By Radhika Desai
In Das Kapital or Capital, Karl Marx resolved the key conundrums of the classical politcal economy: what was value, where surplus value came from, why crises occurred, why the proft rate declined and how wages were determined - in the only way possible, by exposing its exploitatve, crisis-ridden and internatonally aggressive character.
Traditonal politcal economy increasingly struggled to legitmiize capitalism and when Europe's capitalist classes needed an alternatve, one arrived, as if on cue: a systematizaton of what Marx had critciized, lambasted and lampooned in Capital as "vulgar economics" partcularly in a secton about the fetshism of commodites.
We know it today as neoclassical economics. It narrowed the focus of analysis: To exchange, leaving out producton. For prices, leaving out values and to the agency of individuals, leaving out classes. Its equilibrium assumptons lef out capitalism's contradictons and crisis. Since they clearly existed, they were considered exogenous, as if striking capitalism from the outside.
Around such an economics, Max Weber, originally trained as an economist, founded a new social scientfc division of labor, frst hiving of sociology from economics claiming that modern, i.e. capitalist, societes diferentate into autonomous spheres needing separate study. Of course the economy's autonomy matered most, permitng capitalists to keep control over the pace and patern of economic growth irrespectve of performance. Today Western intellectuals perceive the problems with this organiizaton of knowledge only dimly, lamentng the separaton of the social sciences and conjuring with "inter-" and "multdisciplinarity. " In Marx's historical approach, organiized human collectvites - classes, partes and states - made choices, actng in given inherited situatons to drive history forward. In the new social sciences social arrangements, the products of human historical decisions and actons confront individual humans as "laws" to be obeyed, not changed. No wonder such social sciences couch everything in simple present tense:
Partes do this, governments do that, infaton does this, unemployment does that, all the while forgetng that partes change over tme, no two episodes of infaton or unemployment are the same and the actons of historical agents change the terrain of the further unfolding of history.
The capitalism of economics - and the rest of the social sciences, which take economics' word for it - is not only eternal but also cosmopolitan. The historical work of necessarily natonal classes, partes and states in managing capitalism's contradictons through domestc and internatonal actons were writen out of the script. Nothing could be farther from Marx's thinking or from Capital.
Unifying the two main types of capitalist contradictons -- the inter-class contradicton of exploitaton and the intra-class contradicton of competton - between frms and natonally organiized blocks of capital, value producton had lurched from crisis to crisis and experienced increasing legitmacy defcits thanks to its anarchy and injustce. Once economics eliminated value producton as the historical distnctveness of capitalism and its contradictory as well as progressive motor, we had ahistorical capitalism: stable, eternal and unchanging. We lost the central plot that makes its tumultuous history intelligible.
Such intellectually impoverished understanding would have been no match for Capital. However, Marxists themselves wheeled the neoclassical Trojan horse into the Marxist citadel. Within a decade or so of the emergence of neoclassical economics, intellectuals coming over to the side of Marxism and the working class were bringing their neoclassical training with them. They began trying to ft Marxism into the antthetcal theoretcal and methodological framework of neoclassical economics.
This tendency was already at work in the Second Internatonal: Rosa Luxemburg batled its frst incursions when she questoned her comrades' interpretaton of the reproducton schemas in the second volume of Capital. It also lay behind the Second Internatonal's Marxism becoming "positvist." Today it has grown into an ant-Marxist "Marxist economics" making absurd claims: that Capital sufers from a "transformaton problem" as it could not translate values into prices, that capitalism does not sufer from defcits of consumpton demand, that the rate of proft does not fall and that Marx has a commodity theory of money. The list could go on. The rest of the allegedly Marxist social sciences warn against economic determinism, which is only possible afer economics is separated from other social spheres as it is not in Capital. Today these trends ofer us the stunning spectacle of rock-star Marxist scholars who have taught Capital for decades telling us there is no history in Capital.
What does all this mean for those approaching Capital today? Quite simply, Marx and Capital are profoundly historical. We need to prevent capitalism taking humanity down with it and reconnectng the history. We must park our ahistorical economics and social sciences at the door before engaging with Marx and Capital. They are obstacles to understanding the greatest analysis of how we got here and where we might be headed. We must read what Marx actually says: His writng is our invitaton card to history.
The author is professor at the Department of Politcal Studies, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada.
Source: People’s Daily/Global Times
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