Vitaly Vygodsky - The Story Of A Great Discovery

The theoretical luggage with which Marx arrived inLondon.in August 1849. The Poverty of Philosophyand Wage-Labour and Capital- the nucleus of hiseconomic theoryand the point of departure forfurther research. The theoryof value andsurplus-value of the classical bourgeois economists and theirfundamental shortcomings. Marx's application ofthe materialist conception of history to politicaleconomy.Why the study of the subject-matter had to beginagain"right from the start".

Expelled from Paris, Marx arrived in London at the end ofAugust 1849 and lived there for the rest of his life. In the middle ofSeptember he was joined by his wife and children from Paris andFrederick Engels also came during the first half of November. This wasthe start of a new period in Marx's theoretical activities, the periodof the 1850's.

This new period can only be understood and comprehended whenit is considered together with the preceding period of the 1840's withwhich it is inseparably associated.

As regards the science of economics, the greatest achievementsof the 1840's were Marx's The Poverty of Philosophy,published in1847 in Paris and Brussels, and his lectures on Wage-Labourand Capital, held in December 1847 at the GermanWorkingmen's Club of Brussels and printed as a series of leadingarticles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in April1849.

In these works and on the basis of his materialist concept ofhistory, Marx began to work out his theory of economics in detail. Atthe same time, he included in this his critique of the bourgeoiseconomists.

In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marxexposed the fundamental methodological faults of the entire system ofbourgeois political economy - its ahistorical character, its endeavoursto represent the economic laws of capitalism as eternal laws of Nature."Economists express the relations of bourgeois production ... as fixed,immutable, eternal categories ... Economists explain how productiontakes place in the above-mentioned relations, but what they do notexplain is how these relations themselves are produced,. that is, thehistorical movement which gave them birth."

As a result of his historical approach to social relations,Marx formulated in The Poverty of Philosophy oneof the most important theses of his economic doctrine: The relations ofproduction are not, as is the opinion of bourgeois economists,relations between things but relations between people with reference tothings. This view of the relations of production enabled Marx toovercome the ahistorical character and empiricism of bourgeoiseconomists.

In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marxclarified the real position of Smith and Ricardo in the history of thescience of economics and showed that Proudhon's theory of economics,which was claimed to be the last word in political economy, was a stepback in comparison with Smith and Ricardo. "Ricardo's theory of valueis the scientific interpretation of actual economic life; M. Proudhon'stheory of value is the utopian interpretation of Ricardo's theory."

An idea of the qualitative advance achieved by Marx in hisappreciation of the nature of the capitalist mode of production isconveyed by his critical commentaries on Ricardo's On thePrinciples of Political Economy in 1844. In thesecommentaries, Marx still rejected Ricardo's theory of labour-value froman incorrect standpoint.

In The Poverty of Philosophy Marx hadalready shown that the production relations of mankind arc part ofpolitical economics and that the economic categories express theseproduction relations.

Of fundamental significance in this connection was thestatement of the primacy of social production, of production relationsforming a single entity with the productive forces as compared with theother social relations: "The mode of exchange of products depends uponthe mode of exchange of the productive forces Thus in the history ofsociety we see that the mode of exchanging products is regulated by themode of producing them."

The question -which must now be raised is to what extent didMarx work out his own theories of value and surplus-value in ThePoverty of Philosophy and Wage-Labour and Capital.But before this is attempted, it is still necessary to examine thevalue and surplus-value theories of the classical bourgeois economists.This will enable us to draw a clear comparison between the content ofthe two works by Marx and the conclusions which had already beenarrived at by Smith and Ricardo.

A detailed review of bourgeois political economy is given inthe four volumes of Capital and in AContribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Only theconclusions to which Marx came in his analysis of bourgeois politicaleconomy are set out here.

The greatest merit of the standard authors of bourgeoispolitical economy was their effort "to grasp the inner connection", tocomprehend "the inner connection in contrast to the multiplicity ofoutward forms". This isevident above all in the fact that they postulated the theory oflabour-value.

Even the bare statement that human labour is the source ofvalue was an epoch-making event in the history of political economy.From the example of the English economist W. Petty, Marx showed,however, "that recognition of labour as the source of material wealthby no means precludes misapprehension of the specific social form inwhich labour constitutes the source of exchange value". This misapprehension, though,is characteristic to a greater or lesser extent of all bourgeoiseconomists. It follows from the apologetic concept of bourgeois.political economy which regards the capitalist mode of production as aneternal natural form of production.

The most important condition for comprehending the specifichistorical character of value-creating labour is in distinguishing bothin labour itself and also in its product between the material content(useful activity, labour in a specific, tangible form and use-value asthe product of his labour) andthe social form (expenditure of humanlabour in general, no matter in what specific form, and value as theproduct of this labour).

But classic bourgeois political economy was only beginning tounderstand the dual character of labour and the product of labour incapitalist society. "The decisive outcome of the research carried onfor over a century and a half by classical political economy ... is ananalysis of the aspects of the commodity into two forms of labour ..."The bourgeois economists,however, were not able to make a consistent distinction betweenuse-value and value, between concrete and abstract labour, and evenwhen this distinction emerged in their considerations they were usuallyunaware of it and it remained an isolated phenomenon.

The identification of use-value and value by bourgeoispolitical economy expresses its own peculiar fetishism. This fetishism,in turn, is a consequence of the objective fact that the relations ofproduction in the capitalist mode of production necessarily assume theform of a relation between things. For the bourgeois economists, wroteMarx, "the material element of capital is integrated with the socialform as capital ".

In this analysis of bourgeois political economy, Marxcarefully investigated all the elements of a scientific understandingof the dual character of labour and its product in capitalist societywhich were to be found in the standard authors (in Ricardo especially)and through which the labour-value theory of the classical economistscould at all become the source for Marx's theory of value. Marxremarked on the twentieth chapter of Ricardo's "On the Principles ofPolitical Economy and Taxation" that it is "nothing but aninvestigation of the difference between use-value and exchange-value".Marx notes here the factual distinction of the dual character of labourin Ricardo,