*labor power* is commodified, no?
>
>---
>Tobin Nellhaus
>nellhaus-AT-mail.com
>"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce
>
>
>
>
>     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>
>
>     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>
>


----------------------------------

Heikki Patomaki

Network Institute for Global Democratisation (NIGD)
http://www.nigd.u-net.com
Helsinki & Nottingham
e-mail: heikki-AT-nigd.u-net.com
tel: 	+358 - (0)40  - 558 2916  (GSM)
	+44  - (0)774 - 711 24 35 (GSM)

ALSO:

Department of International Studies
Nottingham Trent University
Clifton Lane
Nottingham NG11 8NS
The United Kingdom
e-mail: heikki.patomaki-AT-ntu.ac.uk
tel:	+44 - (0)115 - 948 6610
fax: 	+44 - (0)115 - 948 6385



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