Wolff - Understanding Marx: A Reconstruction and Critique of Capital

Published by Society for Philosophy & Culture at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Robert Paul Wolff

Understanding Marx

A Reconstruction and Critique of Capital

Robert Paul Wolff

Society for Philosophy & Culture

Wellington

2013

Published by

Society for Philosophy & Culture

Wellington, NZ

2013

books@philosophyandculture.org

Author

First Published

Princeton University Press

1984

ISBN: 978-1-301-13762-6

For Toby and Patrick in the hope that their world will be better than ours

Preface

This book is, in a manner of speaking, a return to the traditions of my youth. My grandfather, Barnet Wolff, was a leader of the Socialist Party in New York City at the turn of the century, and one of the seven socialists who were elected to the New York Board of Aldermen in 1917. I grew up thinking of myself as a socialist, and as an adult came to define myself as a radical, but it was not until six years ago that I began to study Karl Marxs political economy seriously. Rereading volume one of Capital forced me to revise my unreflective view of Marx as merely a philosopher of the human condition, and to construe him instead as a theoretical economist before all else.

Fortunately for me, at the moment when I undertook to rethink Marxs political economy, I found myself teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which has the finest faculty of radical and Marxian economists in the United States. Indeed, the entire university is virtually unique in this country as a centre of serious radical thought. Senior faculty, junior faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates all have contributed to my study of Marx. Most valuable has been the opportunity to talk with, and learn from, a number of members of the Economics Department, including Samuel Bowles, Robert Costrell, William Gibson, Herbert Gintis, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff. My acknowledgments to them in the footnotes do not begin to record my debt to them.

At an early stage in my study of Marx, I had the good fortune to attend a graduate seminar on classical, Marxian, and neoclassical value theory taught by John Eatwell of Cambridge University. It was his lectures, more than anything else, that pulled the subject together for me and gave it a shape. I doubt that Eatwell would agree with what I have to say, but I hope nevertheless that he will accept my thanks. I have benefited too from personal conversations and written exchanges with John Roemer, as well as from the important published work that has flowed from his pen in the past several years.

A special word of thanks must be offered to the undergraduates and graduates in Philosophy 594c, who listened to much of this book as lectures and offered their criticisms and comments. There cannot be many universities in this country at which one can find a class of students with so strong a command of Marxs writings, so serious an interest in theoretical issues of political economy, and so patient a willingness to engage with a teacher groping his way toward an understanding of Capital .

At a late stage in the preparation of the manuscript, two distinguished scholars, Gerald Cohen and Edward Nell, read the entire work for Princeton University Press. Both readers made valuable comments and criticisms, and Nell was especially insightful and sensitive in grasping the essence of my theoretical story and helping me to hold fast to its inner unity. My gratitude as well goes to Elizabeth Gretz and several other Princeton University Press copyeditors, whose work has contributed greatly to the readability of the text.

Finally, I wish to acknowledge my debt to my wife, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, and my colleague and closest friend, Robert John Ackermann, each of whom read an earlier draft of the manuscript and gave the highest proof of love and friendship by telling me honestly that it was no good! Much of whatever is valuable in the present work owes its clarity and coherence to their willingness to tell me the painful truth.

Belmont, Massachusetts

May, 1984

Nolite perturbare circulos meos.

Valerius Maxima (8,7,7)

Introduction

Marx was born in 1818, 166 years ago. He died sixty-five years later in 1883, just over one century ago. During his lifetime, he and Engels wrote enough books, articles, drafts, notes, letters, and sketches to fill forty large volumes in the East German edition of their works, and what with the additional materials since uncovered a projected fifty volumes in the complete English edition now under way. The heart and soul of Marxs lifework was a massive critical analysis of the political economy of bourgeois capitalism. If we restrict ourselves to the three volumes of Capital , the three parts of Theories of Surplus Value , the Grundrisse , and the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy , we have, at a conservative estimate, five thousand pages of theoretical material. There is not, in the whole history of Western thought, a similar body of writings by a single author not the three Critiques of Kant, not the works of Hegel, not even the Summa of Thomas Aquinas. The simplest sort of common sense demands that we estimate Marxs place in the intellectual history of our civilisation on the basis of this mass of economic theory.

But a funny thing happened on the way to immortality. Marx published the first volume of Capital in 1867, a decade before the direction, terms, and methodology of economic theory were transformed by the triple revolution of Jevons, Menger, and Walras. The classical debates, initiated by the physiocrats, carried forward by Smith, brought to their highest theoretical development by Ricardo, and then vulgarised by Bailey, J.S. Mill, and the other post-Ricardians, gave way to the marginalist debates of the post-Walrasians. The central, issues of the classical school the distribution of the social surplus and the conditions and causes of economic growth were replaced by the marginalist concern with the static, ideologically safe question of the efficient allocation of scarce resources with alternative uses. After a brief period during which Marx was taken seriously as to economist by the Austrians, the concepts, methods, and theoretical problems of Capital simply faded from view, save in the writings of the religious Marxists, for whom Capital took the place of holy scriptures. Eventually, it became possible for the shallow and vulgar technicians of the neoclassical synthesis to dismiss Marx entirely as an economist, trivialising him, in Paul Samuelsons famous jibe, as a minor post-Ricardian and an autodidact.

For three-quarters of the century between his death and the present day, Marxs economic theories played no role in the literature of the mainstream of modern economic theory. The major development after the introduction of marginalism, namely Keynesian macroeconomics, grafted a sophisticated technique for divining the shadows on the wall of the cave onto the elegant but irrelevant micro-foundations of the original marginalism. The result was the bastard fusion now regularly taught in colleges and universities as the science of economics. Meanwhile, Marx became a world-historical figure of heroic proportions, the demigod of the Eurasian landmass, the darling of the New Left, the Promethean prophet of self-actualisation and, so far as anyone was seriously prepared to maintain still the same old minor post-Ricardian and autodidact.

In the past quarter century, however, Marx has been rescued from the waxworks of Victorian curiosities, and has emerged at last as one of the most original, powerful, and relevant economists since Adam Smith. It is now possible for the first time actually to justify Marxs stature as a thinker coequal with Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, and to say in quite concrete, particular ways how we can learn from him about the world in which we live.