Henryk Grossman - Marx, Classical Political Economy and the Problem of Dynamics

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The dominant view of Marx is to regard him as a student of and successor to the Classical economists; as an economist who 'completed' that work.

Marx distinguishes four phases in the development of political economy: the first embraces the period of 'Classical political economy', and the remaining three the various stages of 'Vulgar Economics'. For Marx, the factor which unites the representatives of Classical political economy into one intellectual school is the basic similarity of their historical situation, despite their sometimes great individual differences, e.g. between Petty, Hume and the Physiocrats, and between the latter and Smith or Ricardo .

Ricardo's theory of ground-rent, as Hume's critique before it, or of establishing the distinction between productive and unproductive labour - which for them was chiefly meant to embrace the representatives of the feudal occupations.

According to Marx, 'Classical' is a term which applies to those authors who make up this 'battle-front', such as John Locke in his polemic against 'unproductive' feudal land-ownership and ground-rent, which in his view, 'does not differ at all from usury. The position adopted by the Classical economists becomes particularly clear in their doctrine of 'productive and 'unproductive' labour which serves to clarify the relationship of the rising bourgeoisie to the preceding classes and ideologies. The doctrine is in stark contradiction both to the view held in the ancient world, 'in which materially productive work bore the stigma of slavery and was regarded merely as a pedestal for the idle citizen' and to that of the social classes and occupations of the feudal period, which were declared to be unproductive.

In Marx's view the language of Classical political economy is, 'the language of the still revolutionary bourgeoisie which has not yet subjected to itself the whole of society, the State etc. All these illustrious and time-honoured occupations sovereign, judge, priest, officer etc. -with all the old ideological professions to which they give rise, their men of letters, their teachers-and priests, are from an economic standpoint put on the same level as the swarm of their own lackeys and jesters maintained by the bourgeoisie and by idle wealth -the landed nobility and idle capitalists. They live on the produce of other people's industry'. As long as the bourgeoisie has not yet confronted the 'really productive' workers in conscious and openly hostile antagonism, a class which could equally, well claim that 'they (the bourgeoisie) live from the produce of other people's industry, it can still face the 'unproductive classes' of the feudal period as the 'representative of productive labour'.

When the bourgeoisie has consolidated its power in the course of economic development, partly assumed dominance over the state, and partly concluded a compromise with the feudal classes and the 'ideological professions', and in addition once the proletariat and its theoretical representatives arrive on the scene and deduce egalitarian and socialist conclusions from the Classicals' labour theory of value (the right of the working class to the full fruits of its labour), 'things take a new turn', and political economy 'tries to justify "economically" from its own standpoint, what at an earlier stage it had criticised and fought against' .

This was accompanied by an abandonment of the distinction between productive and unproductive labour -out of fear of a proletarian critique which had already made its demands known,-which was replaced in Say and Malthus, for example, by the view that all work is equally productive. The real meaning of Ricardo s theory of ground-rent, originally directed against the land-owners, was similarly turned into its direct opposite by Malthus, who introduced the problem of the disposal of the product under capitalism. Although Malthus does in fact point to the inevitability of generalised overproduction, affecting all branches of the economy, he only does so in order to prove the necessity of unproductive consumers and classes, i.e. 'buyers who are not sellers', so that the sellers can find a market where they can dispose of their supply of goods. Hence the necessity of waste and profligacy (including war).

Thompson (1824), Percy Ravenstone (1824) and Hodgskin (1825, 1827), the theoretical representatives of the working class in England, used Ricardo's labour theory of value to derive egalitarian conclusions and demands.-the classical labour theory of value was progressively abandoned, and transformed into a meaningless theory of costs of production: the specific value-creating role of labour was utterly obliterated. Land and capital were now attributed with their own productivity -creation of value! -and labour was recognised as simply another factor of production alongside them. This in turn led to the overthrow of Ricardo's conception of the wage as a relation expressing the share of the working class in the total social product which it itself has created -hence justifying the capitalists' profit as the result of the 'productivity' of their capital (not labour). In similar fashion ground-rent was justified as the fruit of the productivity of the land, which meant that the antagonism towards land-ownership which characterised Classical theory now became meaningless and irrelevant.

The third phase of political economy, the period following the July Revolution, in the 1830s and 1840s, was a time of sharpening class antagonisms, and an ever growing number of proletarian critiques of the prevailing social order in England (John Cray, 1831 ; Bray, 1839) and in France (Pecqueuer). It was a period which also saw the first attempts by the working class at political organisation: the St. Simonists, Buchez, Louis Blanc (Organisation du travail, 1839), and Proudhon's struggle against interest-bearing capital.

The outcome was a strengthened phase in the vulgarisation and transformation of Classical political economy . The last remaining vestiges of the original content of the theory were eradicated: those real contradictions of capital which were still admitted and pointed out by Malthus and Say (Malthus's theory of generalised crisis, Say's disproportionality theory) were now denied and disappeared from economic theory. In the works of F. Bastiat (1848) capitalism has been transformed into a system characterised by harmony.

The fourth phase of political economy, after 1848, falls into the period in which class antagonisms became fully developed, and unmistakably visible in the June battles in Paris, when, for the first time, the working class struggled for its own aims. The result was the complete dissolution of the Ricardian school and a departure from any real theory, which was abandoned and replaced by the historical description of phenomena (a school with W. Roscher at its head) . Alternatively, economic theory was degraded to the status of a pseudo-theory, by leaving the terrain of economic reality and taking flight to the higher regions of psychology. (First attempts at a subjective theory of value by Senior and Gossen, 1853 .) Both these moves served to reach the desired end: a turning away from real class antagonisms and the granting of an equal role to capital and labour in the creation of value. The theory of costs of production, the equalisation of labour, land and capital as factors in the creation of value, was unsatisfactory as it represented a trivial circular argument. In attempting to explain the process of the creation of value, the value of products was reduced to the value of the factors jointly acting to produce the product, i.e. value is explained by value. (No such circular proof exists in Marx's labour theory of value, as it is labour which creates value, but is itself not value: it is the use-value of the commodity labour-power). The force of the critique made by the left Ricardians necessitated the abandonment of the theory of costs of production: however, since no one wished to return to the labour theory of value a way out was found in the transformation of economics into a branch of psychology. In principle Senior had already accomplished this change in his