Marx and Inequality

Beyond liberal egalitarianism

My current cycle of reading and writing began with a provocative pair of substack posts by Canadian philosophy professor Joseph Heath. The crux of them asks what seemed to me a basic question: if you’re against inequality or poverty why do you need Marx? This question forces one to look past popular simplifications of what is presumed to be “Marxist economics.”

Better men than me has responded to Heath. One is Chris Bertram on Crooked Timber, one of the few surviving group blogs that happens to boast a roster of big brains. Another is Dustin Guastella at Jacobin. And another still is Vivek Chibber, interviewed at Jacobin.

It is true that sympathy for the plight of lower-income persons prompts a search for deeper explanations. A Marxist critique of Capitalism in the large scratches that itch. Still, the most emotionally resonant concern pertaining to popular interest in Marxism is the suffering associated with low income status.

I find Heath’s criticisms of Marx to be superficial, not much elevated beyond “Neener, neener, there has been no revolution . . . “ He also wrote a dumb book that purports to debunk lefty nostrums about economics. I actually read it, promise!, and was reminded of a much older classic precursor, “Economics In One Lesson” by Henry Hazlitt, ably deconstructed by my friend John Quiggin.

Like Hazlitt and others, Heath exalts his rookie grasp of a bit of basic economics to indulge in a bout of hippie punching. I’m no economic giant, but thus far my explorations of the philosophers involved with “analytical Marxism” leave me unimpressed with the economics. A Yale professor who does academic economics for real, John Roemer, will require deeper examination.

I do like Heath’s point that Marx’s pretensions to science are askew with a focused, moral critique of Capitalism. I’m going to have to read (again, after decades of neglect, the text distinguishing Marxism from “utopian socialism.” If you get past the unrealized predictions of working class transformation into a triumphant, revolutionary body, we need a little bit of utopia, as I argued here. Morality motivates people more than Science.

To foreground Marx’s failed predictions, or certain exaggerated versions of them, is basically obnoxious. Even if there is no revolution, that leaves little to celebrate about Capitalism, aside from the “no solution, no problem” motto.

Another whipping boy in the post-Marxist litany is the labor theory of value. The basic idea, which seems indubitable, is that the worker is paid less than the value of what he produces. That extra is surplus value. No end of academic and technical commentary has kicked this football back and forth, since the value of the idea for some is that the value of output, the inputs of labor and the surplus, can be used to show prices and economic trends. This debate is of interest to academics and Marxist obsessives, but not to me. The idea of a surplus as the root of exploitation is fundamental and persuasive.

The philosophical palaver centers on the surplus as it applies to the individual worker. It may be contra Marx to say so, but I’m not in the business of explaining what Marx really said or meant. The fundamental point for me is that workers create a world outside of their control. Their existence is alienated from the principal product of their time. In that sense, it’s not the surplus that is central, but the entire volume of output.

There is no ethical or rational basis for the command of output by Capital. You could say that the value of output, after usage of capital and payment to labor is of central interest for the future direction of society. That presumes that payments to labor are a settled matter. I beg to differ.

Capital ownership and labor compensation are products of violence, theft, chicanery, or pure luck. Capital is congealed, dead labor, so the entirety of output is founded on exploitation. The intricacies of the surplus in a given commodity don’t matter to me. It’s not a question of the individual worker’s ownership of his surplus (sic). The inequality of chief interest is not between income classes, but between Humanity and Capital. It is not just a matter of living standards, but also one of power. That is the primary dimension of Exploitation.

Heath invokes the question of Crisis Theory (e.g., “Neener, neener” as above). I addressed that issue here.

Heath also offer twenty-five cents worth of why Keynes corrected Marx, by laying economic breakdown to “a shortage of money.” Not a very good precis. Beware of philosphers who think they have mastered economics. It would be fair to point that under modern Capitalism, thanks to Keynes and his followers, there are ways not foreseen by Marx to cope with breakdowns. In the future, there may come a crisis that proves immune to remedy, but we haven’t seen it yet. We are allowed to be skeptical.

Heath acknowledges that Marx’s investigations of economic relations of production improved Social Science, but since he is a troll, he is reduced to pointing out subsequent advances and refinements in that sphere. Neener, neener indeed.

I’m tired of this dude so I’m going back to trying to read the new translation of Capital, v. 1.