My Meatball Marxism
An occasional series
Still enjoying “Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital” by William Clare Roberts. By now I’ve internalized more Marx from WCR than from Capital itself. If this proves to be a problem, don’t hesitate to school me.
WCR’s parallel tracking of Dante’s Inferno isn’t doing much for me. (The idea is that in Capital, Volume 1, Marx is constantly alluding to Dante’s excursion into Hell. I actually bought a copy of Dante but in translation the book leaves me totally cold. I suppose it’s better in the original Italian.
The argument that there is no unfair exchange of wages for labor in the market was a problem for socialists like Proudhon and other syndicalists who envisioned labor-managed firms or worker-controlled factories as a model. These outfits would supposedly trade honestly and amicably among themselves, shielded from the depredations of monopoly. Ha!
Even so, in both of these, all the shortcomings of commodity production are preserved. Either model, to achieve significant progress towards socialism, would require the additional intervention of the State. There are other huge problems, such as how capital is allocated among firms or workplaces, or how could a cooperative sector compete with an oligarchic sector, but those are discussions for another day.
An analog is the ‘hip’ mania these days for anti-trust action — breaking up big firms that exploit their pricing power. I’m all for that, but the competitive market is a debatable ideal towards which to strive, as any good Marxist will point out.
I’ve previously suggested some value to a macro view of “surplus value” — the difference between what it costs to sustain the worker and the value of what he produces (and is not paid). In the technical literature, there is endless debate at the macro level over the distinctions between under-consumption, over-production, or a falling rate of profit all leading to systemic crises. Each of these could be read as variations on the others, unless you want to be a pedantic dork. Which I am not. Maybe a dork of a different type.
I like this bit from WCR on the relevance of Capital’s control of production, an historic change from previous modes of production or historical periods:
“What the worker sells is not his or her labor, but him- or herself. The capitalist uses the worker for a time, and then pays his or her wages. The wages seem to be payment for what the worker has done, for the time and effort he or she has given over to the capitalist, or for the service performed. In fact, argues Marx, wages are merely what is required to bring the worker back to square one, ready and able to sell him- or herself again. They make recompense for what the worker has lost in being worked; they do not in any way represent the value of what the capitalist has gained from the working. Hence, the form of the contract for exchange spontaneously and very effectively hides the capitalist exploitation of labor power, or the fact that the worker does not stop working when he or she has produced the equivalent of his or her wages, but keeps on working, to the exclusive benefit of the capitalist. Thus, for Marx, the form of the wage contract is, as Richard Hunt has noted, the “disguise” worn by the slavery of the laborers in capitalism.120 The forceful extraction of surplus labor is hidden by the wage, and this passing off of force as freedom is the essence of fraud.”
When I read this sort of thing, I start to get angry about having devoting my academic career, not a big deal in and of itself to be honest, to a corrupt, reductionist discipline that hides the fundamental wage relation behind the “three factors of production” bullshit.
Why bullshit? Well, one of those factors, capital, owes its existence to previous labor expended. The original funding of such labor, as well as ownership of the other factor — land — stemmed from acts of force. They have no ethical basis. Labor is the whole ball game. Also, capital is immeasurable, but again a discussion for another day and another website.
On a different tack, I wanted to quote this tasty bit:
“Marx, following Hegel, considered despotism to be a specific form of tyranny in which constant flux in the person of the despot did nothing to disturb the over-all structure of society, or in which “an unchanging social infrastructure [is] coupled with unceasing change in the persons and tribes who manage to ascribe to themselves the political superstructure. . . .
“The capitalist is not a capitalist because he is a leader [Leiter] of industry; rather, he is a commander [Befehlshaber] of industry because he is a capitalist.”90 Oriental despotism may always have been a republican projection— the threat of what our republic was in danger of becoming, or the mirror revealing what our monarchy already is—but Marx claims to have found this peculiar “power of Asiatic and Egyptian kings” welling up within modern society, bestowed upon anyone with the money to command labor on a large scale.91”
Makes you think how different things would be if Trump dropped dead tomorrow and we were looking at President J.D. Vance.
More during the week. Almost done with the book.
Max, thanks for this. It's dense stuff for me. But I have thought of wage-labor as renting yourself out at day rates. Hourly workers get an hourly rate. Salaried workers get a lease. Either way, renting or selling, "the fact that the worker does not stop working when he or she has produced the equivalent of his or her wages, but keeps on working, to the exclusive benefit of the capitalist" resonates. And it's still a "disguise" for wage slavery.
Being no economist, I wasn't familiar with the three factors of production. From your dismissal of the whole notion as bullshit, I conclude that the slogan "labor is the source of all value" is correct.
Max, I don't know if you know if you made this comment in your earlier discussion of Marx, but I think it's worth making anyway. Marx's CAPITAL is not about fairness or unfairness -- because they are normative concepts. Though Marx's own ethical anger regularly pops up on the edges, it can be argued that after chapter 3 of volume I, the book is written with the ethical base-line being simple commodity production (with a zero average profit for society as a whole). The latter was the capitalist normative framework of Marx's time (and is still embrace by a lot of capitalists and pro-capitalists). But Marx argues that capitalism is immoral from this point of view. Capitalism fails, in in view, by the capitalists' own standards.