This is going to be a series of post in response to Joseph Heath’s brilliant provocations at his Substack, “In Due Course” (I’m a paying subscriber, you should be, too). He’s a Marxist philosopher with a lot to say about Marxism. He’s certainly got me thinking. But I’m not here to attack Heath or to defend Marx. Just trying to see what remains of use in this venerable, troubled tradition.
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I used to think Marx was a lousy prophet. But the more I actually apply his work to current events, and put it to use in my own writing about the nexus of Marxism, pragmatism, and post-structuralism, the less sure of that judgement I become. I know, it’s almost fashionable of late to consign the old Moor to the dustbin of history, marking him as a man of the 19th century who can be forgotten along with other once-famous and influential characters, like, say, Holderlin or Schelling. I’m here to say, not so fast. Because I’m with Jacques Derrida, who claimed in 1993 that post-structuralism was the “radicalization of a certain tradition in Marxism.”
The occasion for these cautionary remarks is Joseph Heath’s brilliant account of Marxism’s demise, written for his Substack, “In Due Course.” It appeared in two parts, August 25 and September 15, 2024. Part 1 explains how Marxists like G. A. Cohen became liberals in the late-20th century, thus giving way to a Rawlsian hegemony (in philosophy, anyway) as they began to realize that the critique of capitalism worked better when equipped with the normative premise of egalitarianism than when it offered only an analysis (or a mention) of exploitation. To my mind, Heath’s story had a happy ending—the entry of Marxism into the mainstream of philosophical conversation via John Rawls and the “reticent socialism” expressed in the sequels to A Theory of Justice (1971).
But this comedic twist on Heath’s tragic narrative was probably over-determined by my own inclination to see how and where the Left has won, rather than exult in its will to powerlessness, by which I mean the effects of its assumption that to speak truth to power, you have to be powerless.
For example, in a book of 1994, I demonstrated that Marxian economics had long since been incorporated in Keynesian and post-Keynesian theories of economic growth, development, and crisis (a.k.a. the business cycle)—not through the labor theory of value, which Marx himself knew would be undone by his own “law of accumulation,” but through the two-sector model he sketched in Volume 2 of Capital. Michal Kalecki, Evsey Domar, Roy Harrod, Joan Robinson, Wassily Leontief, and many others understood perfectly well that, as A. K. DasGupta put it, “Keynes dynamized would look pretty much like Marx.” To me this incorporation was (and is) cause for celebration, not resentment over the co-optation of the radicalism residing in Marxism. [See my Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, Chapter 1, “Making Use of Marx”]
I hasten to say that in the rejoinder to Heath that follows, I am not insisting that there’s only one way to read Marx. As far as I can tell, Marxism is the arguments we keep having over what the man had to say about capitalism—nothing more, nothing less. As long as these arguments have some utility in the present because they help us explain the past and predict the future, Marxism won’t be a disposable remnant of the 19th century. In any case, we’re not decoding holy texts here, as if all the answers we need are in these pages; we’re interpreting Marx in the hope of learning something useful, or interesting.
Part 2 of Heath’s account is called “Key stages in the decline of academic Marxism.” Here is his introductory statement:
“The purpose of all of this, as with my previous post, is to explain why there are not many Marxists around any more in universities, despite the fact that there are plenty of left-wing academics. Otherwise put, the goal is to explain why someone like Thomas Piketty, who talks a pretty good game, is not a Marxist in any sense of the term—his class analysis is not Marxist, his normative stance is egalitarian, not Marxist, his account of how capitalism produces inequality is not Marxist, and he mainly wants to reform the tax system rather than overthrow capitalism. So even though he enjoys giving off Marxist vibes, he is actually a pure embodiment of the current liberal-egalitarian hegemony that I described in my previous post.”
My initial response to this was, well, laughter, because it presupposes a unitary definition of Marxism, as if there aren’t at least three ways to conduct class analysis or explain class consciousness, a half-dozen more to show why a critique of exploitation requires a commitment to the norm of equality (on what I would call Hegelian grounds), and so on, using a method that is plainly or plausibly Marxist, having been drawn from Marx himself or from historians, economists, literary critics, sociologists, and philosophers who cite Marx as their principal guide or source. I mean, c’mon, didn’t Marx, yes himself again, glimpse the “overthrow of capitalism” in the rise of the modern-industrial corporation? [See Capital Kerr ed. [1909], 3: 516-19, and Daniel Bell, yeah, him, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), chapter 1, for an excellent exegesis of Volume 3]
But, no matter. The point here is to change our understanding of Marxism, so that we can see signs of a secret life worth telling in what Heath diagnoses as symptoms of decline. I abridge his claims without, I trust, distorting their intended import, then follow with my rejoinder.
“The major problems with scientific Marxism started showing up pretty early in the 20th century. These included:
“1. The labour theory of value. The first and by far the biggest problem for Marxism stemmed from the declining fortunes of the labour theory of value. [Classical] economists like Marx believed that the prices of commodities were determined by the amount of labour-time involved in their production, whereas neoclassical economists believe that prices are determined by the forces of supply and demand. The crucial shift occurred in the work of Alfred Marshall, who pioneered the style of “marginalist” analysis, [which] has a number of advantages, the most important being that it incorporates demand-side considerations (i.e. how much people want various goods), which were neglected in classical theory.
“Many Marxists have sought to avoid these difficulties by interpreting the labour theory as a metaphysical claim about the ultimate origins of economic value. . . . . The problem is that Marx made a number of much more specific, empirical claims about the economy . . . . Most importantly, his concept of surplus value only made sense if the actual price of labour, and the actual price of the commodities produced through labour, were determined by the amount of labour-time involved in their production. So if the labour theory of value turns out to be empirically false, as a claim about how equilibrium market prices are determined, this renders the concept of surplus value meaningless. Once you take away that concept, a lot of other dominoes start to fall.”
The rejoinder. This is correct as far as it goes, but it goes almost nowhere. To begin with, the labor theory of value as Marx developed it (in both senses after Smith and Ricardo) presupposed an entire history, first the so-called primitive accumulation, by which peasants were dispossessed of customary rights to common land through enclosure—they were turned into proletarians who, as such, had to buy the right not to die because their only property was their capacity to produce value—then the articulation of a concept of equality, by which various forms of producing goods in different sectors could be treated as comparable means of producing value, as measured in equivalent units of time.
Labor power didn’t become a relatively homogenous commodity overnight: that epochal “event” took roughly 300 years in areas bound by the North Atlantic, from 1550 to 1850, the Age, aptly named, of Revolution. And primitive accumulation is never quite complete: proletarianization is a contemporary phenomenon, as witness higher education and health care, where once-cosseted professors and physicians now seek unionization because capital has come for their vocations.
The theory as Marx developed it was predicated, emphatically, on that concept of equality, and, to that extent, eschewed an emphasis on exploitation. It was designed, in other words, to explain how the exchange of equivalents could continually produce an asymmetry of power between capital and labor. The wage received by proletarians was eminently fair because it compensated them, more or less, with income enough to buy food, clothing, and shelter, that is, approximately what it cost to reproduce them as workers, who came to the job with nothing but their adaptability, their capacity to produce more value than they were worth as commodities, as mere factors of production, as units of “abstract social labor.”
But not as much as they were worth as human beings. Marx noted that there was a “historical and moral element” in the wages paid to proletarians, but not unless or until the workers themselves enunciated this element, thereby designating themselves as more than commodified, one-dimensional “factors” of production. Insofar as they could and did enunciate the “historical and moral element,” they’d be able to enlarge their wages or reduce their time on the job, thereby socializing the surplus value they had created, not as individuals but as parts of the whole of “abstract social labor.”
Marx himself predicted the demise of his theory. The law of accumulation he proposed in Volume 1 of Capital stipulated that the ratio of “constant” via a vis “variable” capital, roughly the monetary value of past labor or fixed capital in relation to living labor or the monetary value of wages paid, would inevitably increase, and would, therefore, gradually displace living labor from the process of goods production—to the point of altogether replacing it. At which hypothetical point, all labor time would be embodied or congealed as past labor in constant capital, the means of production, whose value would, necessarily, decrease over time.
Marx wrote the preface to the law of accumulation—which doubled as a death sentence on the labor theory of value—in the Grundrisse, the notebooks of the mid-1850s that fed into his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and to the four volumes of Capital (1867ff.):
“But to the degree that large industry develops,, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour power employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself all out of proportion to the direct labour time spent in their production . . . . As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour-time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value of use value.”
[For more details on the law of accumulation, the labor theory of value, etc., see Pragmatism and Political Economy, n. 23 at pp. 300-01 and related text at pp. 6-23]
To be continued.