from Beyond Capital, by Istvan Mészáros

3.2 ‘Marginal Utility’ and neo-classical Economics

3.2.1
DESPITE Adam Smith’s reassuring words on the benevolent control of the capitalist order by the ‘hidden hand’, the latter failed to live up to expectations. Instead, crises of growing severity became an undeniable feature of Smith’s ‘natural system of perfect liberty and justice’, compelling its defenders to offer some sort of explanation implying also a remedy.

Given the new circumstances, a simple declaration of faith in the ‘hidden hand’ successfully guiding the actions of the individual capitalists in their ‘local situations’ was not enough. A different way of assessing the issue of control had to be found; partly because the dominant units of business enterprise were becoming ever larger (and, of course, inextricably intertwined with far from local connections); and partly because it had to be acknowledged that the ‘trade cycles’ which were assuming most damaging proportions had to be at least accounted for — in full agreement with the imperatives of the system without which the reassuring message would no longer be credible at all. This is how the second typical theorisation of the dilemmas of control and uncontrollability mentioned in Section 3.1.1 came into being out of a partial awareness of the crisis symptoms. Characteristically, however, also the representatives of the new approach refused to acknowledge the causes of the identified difficulties. They preferred to address themselves to the symptoms only, reinterpreting the earlier accounts of the established mode of social metabolic reproduction in such a way that it should not query in the least the uncritically assumed belief of the classics of bourgeois political economy in the naturalness and absolute permanence of the capital system.

W Stanley Jevons, one of the pioneers of this new approach — which became celebrated as the ‘marginalist revolution’ or the ‘subjective revolution’ — insisted that a rigorous scientific method, with a proper mathematical apparatus, should be applied to the encountered problems. The fact that his trend-setting book — The Theory of Political Economy — appeared in the midst of a major international crisis and the year of the Paris Commune, 1871, is of course a coincidence. It is also a mere coincidence that the most influential English economist who offered the fruits of the same ‘revolution’, Alfred Marshall, was pursuing his research project in Berlin at the same time when Bismarck’s Prussian troops were besieging Paris, and thereby massively contributing to the eruption of the Paris Commune. What was, however, anything but coincidence was the increasing frequency and intensity of crises over decades, until a new imperialist expansion relieved tension in the European ‘little corner of the world’ and gave a new lease of life to capital in the dominant imperialist countries. After all, Stanley Jevons himself had to interrupt his University studies and seek employment in Australia for five years — until he could save enough money to resume his studies — because his formerly wealthy iron merchant father’s business had suffered bankruptcy as a result of a serious economic crisis.

As a matter of fact, the spectre of crises haunted Jevons to the end of his life. As a very young man he expressed his concern in a letter to his brother Herbert, in April 1861 (i.e. more than two years before receiving his M.A. at University College, London) in these terms:

Whether commercial revolutions be or be not as necessary and inevitable as are the flux and efflux of the tide, forms a curious and doubtful question. Certain it is that they make their appearance in the ordinary course of affairs, if not at periods exactly regular, at least in cycles of which it is not difficult to determine the average extent. Difficult though it be accurately to determine the principles which regulate them, they are usually found preceded by symptoms and followed by results bearing an analogy, if not a resemblance to each other. A close attention to them on the part of our business men would go far towards the dissemination of that sound information respecting the laws of trade, which would greatly mitigate the severity Commercial revulsions.

Indeed, fifteen years later, in a lecture on ‘The Future of Political Economy’, occasioned by the centenary celebrations of Adam Smith’s Wealth of nations held at the Political Economy Club in 1876 — he insisted that

We need a science of the money market and of commercial fluctuations, which shall inquire why the world is all activity for a few years, and then all inactivity; why, in short, there are such tides in the affairs of men.”

Yet, the successful elaboration and application of Jevons’s ‘science of money and of economic fluctuations’ remained an elusive dream ever since, despite all efforts expended on it and despite all honours — including quite a few Nobel Prizes — lavished upon its propounders. Nevertheless the illusion rooted in wishful thinking persisted ever since that such a science — capable of eliminating the much deplored ‘commercial fluctuations’ and periodic crises or in Jevons’s term ‘revulsions’ — was feasible within capital’s structural parameters, provided that rigorous quantitative methods (encapsulated in mathematical formulas) were adopted by its representatives; as indeed they were fairly quickly, constituting a distinguishing feature of the new orthodoxy. Even Alfred Marshall, who was very anxious to retain the popular accessibility of his writings in order to be able to influence businessmen, happily accepted Edgeworth’s characterisation of his work as ‘bearing under the garb of literature the armour of mathematics’.

However, instead of the postulated remedy touching the causal ground of the system, only the effects were tackled, often with overbearing mathematical and statistical apparatus, producing most problematical results even in the opinion of those who were expecting solutions from the same formalised science of money. Thus many years later, in 1936, Keynes had to sound more than a word of caution against sanguine expectations, appealing to ordinary discourse and common sense as the necessary correctives to mathematical zeal. He argued that

in ordinary discourse, where we are not blindly manipulating but know all the time what we are doing and what the words mean, we can keep ‘at the back of our heads’ the necessary reserves and qualifications and the adjustments which we shall have to make later on, in a way in which we cannot keep complicated partial differentials ‘at the back’ of several pages of algebra which assume that they all vanish. Too large a proportion of recent ‘mathematical’ economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symptoms.

But the roots of the problem reaching back in its mathematicised form to the 1860s and 1870s were much deeper for any appeal to the guidance of common sense and ordinary discourse to rectify. it is true, as Keynes stated, that in the late 1860s ‘the notion of applying mathematical methods was in the air’. But something of much greater import — the deeply felt concern, if not alarm, of capital’s personifications about the growing socialist labour movement — was also in the air. The various theories of ‘marginal utility’ — from the English and Swiss versions to the Austrian variations — were conceived to a large extent as an antidote in this respect. Wesley C. Mitchell rightly stressed in his lectures delivered in 1918 at Columbia University that

No one can read the Austrian writers, whose general scheme was similar to Jevons’s, without feeling that they are interested in developing the concert of the maximising of utility largely because they thought it answered Marx’s socialistic critique of modern economic organisation. It seemed at least at first blush, to show that, so long as interference with competition is repressed, theoretically the best possible organisation of society results when everyone is left perfectly free to make his own decisions. ... One of the interesting and rather ironical developments of the generation after Jevons was that this line of economic theorising which the Austrians used in answer to Marx was adopted by the Fabian socialists as their basic economic doctrine, and a new scheme of socialism, very different in character from Marx’s, was erected on its foundation.

The economists who embraced the main tenets of marginal utility theory politically ranged from Francis Ysidro Edgeworth’s extreme conservative position, stretched to the point of obscurantist insanity — and to be fair to Edgeworth, there was a touch of lunacy in the remedial conceptions of all of them, including Jevons, who wanted to explain ‘scientifically’ what he called ‘commercial revulsions’ by statistically linking them to sun-spots (by which standard the sun must have been excessively, nay perversely spotty in recent decades; but who in his or her right mind would wish to quarrel with the sun?) — to varieties of paternalism towards labour, prominent among the Fabians. The neo-classical paternalist Marshall, for instance, despite his reputation as a careful and most scrupulous scientific thinker, was nonetheless perfectly happy by means of grotesque caricaturistic misrepresentations to dismiss Marx in the most summary fashion — in order to be able to do away at the same time with the notions of surplus labour and exploitation. Indeed, after patting Marx on the back for his ‘sympathies with suffering’, he did not hesitate to indulge even in playing up to the philistine academic gallery, sneering that Marx’s arguments were ‘shrouded by mysterious Hegelian phrases’, although (as we know from Keynes’s account, based on Mrs Marshall’s biographic sketch of her late husband) when Marshall himself was ‘living in Berlin in the winter of 1870-71, during the Franco-German war, Hegel’s Philosophy of history greatly influenced him’.

The big difference in the second half of the 19th century with regard to ‘commercial revulsions’ and crises was that the established production and political order was increasingly being challenged by the organised socialist movement which dared to put forward the ‘extra-economic’ proposition that economic crises are not due to cyclic extra-terrestrial disturbances, nor to the unalterable determinations of ‘human nature’, but to the fundamental structural defects of the capital system.

Understandably, the personifications of capital had to do something about that challenge, since they could not expect an automatic solution from their earlier adopted deus ex machine: the much revered ‘invisible hand’. Whether conservative or paternalistic, they had to offer explanations and justifications which could at least appear to respond to the demands arising from the labour movement. Even the extreme reactionary Edgeworth was suggesting that ‘The whole creation groans and yearns, desiderating a principle of arbitration, an end of strifes.’ It is true that Edgeworth was somewhat special in that his ‘principle’ turned out to be the most naked apologetics for the privileges of the ruling classes, backed up by pseudo-scientific humbug which justified the entrepreneur’s superior social position and corresponding wealth with Darwinian verbiage and utilitarian camouflage by saying that ‘a more highly nervous organisation required on the average a higher minimum of means to get up to the zero of utility’. Nevertheless, the substance of the teaching of his ideological comrades in arms was the same as regards their ‘principles’ of grossly iniquitous distribution and its claimed ‘scientific’ justification. For they all wanted to spirit away even the possibility of considering the relationship between wages and profits, surplus-labour and surplus-value, the fact and the potential remedy of exploitation. And to do this with a view to proclaiming no longer in theoretically and politically contestable Political Economy but more and more in the rationally unchallengeable ‘science of Economics’ — the ‘end of strifes’.

Shifting the emphasis from Adam Smith’s individual capitalist decision-makers to the utility-maximising consumers in general — whose demands are, of course, soundly interpreted and realised by the capitalist entrepreneurs — served the same purpose. For if it was true, as Jevons argued, that ‘value depends entirely on the final degree of utility’ — a proposition shared in one form or another by all variants of ‘marginal utility theory’ — in that case rationality itself prescribed that all claims of the workers had to be assessed in terms of, and in subordination to, purchaser/consumer demand, removing thereby the possibility of contesting in strife-bound class terms the structural determination of the system. What a pity that the claimed link between sun-spots and ‘commercial revulsions’ could not be really established, despite the fact that Jevons twice modified his ‘scientific’ economic statistics in order to fit the (for his scheme most unfortunately) revised astrophysical sun-spot data; and despite the fact that he introduced the notion of ‘normal cycles’ — a methodological procedure of arbitrary definitions and assumptions widely adopted by later apologists so as to be able to prove what could not be sustained by any other way — in order to exclude the stubborn cycles that refused to fit into his neat and convenient preconception. For success in this respect would have demonstrated how absurd all those socialists were who were looking for explanations and remedy not in the sky but on earth by focusing attention on the monstrous iniquities and contradictions of the established socioeconomic order.

3.2.2
HOWEVER, notwithstanding the hypotheses and reassurances of the new economists who adopted the faith of marginal utility theory, the deplored ‘commercial revulsions’ and crises — with their concomitant strifes and class struggles — not only did not fade away but tended to grow in severity. At the same time the persistent challenge of the organised labour movement — not only in France (despite the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune) but in Germany, Russia, Austria/Hungary, Italy, and England as well, to mention only the European ‘little corner of the world’ — made it much more rational from the vantage point of capital to adopt the strategy of co-option in place of confrontation. The concern about social conflict was constantly voiced by Alfred Marshall — probably the most enlightened of the caring paternalists — who argued in an essay written shortly after the 1905 Russian revolution that

In Germany the dominion of bureaucracy has combined with other causes to develop a bitter class hatred, and occasionally to make social order depend on the willingness of soldiers to fire on citizens; and the case is, of course, much worse in the even more bureaucratic Russia. But under collectivism there would be no appeal from the all-pervading bureaucratic discipline. ...collectivism is a grave menace to the maintenance even of our present moderate rate of progress.

And Marshall combined his categorical rejection of collectivism with an idealised picture of both the capitalist ‘rich man’ — who not only fully understands but also generously implements the teachings of the compassionate marginalist creed — and the socioeconomic order of which the Marshallian rich man was supposed to be an exemplary representative. According to this picture, in Marshall’s slowly but inexorably unfolding Utopia

The rich man would further co-operate with the State, even more strenuously than he does now, in relieving the suffering of those who are weak and ailing through no fault of their own, and to whom a shilling may yield more real benefit than he could get from spending many additional pounds. ... Under such conditions the people generally would be so well nurtured and so truly educated that the land would be pleasant to live in. Wages in it would be high by the hour, but labour would not be dear. Capital would therefore not be very anxious to emigrate from it, even if rather heavy taxes were put on it for public ends: the wealthy would love to live in it; and thus true Socialism, based on chivalry, would rise above the fear that no country can move faster than others lest it should be bereft of capital. National Socialism of this sort might be full of individuality and elasticity There would be no need for those iron bonds of mechanical symmetry which Marx postulated as necessary for his ‘International’ projects.

Thus, characteristically, preaching the virtues of conflict-avoidance with an appeal to the fairy-tale conditions of the coming capitalist ‘chivalry’ could be happily wedded to a militant anti-socialism, misrepresenting Marx, again, as a crude mechanical thinker. At the same time Marshall also had to maintain that the idealised capitalist socioeconomic order contained within it the true Socialist system, in its ‘National Socialist’ variety. After all, he was not only a ‘friend of labour’ and of the British Co-operative movement (at one time even the President of the latter), but also a good English imperialist who — while strongly condemning German and Russian bureaucracy, as well as too much state involvement in general — could believe and argue in all seriousness that ‘The chivalry which has made many administrators in India, Egypt, and elsewhere, devote themselves to the interests of the peoples under their rule is an instance of the way in which British unconventional elastic methods of administration give scope for free, fine enterprise in the service of the State’. Surely this must have pleased national imperialists from all classes, including the ‘moderate’ and ‘realistic’ Fabian labourite ‘National Socialists’. The curious thing was only that Marshall imagined that he could combine without inconsistency his militant strictures against the unreality of radical socialists — like: ‘in recent years we have suffered much from schemes that claim to be practical, and yet are based on no thorough study of economic realities’ — with the total unreality of his own idealisation of both capitalism in general and of its British imperialist variety in particular.

But, of course, he was not alone in all this. The ‘economic realities’ which he proclaimed to be the necessary premises of rational economic discourse were the imperatives of the capital system to which all social reform strategy had to conform. Marshall was far from unique in defining the only legitimate form of ‘collective action by the working classes’ as ‘employing their own means, not indeed suddenly to revolutionise, but gradually to raise their own material and moral conditions.’ Reformism surfaced in the radical socialist movement in the late 1860s and early 1870s, and Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme clearly sounded the alarm in this respect. However, his critical intervention proved to be in vain in that the emerging Social-democratic parties in the dominant capitalist countries moved in the direction of reformist participation in their national Parliaments.

This tendency was both reflected and actively influenced by marginalist economic theory, not only in England — mainly through the agency of the Fabians — but all over Europe. ‘Co-option’ was ‘in the air’ both before and — with greater intensity — after the Paris Commune. Indeed it was so much preferable to confrontation in the view of capital’s personifications that no less a prominent figure than ‘Iron Chancellor’ Bismarck himself wanted by ‘scheming with Lassalle’, as Marx and Engels complained at the time, to entice the ‘Red Doctor’ Karl Marx to return home in order to suitably manage the German working class on behalf of national-imperialistically aspiring German capital. (The repeal of Bismarck’s anti-Socialist Law in due course. was fully consistent with the Iron Chancellor’s national imperialist design and the role assigned to the working classes in it.) Understandably, Marshall treated Lassalle with much greater sympathy than Marx, praising him for his rejection of the ‘iron law of wages’ while crudely ascribing adherence of it to Marx. As to the theoretical formation of the leading light of German ‘evolutionary socialism’, Edward Bernstein (who later became also Max Weber’s favourite socialist), he derived much inspiration not only from the Swiss and Austrian variety of marginal utility theory but also from its British versions during his long stay in England.

This is how the organised socialist movement — in the new imperialist expansionary phase of dominant European capital, and in tune with the specific form of division between economics and politics in the capital system — became fatefully split between labour’s ‘industrial arm’ and its ‘political arm’, from which later the split and antagonism between revolutionary and ‘evolutionary’/reformist socialism inevitably also followed. Capital, the extra-parliamentary force par excellence, could exercise political power as a matter of course through the capitalist state — i.e. its own political command structure of which Parliament is only a part, and by no means the decisive one. By contrast, the ‘economic arm’ of labour (the trades unions) were confined to the strictly limited economic domain, and labour’s ‘political arm’ (the reformist social-democratic parties) to the bourgeois self-serving rules of the parliamentary game, — established a long time before the working class was allowed to participate in political legislation in a structurally entrapped and therefore necessarily subordinate position. In this way ‘evolutionary socialism’ condemned itself to ‘evolving’ absolutely nowhere beyond the ‘practicable’ and by capital in its own favour predetermined ‘economic realities’.

But despite all of capital’s successes and labour’s self-paralysing. accommodations the uncontrollability of the system itself could not be remedied. Instead of gradually progressing towards Alfred Marshall’s (according to him ‘in the course of being accomplished’) Utopia of capitalist chivalry — a condition which was supposed to secure higher and higher achievements thanks to the happily paid high taxes of risk-taking entrepreneurs and to the proper education of the working classes for appreciating ‘economic reality’ and for accepting their moral and political obligations implicit in it — the antagonistic contradictions of capitalist society already in Marshall’s lifetime erupted in the form of a most devastating imperialist conflagration, co-involving the entire world (for the first time ever) in the ‘Great War’ lasting four long years. As to the postulated National Socialist solution, defined as the harmonious fusion of chivalrous businessmen with the ‘rational’ sections of the working class — people who would hold the conviction that it was possible to ‘rise above the fear that no country can move faster than the others’ without trampling upon the others in order to avoid becoming ‘bereft of capital’ — this strategy, far from leading to a state ‘full of individuality and elasticity’, resulted in the monstrous inhumanities of Hitler’s national and global adventure. Besides, such a grave turn of events in Germany and elsewhere did not come about without the active complicity, for several years, of powerful sections of foreign capital, nurturing its own ‘International project’ to liquidate forever through Hitler’s and Mussolini’s agency Marx’s ‘mechanical International’ socialist project.

3.2.3
ECONOMISTS viewing the world from capital’s vantage point cannot simply ignore the structural uncontrollability of their cherished system, matter how much they might wish to do away with the underlying contradictions. Depending on the given stage of historical development, the difficulties of control are more or less prominent in their conceptualisations, but no one can completely avoid them.

Adam Smith, writing in the age of capital’s dynamic historical ascendancy and the dawn of its global expansion — that is, at a time when his own fight against mercantilist protectionism represented a real progress — could well content himself with brief references to the ‘invisible hand’ as not only the evidence for but also the benevolent solution of the system’s uncontrollability by the individual capitalists. No such straightforward solution was available to his late 19th and early 20th century successors when, in sharp contrast to Adam Smith’s age, the second half of the 18th century, all further territorial expansion of the capital system had been terminated in the form of the rival imperialist carve-up of the entire planet, and of necessity the prospect of major systemic crises entered the horizon. John Stuart Mill’s ‘stationary state’ already foreshadowed some of the dangers implicit in the coming closure not only territorially which could be in principle reopened through the ‘zero-sum game’ of imperialist wars in favour of the victors and at the expense of the defeated but in terms of the constraints imposed in the future on the productive expansion of the capital system as a whole. Significantly, therefore, in the new economics’ of Mill’s successors all the dark shadows had to be removed; and the ‘stationary state’ had to be turned into a pillar of apologetic economic wisdom through its transformation into an openly admitted ‘convenient’ technical device in terms of which all of the arbitrarily adopted assumptions of ‘scientific economics’ could be proclaimed to correspond to the ‘normal’ state of affairs.

In Adam Smith’s scheme of things the ‘invisible’ hand fully solved the identified problem and thereby assigned to the individual capitalists the satisfactory operational control of their part in the system. Thus there was no reason for Smith to indulge in inventing a bewildering network of assumptions through which the dominant but by labour contested values of the capital system could be readily justified. Under the new circumstances, however, responsibility for the system’s actual mode of operation — and, of course, for its potential defects and crises — had to be spread as wide as possible in order to deflect and neutralise criticism. To quote Joan Robinson, according to Mill’s successors

Each employer of factors (of production) seeks to minimise the cost of his product and to maximise his own return, each particle of a factor seeks the employment that maximises its income and each consumer plans his consumption to maximise utility.

There is one equilibrium position in which each individual is doing the best for himself, so that no one has any incentive to move. (For groups to combine to better themselves collectively is strictly against the rules.) In this position each individual is receiving an income governed by the marginal productivity of the type of factor that he provides, and marginal productivity is governed by scarcity relatively to demand. Here ‘capital’ is a factor like all the rest, and the distinction between work and property has disappeared from view. Setting the whole thing out in algebra is a great help. The symmetrical relations between x and y seem smooth and amiable, entirely free from the associations of acrimony which are apt to be suggested by the relations between ‘capital’ and ‘labour'; and the apparent rationality of the system of distribution of the product between the factors of production conceals the arbitrary nature of the distribution of factors between the chaps.

Thus the concept of ‘sovereign subject’ which is supposed to ‘plan’ the ‘normal’ functioning of the socioeconomic metabolism and to which responsibility for the encountered economic problems and ‘dysfunctions’ could be legitimately ascribed embraced in equal measure the totality of individuals in society. Accordingly, the very idea of contesting the system as such in collective terms could be ruled out of court as utterly irrational. For in the neatly streamlined accounts of ‘marginal utility theory’ all such contestations must have been based on a total misunderstanding of the ‘factors of production’ as well as of their constituent parts or ‘particles’ which were predestined to define in the interest of all the nature of the established order of production and distribution. At the same time, the use of algebra and suitable diagrams not only removed the real actors — capital and labour — from the historical stage but also created the semblance of great scientific rigour in dealing with the subject matter of ‘Economics’ supplying the best possible tools for the healthy functioning of the system.

Naturally, there could be no question of challenging the individual capitalist’s ideal suitability to fulfil the functions assigned to him in this scheme. For, as Marshall argued, ‘no fairly good substitute has been found, or seems likely to be found, for the bracing fresh air which a strong man with a chivalrous yearning for leadership draws into his lungs when he sets out on a business experiment at his own risk’. Indeed, remaining wedded to the idealisation of the individual capitalist, Marshall insisted that ‘If he [the businessman] is working at his own risk, he can put forth his energies with perfect freedom. But if he is a servant of bureaucracy, he cannot be certain of freedom’. Accordingly, Marshall passed utterly negative judgement on the control structure not only of the ‘industrial undertakings of Governments’ but also of ‘very large joint-stock companies’: an attitude radically reversed at the next stage of trying to control capital’s inherent uncontrollability, as we shall see in Section 3.3 of the present study. The courageously risk-taking and innovative businessman/entrepreneur remained for Mill’s successors the proper intermediary figure who would perfectly facilitate for the totality of individual consumers the maximisation and harmonisation of their interests, acting without interference from the freedom-denying bureaucratic forces.

As mentioned above, Edgeworth characterised Marshall — and through the writings of the latter what he himself considered the essential feature and the most important achievement of the new economics in general — as ‘bearing under the garb of literature the armour of mathematics’. In truth, however, such a claim was by no means justified. For the ‘mathematical armour’ was in fact no armour at all; it would be much more appropriate to call it ‘mathematical garb’. The real armour was something else, providing a consciously produced defensive shield against the socialist critics of the capital system. Indeed, given the conceptual structure of the new economics — and not its mathematical garb which gave it the appearance of ‘hard-headed’ and ‘tough-minded’ scientific rigour — the defensive shield of the so-called ‘subjective revolution’ had to be considered in its own terms of reference quite impregnable.

Here it is important to remember the link of marginal utility theory to one its forefathers, utilitarianism. For in the new economics the key orienting principle of ‘equilibrium’ is inextricably tied to the notion of the individuals’ ‘utility maximisation’. Everything else is built around these two principles which are never established, but always assumed. They reciprocally and quasi-axiomatically support one another, constituting thereby the real armour of the theory. According to the believers in the ‘subjective revolution’, the irrepressible drive of the — by their ‘human nature’ so determined — individuals for maximising their utilities brings about the happy economic condition of equilibrium; and by the same token, economic equilibrium itself is the required condition under which the maximisation of the utilities of all individuals predestined for the purpose of selfish utility-maximisation can be — and for good measure actually is being — accomplished.

This impregnable circular reasoning provides the theoretical framework in which assumptions can run riot, enabling the economists concerned to derive the desired conclusions from the earlier enunciated ‘assumptions’ and ‘suppositions’, without any need to subject them to the test of actuality. (This is how we are offered explanations in terms of ‘general equilibrium’, ‘perfect competition’, ‘competitive equilibrium’, ‘perfect freedom of exchange’, etc., etc.) If discrepancies and anomalies appear for some reason, that can be also quite easily remedied by the attribute of ‘normal’ as the convenient qualifier and help to put the derailed carriage back on the rails, or, with better apologetic foresight, to prevent it from being derailed by the intrusion of reality. ‘Normal’ is whatever needs to be defined in that way in order to fit the requirements of the theory. Indeed the category of ‘normality’ is used in great abundance, from Stanley Jevons (as we have seen earlier with reference to his ‘corrective’ to his own sun-spots theory of periodic crises) to everybody else, including Marshall who uses it hundreds of times as an obliging self-referential escape-clause in his Principles of economics and in his other writings.

When it comes to the concept of utility, the ubiquitous individualistic assumptions conveniently remove the potentially most embarrassing question in relation to the real world — as opposed to the tendentiously assumed ‘economic realities’, — namely: ‘whose utility’ are we talking about. For if it is stipulated from the outset that the maximisation of utilities is a strictly individual matter and therefore the ongoing process of maximisation adequately covers all individuals who are themselves responsible for pursuing their own strategies in the best possible way for themselves, and thereby indirectly also for all — in that case the most problematical and disturbing reality of actually existing relations into which the individuals are inserted completely disappears from sight. Not surprisingly, therefore, the concept of ‘power relations’ is conspicuous in the writings of all the marginalist economists by its absence. They are happy to depict their own world of ‘economic realities’ in strictly individualistic terms when in the actually observable world the ever-intensifying tendency of monopolistic transformations — with all its brute force for nullifying the decision making power of the individuals, including even that of the idealised ‘risk-taking and innovative entrepreneurs’ — is staring them in the eye.

A great deal has been written about the so-called ‘naturalistic fallacy’ concerning ‘pleasure’ and the ‘desirable’ in utilitarian discourse. However, the real fallacy of utilitarian philosophy — fully embraced in one form or another by the representatives of marginal utility theory — is to talk about ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ in capitalist society. For the suggestion that anything even remotely approaching the greatest happiness of the greatest number of human beings can be achieved under the rule of capital, without even examining let alone radically changing the established power relations, constitutes a monumental vacuous assumption, whatever the subjective intentions of the major utilitarian philosophers behind it. Marginal utility theory, instead of acting in this respect as a corrective to Bentham and Mill, makes everything worse by asserting not only that it is possible to maximise every individual’s utility within the established framework of production and distribution, but also that the desired maximisation is actually being accomplished in the ‘normal’ processes of self-equilibrating capitalist economy. People who deny the reality of such a happy state of affairs are dismissed even by the enlightened paternalist Alfred Marshall by saying that ‘they nearly always divert energies from sober work for the public good, and are thus mischievous in the long run’.

In this way even the indirect acknowledgment of capital’s uncontrollability does not last very long. Admitting that the controlling power of the businessman/entrepreneur cannot account for the functioning of the system, let alone guarantee the satisfaction of the wants generated under capitalism, does not lead to a badly needed critical examination. On the contrary, the broadest possible extension of the notion of the controlling subject (done in such a way that it fictitiously embraces the totality of individuals) — which is another way of saying that no identifiable subject is really in control, other than what Hegel characterised with the notion of ‘bad infinity’ — is used for the most apologetic purpose. For with the help of this extension and individualistic harmonisation of all ‘legitimate’ claims the actually existing class subjects of the system capital and labour — are fictitiously ‘transcended’ towards ‘bad infinity’, thereby simply assuming out of existence the problems and antagonistic contradictions of the established socioeconomic order. The mathematical and ‘scientific’ garb in which this conceptual framework of assuming out of existence the dilemmas of control is dressed up well serves the purpose of removing the temptation of contesting the various tenets of the ‘subjective revolution’ and ‘marginalist revolution’ in other than the purely self-referential ‘rational’ terms of the theory, far away from actual substantive social — not to say class — issues.

If in the end the problem of uncontrollability is still contemplated by some of the marginalist and ‘neo-classical’ economists, it is done in a characteristic way. Edgeworth, for instance, refers to what he calls the ‘controlless core’ of human affairs in his discussion of utilitarian theory. However, his purpose is not the investigation of the objective social relations and identifiable economic determinations of the given system of production and distribution, with a view to finding some remedy to uncontrollability, but, on the contrary, an attempt to freeze and turn into an unalterable absolute the identified defect. For in his view the ineradicable core of controllessness is a characteristic of human nature itself. To counteract its consequences ‘It would have to be first shown that the interest of all is the interest of each, an illusion to which the ambiguous language of Mill, and perhaps Bentham, may have lent some countenance’.

Comparing Marshall with Jevons as originators of the new ‘scientific economics’ Keynes wrote in his celebratory essay published in the Memorials of Alfred Marshall volume:

Jevons saw the kettle boil and cried out with the delighted voice of a child; Marshall too had seen the kettle boil and sat down silently to build an engine.

Perhaps so — even though the judgement seems rather harsh on Jevons — but to what effect? For Marshall himself was in his later years somewhat dissatisfied with his own steam engine. He wrote, accordingly, that ‘The Mecca of the economist is economic biology rather than economic dynamics’. And, without intending to, in the same article he also revealed the secret of why the economists of his own liking could never reach their Mecca. He proclaimed that ‘The chief difficulties of economic science now arise rather from the good than from the evil fortunes of mankind’. This he did at a time when the overwhelming majority of humankind lived — as it does today, almost one hundred years after Marshall’s sanguine diagnosis — in the most abject poverty. Thus, just like Keynes himself, who ten years later criticised Marshall for very different reasons, the representatives of the new ‘scientific economics’ could not see anything wrong with totally divorcing in their theoretical considerations the conditions of the privileged imperialistic countries in which they lived from those of the ‘wretched of the earth’ at the receiving end of their system. It was not the insufficiency of statistical data, as Marshall claimed, that had to prevent them from reaching the Mecca of their claimed scientific anticipations even in a thousand years. Rather, their necessary failure was due to the fact that they could formulate their diagnoses and solutions in such conveniently separate compartments, against the painfully obvious evidence of a hierarchically structured and globally intertwined world.

The actually existing capital system took no notice of the wishful thinking and corresponding remedies of control advocated by the marginalist and neoclassical believers in its steady progress towards the happy ‘solution of mankind’s economic problem’, as Keynes went on promising it even in 1930, disregarding the sobering evidence of a grave world economic crisis. Instead, capital continued inexorably on its own uncontrollable course of development which became theorised by its faithful defenders at the next stage under the promising label of yet another ‘revolution’.

The new-found answer to the structural deficiencies of control was no longer called ‘the marginalist revolution’ and ‘the subjective revolution’ — although, of course, in the new theory the old claims to scientific rigour and sound evaluation of the ‘economic realities’ remained as strong as in the writings of the neo-classical predecessors — but ‘the managerial revolution’. By adopting such orientation, the new conception of how to gain control over the encountered ‘dysfunctions’ — of which there were far too many in evidence in the period of the great world crisis of 1929-33, when the first theories of ‘the managerial revolution’ were articulated in some detail — abandoned the earlier idealised notion of the risk-taking and innovative businessman/entrepreneur as the pivot of the capital system. The remedial powers ascribed to the managers in the new approach constituted the third typical way of addressing and by the same stroke happily resolving the stubborn problem of uncontrollability. This is what we must now consider.

Rudolf Hilferding:
Böhm-Bawerk's Criticism of Marx
Chapter Three
THE SUBJECTIVIST OUTLOOK

THE phenomenon of variations in the price of production has shown us that the phenomena of capitalist society can never be understood if the commodity or capital be considered in isolation. It is the social relationship which these occupy, and changes in that relationship, which control and elucidate the movements of individual capitals, themselves no more than portions of the total social capital. But the representative of the psychological school of political economy fails to see this social nexus, and he therefore necessarily misunderstands a theory which definitely aims at disclosing the social determinism of economic phenomena, a theory whose starting point therefore is society and not the individual. In apprehending and expounding this theory he is ever influenced by his own individualistic mentality, and he thus arrives at contradictions which he ascribes to the theory, while they are in truth ascribable solely to his interpretations of the theory.

This confusion may be traced in all the stages of Böhm-Bawerk's polemic. Even the fundamental concept of the Marxist system, the concept of value-creating labor, is apprehended in a purely subjective manner. To him "labor" is identical with "trouble" or "effort" ["Mühe"].To make this individual feeling of distaste the cause of value naturally leads us to see in value a purely psychological fact, and to deduce the value of commodities from our evaluation of the labor they have cost. As is well known, this is the foundation which Adam Smith adopts for his theory of value, for he is ever inclined to abandon the objective standpoint for a subjective. Smith writes: "Equal quantities of labor must at all times and places be of equal value to the laborer. In his ordinary state of health, strength, and spirits; in the ordinary degree of his skill and dexterity, he must always lay down the same portion of his ease, his liberty, and his happiness." [1] If labor regarded as "trouble" be the basis of our personal estimate of value, then the "value of the labor" is a constituent, or a "determinant" as Böhm-Bawerk puts it, of the value of commodities. But it need not be the only one, for a number of other factors which influence the subjective estimates made by individuals take their places beside labor and have an equal right to be regarded as determinants of value. If, therefore, we identify the value of commodities with the personal estimate of the value of these commodities made by this or that individual, it seems quite arbitrary to select labor as the sole basis for such an estimate.

From the subjectivist standpoint, therefore, the standpoint from which Böhm-Bawerk levels his criticism, the labor theory of value appears untenable from the very outset. And it is because he adopts this standpoint that Böhm-Bawerk is unable to perceive that Marx's concept of labor is totally opposed to his own. Already in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Marx had emphasized his opposition to Adam Smith's subjectivist outlook by writing "[Smith] fails to see the objective equalization of different kinds of labor which the social process forcibly carries out, mistaking it for the subjective equality of the labors of individuals." [2] In truth, Marx is entirely unconcerned with the individual motivation of the estimate of value. In capitalist society it would be absurd to make "trouble" the measure of value, for speaking generally the owners of the products have taken no trouble at all, whereas the trouble has been taken by those who have produced but do not own them. With Marx, in fact, every individual relationship is excluded from the conception of value-creating labor; labor is regarded, not as something which arouses feelings of pleasure or its opposite, but as an objective magnitude, inherent in the commodities, and determined by the degree of development of social productivity. Whereas for Böhm-Bawerk, labor seems merely one of the determinants in personal estimates of value, in Marx's view labor is the basis and connective tissue of human society, and in Marx's view the degree of productivity of labor and the method of organization of labor determine the character of social life. Since labor, viewed in its social function as the total labor of society of which each individual labor forms merely an aliquot part, is made the principle of value, economic phenomena are subordinated to objective laws independent of the individual will and controlled by social relationships. Beneath the husk of economic categories we discover social relationships, relationships of production, wherein commodities play the part of intermediaries, the social relationships being reproduced by these intermediate processes, or undergoing a gradual transformation until they demand a new type of inter-mediation.

Thus the law of value becomes a law of motion for a definite type of social organization based upon the production of commodities, for in the last resort all change in social structure can be referred to changes in the relationships of production, that is to say to changes in the evolution of productive power and in the organization of [productive] labor. We are thereby led, in the most striking contrast to the outlook of the psychological school, to regard political economy as a part of sociology, and sociology itself as a historical science. Böhm-Bawerk has never become aware of this contrast of outlooks. The question whether the "subjectivist method" or the "objectivist method" is the sound method in economics he decides in a controversy with Sombart by saying that each method must supplement the other—whereas in truth we are not concerned at all with two different methods, but with contrasted and mutually exclusive outlooks upon the whole of social life. Thus it happens that Böhm-Bawerk, unfailingly carrying on the controversy from his subjectivist and psychological standpoint, discovers contradictions in the Marxist theory which seem to him to be contradictions solely because of his own subjectivist interpretation of the theory.

But if labor be the only measure for the estimate of value and therewith the only measure of value, it is as regards this subjectivist outlook only logical that in that case commodities should exchange solely by the measure of equal quantities of labor embodied in them, for otherwise it would be impossible to see what should induce the individuals to deviate from their personal estimates of value. If, however, the facts do not conform to these premises, then the law of value loses all significance, even if labor be no more than one determinant among several. This is why Böhm-Bawerk lays so much stress upon the contention that commodities are not exchanged one for another by the measure of equal quantities of labor. This necessarily appears to be a contradiction when value is conceived, not as an objective quantity, but as the outcome of individual motivation. For if labor be the measure for my personal estimate of value, then I shall not be inclined to exchange my good for another unless in that other I obtain something which, if I had to produce it for myself, would cost me at least as much labor as my own good has cost me. A permanent deviation of the exchange relationship is in fact, if the subjectivist conception of the law of value be once assumed, a contradiction per se, a suspension of the meaning (that is to say, of the subjectivist meaning) of the law of value, which here supplies the individual's motive for economic action.

Very different is Marx's outlook. In his view, that goods contain labor is one of their intrinsic qualities; that they are exchangeable is a distinct quality, one solely dependent on the will of the possessor, and one which presupposes that they are owned and alienable. The relationship of the quantity of labor to the process of exchange does not come into consideration until they are regularly produced as commodities, produced that is to say as goods specifically destined for exchange; thus this relationship makes its appearance only in a definite phase of historic evolution. The quantitative ratio wherein they are now exchanged becomes thereby dependent upon the time of production, which is in its turn determined by the degree of social productivity. The exchange relationship thus loses its chance character, thus ceases to be dependent upon the caprice of the owner. The social conditions imposed upon labor become objective limitations for the individual, and the social complex controls the individual's activities.

Now the mode of the social process of production determines the social process of distribution, for this latter is no longer consciously regulated, as if in a communist community. Under capitalism the process of distribution manifests itself as the outcome of the exchanges effected by independent individual producers, exchanges controlled by the laws of competition.

The Marxist law of value starts from this, that commodities exchange at their values, this meaning that commodities exchange one for another when they embody equal quantities of labor. The equality of the quantities of labor is solely a condition for the exchange of commodities at their values. Böhm-Bawerk, entangled in his subjectivist interpretation, mistakes this condition for a condition of exchange in general. But it is obvious that the exchange of commodities at their values, while on the one hand it merely constitutes the theoretical starting point for a subsequent analysis, on the other hand directly controls a historic phase of the production of commodities, a phase to which a specific kind of competition corresponds.

But the exchange relationship of commodities is no more than the material expression of the social relationships of persons, and what in fact secures realization in the exchange relationship is the equality of the agents of production. Because, in the simple production of commodities, equal and independent laborers severally possessed of their means of production confront one another, exchange takes place at prices which tend to correspond to the values. Thus only can the mechanism of the simple production of commodities be maintained; thus only can the conditions requisite for the reproduction of the relationships of production be fulfilled.

In such a society the product of labor belongs to the laborer. If by permanent deviation from this rule (chance deviations are mutually compensatory) a portion of the product of labor be taken away from the laborer and assigned to another person, the foundations of the society will be modified; the former will become a wage laborer (engaged in home industry), and the latter will become a capitalist. This is actually one of the ways in which the simple production of commodities comes to an end. But it cannot come to an end unless there has occurred a modification in social relationships, carrying with it a modification in exchange, the expression of social relationships.

In the capitalist process of exchange, whose purpose is the realization of surplus value, the equality of the economic units is once more reflected. These, however, are no longer independently working producers, but owners of capital. Their equality secures expression in that the exchange is only normal when the profits are equal, when both are average profit. The exchange which gives expression to the equality of the owners of capital is of course differently determined from the exchange that is based upon an equality in the expenditure of the labor. But just as both societies have the same foundations, the division of property and the division of labor; just as capitalist society can be conceived as merely a higher modification of the earlier type of society; so also is the law of value unchanged in its foundation, for it has merely undergone certain modifications in its realization. These are caused by the specific mode of capitalist competition, which effectuates the proportional equality of capital. The share in the total product, whose value remains directly determined by the law of value, was formerly proportional to the individual's expenditure of labor, but now becomes proportional to the expenditure of capital requisite to set labor in motion. Thus the subordination of labor to capital finds expression. It appears as social subordination, the whole society being subdivided into capitalists and laborers, the former being owners of the product of the latter, the total product, determined by the law of value, being divided among the capitalists. The capitalists are free and equal; their equality is displayed in the price of production = k + p, where p is proportional to k. The dependent position of the laborer is shown by his appearance as one of the constituents of k, side by side with machinery, lubricating oil, and dumb beasts; this is all he is worth to the capitalist as soon as he has left the market and has taken his place in the factory to create surplus value. For a moment only did he play his part in the market, as a free man selling his labor power. The brief glory in the market and the prolonged debasement in the factory—here we see the difference between legal equality and economic equality, between the equality demanded by the bourgeoisie and the equality demanded by the proletariat.

The capitalist mode of production (this is its historic significance, and this is why we can regard it as a preliminary stage on the way to socialist society) socializes mankind to a greater extent than did any previous mode of production, that is to say, capitalism makes the existence of the individual man dependent upon the social relationships amid which he is placed. It does so in an antagonistic form, by the establishment of the two great classes, making the performance of social labor the function of one of these classes, and enjoyment of the products of labor the function of the other.

The individual is not yet an "immediate" of society, that is, he does not yet possess a direct relationship to society, for his economic position is determined by his position as member of a class. The individual can only exist as a capitalist because his class appropriates the product of the other class, and his own share is solely determined by the total surplus value, not by the surplus value individually appropriated by him.

This significance of class gives expression to the law of value as a social law. To confute the theory of value it must be shown to lack confirmation in the social domain.

In capitalist society the individual appears as ruler or slave according as he is enrolled in one or other of the two great classes. Socialist society makes him free, inasmuch as it abolishes the antagonistic form of society, inasmuch as it consciously and directly installs socialization. No longer, then, are the interrelationships of society concealed behind enigmatic economic categories which seem to be the natural qualities of things; these interrelationships now manifest themselves as the freely willed outcome of human co-operation. Political economy then ceases to exist in the form we have hitherto known, and is replaced by a science of the "wealth of nations."

Competition is the power that effects the transformation of values into prices of production. But the competition with which we have to do here is capitalist competition. Competition is further necessary to secure a sale at prices which shall fluctuate round the value. In the simple production of commodities, on the other hand, we are concerned with the reciprocal competition of the finished commodities; it is this which equates the individual values to constitute a market value, thus objectively correcting the subjective errors of individuals. But here (in capitalist society) we have to do with the competition of capitals for different spheres of investment, a competition which establishes equal rates of profit, a competition which cannot become effective until after the abolition of the legal and material shackles which had previously been imposed upon the freedom of movement of capital and labor. Whereas the continually increasing diversity in the organic composition of capital, and the consequent greater and greater variations in the masses of surplus value directly created in the individual spheres of production, are in the first instance the outcome of capitalist evolution—this evolution in turn creates the possibility and the need for extinguishing these differences as far as capital is concerned, and for thus realizing the equality of human beings qua owners of capital.

We have previously seen what are the laws in accordance with which this equalization is effected. We have also seen that only upon the basis of the law of value was it possible to determine the magnitude of the total profit undergoing distribution as being equal to the total surplus value, and thus to determine the extent of the deviation of the price of production from its value. We have further seen how changes in the prices of production must always be referred to changes in value, and can only be explained with reference to such changes. All that we are interested in here is to note how, in this respect also, the subjectivist outlook hinders insight into Marx's train of thought.

For Böhm-Bawerk, competition is merely a collective name for all the psychical impulses and motives by which the parties in the market are influenced, and which thus affect the formation of prices. In relation to this view he has therefore no occasion to speak in a bad sense of the equilibrium between supply and demand, seeing that a number of wants always remain unsatisfied; for what this theory is concerned about is not the effective demand, but demand in general, so that certainly it remains enigmatical how the opinions and wishes of those who cannot buy are to influence the purchasing prices. Does not Marx destroy the validity of his objective law of value when he appeals to competition, appeals, that is to say, to these psychical impulses?

The relationship between supply and demand determines the price, but the height of the price determines the relationship between supply and demand. If the demand increases, the price rises, but if the price rises, the demand lessens, while if the price falls the demand increases. Further, if the demand increases and consequently the price rises, supply increases because production has become more lucrative. Thus price determines supply and demand, and supply and demand determine price; moreover, supply determines demand, and demand supply. In addition, all these fluctuations have a tendency to neutralize one another. If demand increases, so that price rises above its normal level, supply increases; this increase readily becomes greater than needful, and price then falls below the normal. Can we find no fixed point in all this confusion?

In Böhm-Bawerk's opinion, demand and supply invariably balance one another, whether exchange be effected at a normal price or at an irregular one. But what is this normal price? On the basis of capitalist production the surplus-value-creating process of capital is a precondition of production. In order that the capitalist may continue to produce, he must be able to sell the commodity at a price which is equal to its cost price plus average profit. If he is unable to realize this price (the normal price of the commodity produced under capitalism), the process of reproduction is arrested, and the supply is reduced to a point at which the relationship between supply and demand renders it possible to realize this price. Thus the relationship between supply and demand ceases to be a mere matter of chance; we perceive that it is regulated by the price of production, which constitutes the center around which market prices fluctuate in directions which are perpetually opposed, so that the fluctuations compensate one another in the long run. Thus the price of production is a condition of the supply, of the reproduction, of commodities. And not of this alone. It is necessary to secure such a relationship between supply and demand that the normal price, the price of production, can be realized, for then only can the course of the capitalist mode of production continue undisturbed, then only can occur the perpetual reproduction, through the very course of the process of circulation, of the social preconditions of a mode of production whose motive force is the need of capital for the creation of surplus value.

In the long run, therefore, the relationship between supply and demand must be of such a kind that price of production (brought about independently of this relationship) may be attained which shall yield the capitalist the cost price plus the profit for the sake of which he has undertaken the production. Then we speak of the equilibrium of supply and demand.

If, on the other hand, we consider demand, we find that it is "essentially conditioned on the mutual relations of the different economic classes and their relative economic positions, that is to say, first, on the proportion of the total surplus value to the wages, and secondly, on the proportion of the various parts into which surplus value is divided (profit, interest, ground rent, taxes, etc.). And this shows once more that absolutely nothing can be explained by the relation of supply and demand, unless the basis has first been ascertained on which this relation rests" (III, 214). Thus Marx supplies the objective laws which are realized by and control the "psychical impulses" of individuals. The psychological school can attempt to elucidate but one side of the question, demand. The members of that school believe that they have explained the matter when they have classified the individual needs which manifest themselves as demand. They fail to recognize that the fact that a need exists does not convey any implication of the possibility for satisfying this need. The possibility of satisfaction does not depend upon the good will of the person feeling the need; it depends upon his economic power, upon the share of the social product of which he is able to dispose, upon the magnitude of the equivalent he is able to give for products owned by other persons.

Inasmuch as the productive power of human society in the specific form of organization which society confers upon that productive power is for Marx the fundamental idea of political economy, Marx demonstrates economic phenomena and their modifications as they manifest themselves in conformity to law, and causally dominated by the modifications in productive power. In this demonstration, in accordance with the dialectic method, conceptual evolution runs parallel throughout with historical evolution, inasmuch as the development of the social power of production appears in the Marxist system, on the one side as a historical reality, and on the other side as a conceptual reflex. Moreover, this parallelism furnishes the strictest empirical proof of the accuracy of the theory. The commodity form is necessarily the starting point; the commodity form is the simplest form, and becomes the object of economic contemplation, as the object of a specific scientific contemplation. For in the commodity form there already comes into being that delusive appearance which results from the fact that the social relationships of individuals assume the aspect of material qualities of things. It is this delusively material appearance which so greatly confuses the issues of economics. The social functions of individuals masquerade as material qualities of things, just as time and space, the subjective forms of perception, masquerade as objective qualities of things. Inasmuch as Marx dispels this illusion, inasmuch as he discloses personal relationships where before him material relationships had been seen, and discloses social relationships where before him individual relationships had been seen, he succeeds in furnishing a unified and consistent explanation of the phenomena which the classical economists had been unable to elucidate. The failure of the classical economists was inevitable, for they regarded bourgeois relationships of production as natural and unalterable. Marx, having demonstrated the historic conditioning of these relationships of production, was able to take up the analysis at the point where the investigations of the classical economists had been arrested.

But the demonstration of the historic transitoriness of bourgeois relationships of production signifies the close of political economy as a bourgeois science and its foundation as a proletarian science.

No more than two ways now remained open to the bourgeois champions, if they desired to be anything more than mere apologists for whom an uncritical eclecticism would provide the crumbling pillars of their systems of harmony. They might, like the historical school in Germany, ignore theory, and endeavor to fill its place with a history of economic science, but would then be restricted, as the German historical school has been restricted even within its own chosen field, by the lack of any unified apprehension of economic happenings. The psychological school of economics has chosen the other path. The members of this school have endeavored to construct a theory of economic happenings by excluding economics itself from their purview. Instead of taking economic or social relationships as the starting point of their system, they have chosen for that starting point the individual relationship between men and things. They regard this relationship from the psychological outlook as one which is subject to natural and unalterable laws. They ignore the relationships of production in their social determinateness, and the idea of a law-abiding evolution of economic happenings is alien to their minds. This economic theory signifies the repudiation of economics. The last word in the rejoinder of bourgeois economics to scientific socialism is the suicide of political economy.

Um texto (ou tratado?) sobre economia deste tamanho todo? e ainda por cima escrito em inglês? Porra, vão arranjar algo de útil para a comunidade, tipo ajudar os garis limparem as ruas nesta segunda, seus putos liberais!

Censura é uma merda, mas o site poderia ter algum critério para inserção de textos, até para preservar o espaço disponível para coisas mais importantes do que discussões teoréticas sobre economia.

Não filho, esses textos em inglês (infelizmente não os pude encontrar em português) não são textos "liberais", todos são textos de economistas marxistas, e a razão e terem sido postados é rebater os argumentos dos neoliberais de plantão. Especificamente falando, na verdade o eixo dos três textos é atacar a Economia Politica Neoclássica e a teoria da utilidade marginal, e defender a teoria do valor-trabalho.

PS.: e Adam Smith tem seu valor na história do pensamento economico, assim como David Ricardo, por terem esboçado a teoria do valor-trabalho (embora o verdadeiro pioneiro seja William Petty)

Eu até que entendo um pouco de inglês, mas pra grande maioria dos leitores do CMI esta porra aí em cima podia estar escrita em chinês que não ia fazer diferença. Isso aqui não é clubinho pra nego ficar exibindo conhecimentos, é um fórum popular, e gastar espaço com estas coisas impede a leitura de outras notícias relevantes. Olha, a opção de publicar em outras línguas aqui, me parece, é pros internautas de outros países poderem postar coisas de interesse pra nós e ler artigos SOBRE O BRASIL em um idioma de entendam. Se alguém achar que estes textos são tão importantes assim pra luta de classes, me faça um favor: traduza-os primeiro para o velho e bom português brasileiro e depois publique. A massa ignara agradece.