File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-02-14.064, message 13


Date: Tue, 11 Feb 1997 14:39:59 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: M-I: LTV



High says that exploitation is an abstraction which "can" be dealt with
briefly. Perhaps briefly, but not adequately. Hugh and Carroll both say,
rightly, that capitalist exploitation has to be looked at in its concrete
specificity, as distinct from other kinds of exploitation (e.g., feudal),
and in its its historical development. I agree. They then say, Hugh more
confidentally than Carroll, that value theory is necssary for this sort of
a concrete analysis. This is not so clear.

One thing that a theory of capitalist exploitation has to capture, to
represent capitalism accurately, is that capitalists don't want the stuff
they take from the direct producers for its own sake, but to sell for
profits. Feudal exploiters, by contrast, typically want the stuff the they
take mainly to consume directly. One way to say this is that what
capitalists want from their exploitation is its value. But this is to use
the word in a nontechnical sense. Certaintly capitalists do not say to
themselves, I'm gonna make the workers produce a greater share of socially
necessary labor time that is embodied in the commodities I sell. Most of
them have never _heard_ of the LTV. They say rather, I'll cut my labor
costs and make more profits. Now, this doesn't show that value in Marx's
sense does not work. It may operate, as Marx things, objectively, behind
the backs of the exchangers. But that's a big "may"--that value does so
operate has to be shown.

In my papers on exploitation theory, which, by the way, are published,
Mark, in widely circulated major journals and accessible to anyone with
enough get-up-and-go to go to a university library or ask on interlibrary
loan for the revelant volumes, I say that we can usefully speak
qualitatively of value to capture the idea that capitalists are interested
in what they can sell stuff for and not just to have it themselves. I also
argue that most of this value is indeed contributed by labor
--obviously I;m not following Marx in treating value as definitionally
embodied labor. Rather value is whatever explains why commodities exchange
in stable ratios, which includes a large but quantatively somewhat
indeterminate labor component.

Hugh and Mark say that Marxism cannot be reduced to a theory of
exploitation, and of course I agree. Exploitation is just one of a number
of important features of capitalism that Marx seeks to explain. It is an
aspect which, like most of Marx's other insights, I think can be grasped
and better reconstructed without adherence to a quantatitive value theory,
which I think fails for reasons I have explained elsewhere. 

Mark's contribution is really rather silly. After bridling at my calling
him a fundamentalist, he makes fun of me for daring to criticise Marx and
present arguments for conclusions that differ from his. I am not a
Marxist, says Mark, I am a Schwartzist--because I disagree with Marx. This
is the true face of fundamentalism. Mark treats Marx as the holy writ, to
be defended no matter what against all comers. Divergence from this is
heresy. Accordingly I have to be read out of Church, excommunicated. Does
anyone imagine that this is the scientific approach? Marx himself said
that he welcomed all scientific criticism. In response to certain
fundamentalists he said, according to Engels, that _he_, Marx, wasn't a
MArxist. And if he hadn't said those things, he shouldn't have done; since
he did, we can take him at his word. 

As I've said in other contexts, I don't care whether I'm a Marxist
according to someone's narrow definition. I care to hold beliefs that are
true and useful to the working class--and I think that all true beliefs
are useful to the working class. Marxism is a tradition and a broad style
of analysis, not a set of dogmas that cannot be challenged. If it is a
catechism, I want no part of it. But I think it's not. It's rather a set
of tools, kinds of questions using a characterstic and expanding set of
concepts, with which generations of workers and intellectuals commited to
the workers' cause have approached matters concerning their own
emancipation. It doesn't guarantee any answers in advance, including
Marx's, and if it did, it would have been consigned to the museum of dead
religions a hundred years ago.

In this connection I continue to find Mark's tone and approach unhelpful
and unnecessarily antagonistic. I say he is wrong. He replies, in effect,
Infidel! Turncoat! This is not the way that progress is made. It is, in
fact, regress. 

Now, substantively speaking, to put the best face on Mark's argument,
which is more than he has done with mine, someone more careful than he
might say, well, OK. Disagreement with Marx on lots of points is fine. But
there is a hard core to the theory. You can't be a Newtonian if you reject
graviattion or a Darwinian if you reject evolution, whatever your other
differences from Newton or Darwin. And value theory (and maybe socialist
planning) occupy a similar position in Marx's theory. They are so central
that the rest of the theory simply makes no sense without them; they are
the essence of his contribution. This would not be a crazy thing to say.

But it would be wrong. In the first place, I do not think that Marx
actually _held_ the labor theory of value. He used it, to be sure. It was
the dominant theory in political economy of his day and he operated within
in its intelllctual ambit. But I think Marx regards the theory as only a
useful heuristic, as approximately true, but since truth does not come in
degrees, as false in fact. 

In CIII he expressly abandons the law of value, that commodities exchange
at value equivalents. What remains of it in the more sophisticated model
of CIII is a "tendency" of prices to fluctuate around values, although
since valyes cannot be determined for individual commodities but only in
aggregate it's not clear how this proposition is supposed to be tested. In
CIII also he abandons the proposition that all profits come from surplus
value. Some, he says, come from technical monopolies on things like
waterfalls (his example); and by implication, from other sources like
market luck, sharp trading, and the like. Most profits come from labor,
but it's not analytically true that they do. So, Marx does not hold the LTV.

Moreover, even if he did, he need not have. For he could have said the
things I just did, and more besides, and generally recast his theory
without commitment at least to a quantative value theory. In doing so he
would not be like Newton abandoning gravitation or Darwin evolution; it
would have been more like Newton giving up a geometric formulaism for
Leibniz's algebraic one or, more closely, Darwin allowing for neutral as
well as natural selective sources of evolution. His basic insights, taht
capitalism is exploitattive, that it tends to expand and revolutionize the
means of production, that it has deep and ineradicable instabilities, that
it involves systematic class conflict, and so forth, none of them require
statement in narrowly labor-value theoretic terms. 

In any case, finally, there is a lot of Marx's theory which is only
tangentially related to narrowly political economic concerns at all. The
theories of historical materialism, the theory of ideology, the theory of
the class cahracter of the state, the critique of the ahistorical
character of liberal thought and of the individualistic theory of human
nature, enough stuff to occupy whole libraries, none of these even need
refer to value. Hal Draper wrote five + magnificant volumes on Marx's
theory of revolution and the state, not a word of which would have to be
changed if every sentence Marx wrote concerning value had never been
written. To put it a bit differently, Marxism is a looser and more
open-textured theory than Newtonian mechanics (a deductive system) or even
than Darwin's theory of natural selection.

I shan't take on Mark's comments on market socialism, since what they boil
down to is that Marx wasn't a market socialist. I agree, but that's not a
reason for us not to be MS.

--Justin


 On Tue, 11 Feb 1997, MA Jones wrote:

> Justin calls me a 'fundamentalist' because I disagree violently
> with this and continue to insist that  value theory is the heart of
> Marx's work. But it is and I do. Take value theory away and you are
> left with an interesting 19th century essayist and belle-lettrist with
> a social conscience, and not much more.
> 
> I do not think anyone can sensibly and non-provocatively disagree
> with this. Value theory is the core of Marx's work.
> I have not read Justin's detailed account of his own theoretical ideas,
> his alternative theory of exploitation etc. I have asked him to
> download his stuff and he has made a counter-proposal which I have
> balked at (sorry, Justin). But it is clear that he wants to jettison
> Marxism. Even if his counter-theory is correct (and I do not
> believe this) it would not be Marxism but Schwartzism. We should
> then become Schwartzists and Marxism would be relegated to the
> history books.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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