Explaining Marx to newbies

Thanks for this, Chris. It’s particularly interesting to me, since I’ve just been teaching Marx to “newbies” (I’ve been doing so in discussion sections of 12-13 students, rather than lectures; obviously, the format has affected the way that I’ve approached the topic). Our approaches are largely similar, I think, but there are a few areas where we differ:
1) Since we’d been looking at Hegel, I started out by contrasting Marx’s account of history and his method of social explanation to Hegels — which centred on discussion of the distinction between base and superstructure, and claim that the base determines the superstructure.
2) I didn’t make heavy weather of the economic theory, but I did emphasize Marx’s own emphasis on labour — and that his economic theory rests on the labour theory of value (I didn’t mention that this is now pretty universally rejected by economists)
3) I talked a bit more about reification than it seems like you would in your Marx spiel (not using that term, but trying to give the basic idea)
4) I raised (or, rather, allowed my students to raise — which, bless them, they did) the ticklish subject of Marx’s critique of capitalism and morality — which seems to be absent from your summary.
5) Next week we’ll be going on to Mill, so I plan to start out with a discussion of what Marx means by freedom — and also his critique of the bourgeois state and of rights.
I think points 4) and 5) are important, though also tricky, to emphasize. On the one hand, one doesn’t want to reinforce preconceived notions of Marx as totalitarian bogey-man (particularly since I’ve already had to defend Hobbes and Hegel from charges of totalitarianism.) On the other, it does seem to me important to stress that Marx’s critique of capitalism is not a matter of liberal humanitarianism; and that he believed that, if his analysis was correct — and if one takes his claims seriously — simply remaining wedded to a (more egalitarian version or interpretation of) liberal theories of human rights just won’t cut it. I guess this is sort of implied when you make mention of the appearance of freedom and equality in contrast to the reality of exploitation and oppression. But, from this bare summary, I could see your account making Marx seem more reconcilable to a sort of left-liberal humanitarianism than I think he is, or should be presented as being.
(I, also, didn’t discuss Stalin, Pol Pot, etc. Though come to think of it, I should make more of the difference between Marx and Marxism next week.)

“Then I’d say something about Marx’s belief that, despite the appearance of freedom and equality, we live in a society where some people end up living off the toil of other people. How some people have little choice but to spend their whole lives working for the benefit of others, and how this compulsion stops them from living truly truly human lives.”

Marx had no such beliefs, since we wasn’t born then. We can only speculate on what he’d make of the 21st century.

make the students realize its not just some dead white guy you’re talking about.

When I teach Marx (alongside Smith), I sometimes say in passing that not only is he a Dead White Guy, he’s the sort of guy critics repeatedly exhume and beat the shite out of over and over, just to make absolutely sure he really is dead.

A friend who once had the displeasure of attempting to obtain a degree in economics from Texas A&M – that marvelous place that brought you Phil Gramm – related to me how one of the faculty (not Gramm) gave a “lecture” on Marx each semester consisting of an hour’s worth of Marx-related jokes. Unfortunately, Groucho and his brethren were not involved, although Harpo would have made at least as substantial a contribution to academia.

Did you see the post where DeLong insulted and dismissed David Harvey? Then the one where he doubled down after commenters pointed out that he was misreading Harvey? There’s really something about Marxism that makes DeLong go crazy.

I didn’t see DeLong’s introduction as particularly egregious. But then maybe that’s because the only other introductory lecture on Marx that I’ve seen, given to first-year anthropology students at Cambridge by a particularly old-fashioned member of the department, had the following two notable features:

1) it opened with a note that Marx was responsible for more deaths than possibly anyone ever; and
2) it failed to mention that “class” was an idea that Marx sometimes liked to make use of.

So judging by those standards DeLong’s effort seemed pretty reasonable to me.

“I don’t think I’d go on about Pol Pot or Stalin”

Which means you’d get Marxism without actually existing Marxism. How can you introduce students to an important thinker while purposefully ignoring the most important real world impact that this thinker had? I mean, surely if this was about introducing students to John Locke you’d want to mention the American Declaration of Independence.
I think on Wikipedia they call this “weaseling”
(and Brad was almost completely right on Harvey, I don’t know what threads Adam was reading – but I’ve gotten used to these alternate views of Brad (which usually involve mistaking cringe-worthy statements in the comments section for serious argument))

The idiot empricism of DeLong criticism of the theory of commodity fetishism is pretty funny: “Well, I’ve never met anyone who fetishized commodities!”

There’s really something about Marxism that makes DeLong go crazy.

ANYTHING to the left of DeLong makes DeLong go crazy. There have been multiple examples of such meltdowns on his blog over the years.

Re:15 see the end of my 13
Re: 17. Really? Ok, I’m surprised – especially since we’re talking about newbies here. Why not?
(And putting aside the fact that whereas Locke had a big impact on theory and the real world, at the end of the day Marx had just a big impact on the real world, not theory (this is the Samuelson bon mot))

The notion that Marx somehow caused great swaths of 20th Century history testifies to the enduring appeal of naive idealism. It’s as if when a famous thinker dies he becomes a God who can thereafter affect events by magical means. Anyhow, if you really buy this version of historical influence, you’d have to say that Marx lay behind not only the Soviet Union and Red China but also the British labor party and the German S.P.D. Why focus on the Leninists or Pol Pot? As the Chinese are demonstrating every day, Marxism on the hoof can be pretty much anything.

I don’t expect and certainly don’t hope that the labor theory of value and all the rest of the Marxist apparatus makes a comeback, but thinking about Marx at least has the benefit of focusing attention on the centrality of domination in human history. At a first approximation, after all, the basic plot of our story is how a series of elite minorities have fought each other over the centuries to see who would get to dominate the majority.

I didn’t see DeLong’s introduction as particularly egregious.

Taking any historical thinker and declaring (on the basis of flimsy evidence) that he is wrong, wrong, wrong is an easy game to play. It can makes you feel all superior and clever for having shown that Plato was an old fool and Marx a semi-talented political activist but it makes for poor history of ideas. Especially if, as in at least some part of DeLong’s account, very little effort is made to understand the historical and intellectual context of Marx’s work. I mean, you have to love the sentence starting with “We neoliberal economists shrug our shoulders and say that we are in favor of a market economy but not of market society”.

Besides, the discussion about Marx’s theory of value seems to me to be based on a complete misunderstanding of what Marx is saying.

Your students have never heard of Hobbes so they have no pre-conceived ideas. There’s no brush you need to clear away

In point of fact, they almost all know he was just an ordinary stuffed toy, really.

Although I agree with some aspects of Delong’s critique, his insistence on presenting Marx only through the lens of his own responses to him prevents his students from getting an accurate view. For example, why did Marx accept the labor theory of value? What was his argument for it? This is actually rather important, as critiquing the argument gets you more than attacking the conclusion, but Delong’s students won’t get that because Delong found that part boring. And did Marx really say the fetishistic character of commodities was specific to Capitalism? It’s been ages since I read this stuff, but, as I recall the logic of the argument in Capital, that doesn’t seem to fit at all. Yet somehow, Delong treats it as a major gotcha.

In my alternative incarnation as the world’s oldest community college student I have to say that I was surprised when my economics instructor (quite left wing apparently based on e-mail but not on his lectures) brought up Marx, mostly as representative of a critique of Adam Smith who was kind of the center of the course, none of my fellow students, mostly a third my age, had any particular reaction at all, except some intellectual curiosity. Hardly what would have happened when I was their age forty years ago. A fair number of these people are also Iraq war veterans.

In point of fact, they almost all know he was just an ordinary stuffed toy, really.

Hobbes, “ordinary”?! You blaspheme.

Might have figured that lots of people would show up to obfuscate and insist that you can’t understand Marx (at the freshman level) without reading X, Y, and Z. DeLong’s summary has the great virtue of being clear. So clear that you can see his biases, more or less.

Enter key.

DeLong’s supposed smackdown of David Harvey was embarrassing.

I distinguish Marx the economist (Capital) from Marx the philosopher of history (The German Ideology, Preface of 1859). I describe to students Popper’s critique of Marx’s alleged “historicism”. I suggest that in excoriating Marx for seeking a predictive science of human history, Popper confuses Marx’s general theory of history (which is not deterministic in this strong sense) with Marx’s analysis of the purely (ideal) capitalist economy, which (uniquely among economic types) is strongly deterministic.

I then turn to the claim by Popper and others that, however salutary Marx’s emphasis on economy and technology, his general theory of history involves a crude and untenable economic (and/or technological) reductionism. I describe how G. A. Cohen uses functional explanation to reconcile the idea of determination of the political/legal/ideological superstructure by the economic structure with the obvious fact that the superstructure has a vital causal effect on the economy (and in turn the economic structure on the forces of production).

I may also mention to students that the Preface of 1859 appeared the same year as The Origin of Species, and that Marx’s appreciation of Darwin was in part the result of Darwin’s use of a non-teleological causal mechanism to retrospectively explain historical evolution.

Shorter Rich Pulchalsky:
It’s better to be clearly wrong,- (who cares about the consequences?),- than complicatedly, more-or-less, right, with an uncertain distribution of consequences, since those poor children need to be taught authoritative clarity, rather than confused criticisms.

“non-teleological causal mechanism”

A concept one imagines ought to be explained to those, who would make Marx responsible for Lenin, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot.

There’s a good gag here: Marx….went on to say that we should kill each other and then just get along

I just reminded myself of Hobbes’s dates (b. 1588 – d. 1679). There was, of course, religious conflict in this period, but one could argue that the most acute religious conflicts in Europe were at their height before Hobbes was born and were tailing off by the time he was 25 or so.

Well, if you want to ignore the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). And the fact that the seventeenth century in England had one king executed for his religio-political views (Charles I) and another deposed for them (James II in 1688).

When I talk about Marx I emphasize that he created a vast and remarkably coherent intellectual system that we can only touch on, that his view of human nature emphaised fulfillment through creative labour. I pose as a question for consideration how this emancipatory ideology could end up justifying repressive regimes but in one first-year lecture all you can do is pose the question. Rather than discussing Stalin or Pol Pot perhaps consider how Marx’s faith in the dynamic power of capitalism is echoed oddly in current governing Communist practice.

Everybody’s already piled on Not Sneaky, but his remark is a really good example of a pervasive kind of thinking. It’s as though our job as lecturers is to demonstrate the continued relevance of what we’re talking about. Presentism is one thing, effacing historical difference is another altogether.

Just off the top of my head, I’d judge that raising the whole Peter Laslett exclusion crisis vs. glorious revolution question when teaching Locke’s Two Treatises is far more interesting for undergraduates than talking about how Jefferson, et al, appropriated it. The latter path seems to me to be a cloying bid for attention — “You guys care about the Declaration of Independence, right?” — rather than presenting any intellectually-interesting material that might warrant that attention. Are we really teaching our students to think historically if the context we’re providing for Locke is the seventeen seventies? We might as well all become Straussians.

In the same line, then, why would it be more interesting pedagogically to talk about the Soviet Union with Marx than, say, Chartism, enclosure, German Idealism, or any number of things that actually happened during or before Marx’ life? If you want to talk about the twentieth-century reception of Marx, well, that’s a totally different topic.

Justification is a suckers game. Less talk, more rock.

As Rich (35) said, the piece is polemical (which is made crystal clear by “We neoliberal economists…“). There’s nothing wrong with that as far as it goes, but it doesn’t work as a lecture. For this to be educational (or even just interesting) he needs an opponent, someone who could respond with “we marxists…“

@38 The Okishio theorem is silliness. It assumes constant wages and quite elastic demand, neither of which are obviously assumptions you want to make. Nothing against the theorem itself, but it’s not the sort of simple, obvious theorem that deserves to get into a one-hour introductory lecture.

A spectre is haunting Brad Delong.

I am struck by the increase in the volume and intensity of Brad’s anti-communist interventions in the last couple of years. It would be an interesting exercise to plot a graph of the frequency of his posts asserting that Karl Marx ‘got too much into the magic mushrooms’ or accusing David Harvey of ‘intellectual masturbation’, etc, against the number of new mortgage starts, or the LIBOR.

No matter how important Marx is historically and philosophically, the labor theory of value is a dead end. For an economist, that’s what matters.

Looks like Smith and Ricardo are both heading for the scrap heap then.

‘No matter how important Marx is historically and philosophically, the labor theory of value is a dead end’.

That may well be the case, but surely the reason that it is a dead end, assuming it is, is that it doesn’t actually predict, with the requisite (scientific) degree of accuracy, real prices in the real world.

My reply to neo-classicists would be: and what, precisely, does the marginal utility approach predict? With examples?

[Popper is not good to the neo-classicists here: insofar as Popper admired anyone in economics it was Hayek (and, presumably, the Austrian school in general?). Whatever mistakes Hayek made, that one wasn’t one of them. ]

Z-25, (& belle 55),

It should be mandatory for anything on a historic figure for any audience to stress the facts of a. the person being death here/now & b. the person not having had benefit of hindsight (Heidegger was a different animal: he at least had the ‘benefit’ of hindisght).

I read Das Kapital in German and (no I’m not going to be masochistic and check) a major part of it is about concentration of capital (hence power) in few hands and that not being good for those not having those hands attached to the ends of their arms. That part of his theory is still upright, and very actual, very real and very worrying. A lot of other parts are not (luckily: we progress!).

Marx did not have the benefit of Darwinian theory & God was not even dying when he lived. We need to keep that in perspective, especially when we go to newbies or right long articles – what’s interesting now in Marx is not the things he was wrong about but the things (good & bad) we can still take from it. The bad – not seeing that accumulation of wealth in private hands is still better than accumulation of power in public hands. The good – don’t trust what those in power want us to believe because they’re biased in favour of retaining the power they have.

As belle says: if we ignore the crisis-speak and focus on real human interaction and how free and uncontrollable it is proving to be … power isn’t what it used to be ;-)

PS: I’m not sure but I think Popper was careful enough to have gripes with Marxism, & not with a person like Marx specifically. Marx is only in part responsible for Marxism (well maybe Hegel was in fact mostly responsible for his part) but even if he would be wholly responsible for it then there is more in what he said than what was expressed in Marxist ‘experiments’.

i think if people left my lecture not knowing what i thought of the topic and unsure if i even existed, i would feel a bit deflated as to my lecture-giving abilities

As having once, as a TA grad student some 35+ yrs ago taught a survey course on “Democracy and Communism” to under grads, I have read this exchange with fascination and find it most informative. Marx is someone more often referred to than understood, and exactly how to tailor any presentation that does justice to both theory and history is a difficult attempt. I’ve found much to both agree with here and to be enlightened by. I would probably associate my self with Jacob T Levey’s remarks@58 if pushed, but there are several other’s as well.

I can’t resist noting that while I take the thrust of belle’s general point@56, it seems that–unless I read her wrong–for belle the siren call of that old bete noir, that pesky “cash nexus” keeps raising it’s ugly head to prevent achievement of a workers paradise for types such as belle. If only we could achieve a cashless society…..with the “right people” deciding who gets what….humans being so much more “humane” and all….

no you pretty much read me right: i don’t think that monetary price is the last word on value and nor do you, probably — i don’t think it should be me and my pals imposing value on everyone else (i don’t have any pals)

belle;

“nor do you, probably” LOL. You’re right about that–got me there.

Belle, if you give a lecture and, at the end of it, your listeners are unsure you exist, then you have transcended pedagogy and entered the realm of the Master and the Margarita! That would truly be a lecture to die for. In a way, Woland’s seance in that novel is the greatest economics lecture ever given, a definitive scenario in greed and naivete.

Chris,

Although it is so often a sign of pretentiousness to cite one´s own posts, I´ll take the risk and cite a couple passages from my post to Brad´s blog as the post somehow failed to appear, no doubt because of some technical reasons. Anyway, I shall cite only parts that are directly relevant vis-a-vis your comments. So, here they are:

Brad says: “But the only person to try it seriously soon throws the Marxist apparatus over the side, where it splashes and sinks to the bottom of the sea. Perry Anderson’s Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State are great and fascinating books, but they are not Marxist. They are Weberian. The key processes in Anderson’s books concern not “modes of production” but rather “modes of domination.”

Chacona says: I share your admiration for these two works of Perry Anderson. I also agree with you that Anderson´s works highlight the grave difficulty of trying to extend distinctions that Marx and his followers made vis-a-vis capitalism to “pre-capitalist social formations”. Hence the difficulty of separating “economy” and “polity”, indeed “base” and “superstructure” in “pre-capitalist societies” in the same way as in capitalism. But it does not follow that Anderson is simply “Weberian”, unless you think of a Weberian who is always very interested in the disposal of surpluses in various social formations. After all, what is common to all these social formations is the existence of a surplus beyond the need of simple reproduction. All things become so much clearer when one approaches these questions from the point of reproduction:
All the same, raising to discussion Anderson´s difficulties with matching the Marxian framework of interpretation and analysis with the realities his sources imply, is certainly rare in discussions “mainstream economists” tend to have. Thanks for showing uncommon intellectual curiosity!

Brad says: “Karl Marx never completed the intellectual trajectory he set himself on. He tried as hard as he could to become a British-style classical economist- -a “minor post-Ricardian theorist” as Paul Samuelson once joked–but he did not make it: the late, mature Marx is mostly an economist and economic historian, but he is also part political activist–and also part prophet.”

Chacona says: The traditional (Leninist) intellectual biography of how “socialism became a science” tells a story of how German philosophy, French socialism and British political economy joined forces to give us “scientific” socialism. And that is pretty accurate: no need to claim that Lenin was always wrong. But you seem to hint ever so subtly that this blend of philosophy, revolutionary activism and economics must be bad and that all would have been so much better if Marx had been a little bit more mature and scientific: he could have taken then his just place among the many minor Ricardians. (By the way, who are the non-Ricardians among the mainstream economists?)

Well, I agree with you that Marx inherited from Hegel, from French revolutionary tradition and also from British “classical economists” ideas and ways of thinking that were deeply problematical and that eventually became – at least in the hands of some of his followers – extremely dangerous. Far from becoming intellectual weapons of emancipation for the “downtrodden proletarian masses”, they became an ideology for restless “intelligentsia” that was looking for a way to assert its dominance in societies where aristocratic dominance seemed to be giving way to bourgeois institutions and values. That is where we can find the origins of “teleocratic power”, the claim of Communist Parties that they know – not the ignorant masses! – the correct ends of human activity. (Compare with Weberian technocrats who “merely” claim to know better than others the correct means necessary for reaching the ends that are themselves beyond the competence of the technocrats.) No doubt about it, while Marx himself viewed the Paris Commune as the representative of “proletarian dictatorship”, his followers did not find it too difficult to turn their illusions of grandeur into delusions of omnipotence and eventually shift from the dictatorship of the Party to the dictatorship of the Leading Comrade – as indeed some perceptive Marxists (such as Rosa Luxemburg) had correctly predicted..

But enough of this sordid history here. I shall nevertheless claim that what Marx has but many professional mainstream economists do not have is a sense of history and a sense of philosophical understanding. Sure, Marx got so many things wrong, but it is better to be red than dead!….

Social Democracy as the Marxism prophylaxis

“that even though the ruling class could appease the working class by using the state to redistribute and share the fruits of economic growth it would never do so. They would be trapped by their own ideological legitimations–they really do believe that it is in some sense “unjust” for a factor of production to earn more than its marginal product. Hence social democracy would inevitably collapse before an ideologically-based right-wing assault, income inequality would rise, and the system would collapse or be overthrown. The Wall Street Journal editorial page works day and night 365 days a year to make Marx’s prediction come true. But I think this, too, is wrong.”

“I think that Western Europe over the past fifty years serves as a significant counterexample. It may be difficult to maintain a democratic capitalist market system with an acceptable distribution of income. But “incapable” is surely too strong. Beveridgism or Myrdalism–social democracy, progressive income taxes, a very large and well-established safety net, public education to a high standard, channels for upward mobility, and all the panoply of the twentieth-century social- democratic mixed-economy democratic state can banish all Marx’s fears that capitalist prosperity must be accompanied by great inequality and great misery.”

How anyone writing from the US of A, where whatever Social Democratic prophylaxis we’ve had agaist the revolution predicted by Marx has been clearly on the run for 30 years, could be so confident that Myrdalism is robust enough to keep the Marxist apocalypse at bay, is beyond me. DeLong succeeds only, especially in this economic crisis we are in right now, in making it seem like this Marx fellow maybe deserves a second look as some sort of prophetic genius. Perhaps that’s his Socratic intention.

If the idea that capital has some sort of moral right to impoverish and devastate everything in its path as it follows the course of self-aggrandizement, were limited to the WSJ editorial page, we would not be in this current crisis. It took a consensus that government regulation is anathema, a faith held in the face of all evidence to the contrary, to give us the shadow banking system that ate Detroit, and looks to soon finish eating the rest of our economy.

That faith survives even in the face of the present crisis. I don’t think that Social Democratic principles are much in evidence in the measures we have adopted so far to meet the crisis. But if we won’t turn to these principles now, if the crisis hasn’t thoroughly debunked free market fundamentalism, and our grand plan of salvation is to reinflate all market bubbles — I really don’t see any room for confidence at all that Social Democracy can save us from that final confrontation between reactionary defenders of the privileges of great wealth, and the rest of us.

I’m not sure that publishing a Five Minute Hate on any particular economic thinker or school of thought, would be very helpful in any circumstance. But a polemic targeted anywhere but in at least the general direction of Milton Friedman and the cult he founded, at this point in time, pretty much puts you right up there with the editorial page of the WSJ on the side of mindless reaction.

@ 77
In fairness I think DeLong does think more social democracy would be a good thing, and if he had his druthers then the USA would be a good little social democracy and the horrors of the capitalist mode of production would be ameliorated. Now, I don’t think that actual existing social democracy in Europe is exactly a stake through Marx’s heart, but then I learned everything I know about Marx by reading Capital and watching David Harvey’s lectures on-line, so probably DeLong would say that I am blinded by too much mental masturbation.

he’s pretty often pretty easy to read — he was a good polemical journalist, and he’s funny (even if some of his more famous jokes are a bit wellworn 150 years on); even kap has plenty easy-to-read stretches once you get going, it comes in lots of modes… didn’t someone call it the first great modernist novel?

It’s been ages, but I recall the Paris Manuscripts being a pretty good read.

jane dark: “is nobody going to…” — oh well, i thought i had pointed that out, never mind, i achieved non-existence after all

Actually, belle, several people here made versions of that point. I myself said that Marx had “ironized” LTV: labor is only the source of “value” because it has already been alienated. And the whole point of Marx’ deployment of LTV is to explicate the key notion of “surplus-value”.

I was ridiculed by Radek earlier on this thread for mentioning Okishio’s theorem, as if I thought it should be the stuff of an introductory lecture for “newbies”. But my point was the DeLong, if he wants to be taken seriously, with his scholarly pretensions, as an explicator of Marx, should himself have taken account of the formal-rational and mathematical reconstructions of Marx’ economics,- (which itself needs to be “surgically” removed from a more complex project and set of purposes, which itself requires understanding Marx’ conceptual method, in order to know how to go about the “surgery”),- for which the neo-Ricardan criticisms of the Sraffans and Okishio’s theorem especially provided the impetus. (Okishio’s theorem, if anyone doesn’t know, purports to prove mathematically that productivity-enhancing capital investment increases the rate of profit, thus refuting Marx’ claim for “the tendential law of the falling rate of profit”. The first response is, of course, it does, else such investments aren’t made,- that little bit about relations of production constraining forces of production,- but then Okishio’s theorem, in layman’s terms, makes a price-taking assumption, which is scarcely realistic for the competitive conditions under which such investments are made, and so defeats its own point). But rather than adequately informing himself on the scholarship, DeLong insists on reading Marx in hermeneutically inappropriate neo-classical terms and repeating shop-worn neo-classical criticisms that themselves are demonstrably false,- (note, for example, how he assimilates “use-value” to “utility”, the former not being a separate item, but a “contradictory” aspect of the value-form of the commodity, which itself is not a real thing, but a ghostly form “stamped” on concrete things),- which amounts to sheer academic non-feasance and incompetence, i.e. bad faith. It’s usual in one of his hissy-fit performances with respect to Marx for DeLong to go prattling on about the “transformation problem” and its unsolvability, as a decisive refutation of Marx, without the slightest awareness that it was the neo-classicals who invented the “problem” by re-normalizing each production period as at equilibrium, and thereby themselves double-counted, which Marx did not do, since his whole aim was to demonstrate the long-run, cumulative disequilibrium tendencies of industrial capitalist systems. Note how DeLong sneers at Marx’ invocation of “essence”, without evincing any awareness that Marx’ whole mode of presentation, (Darstellung), is organized in terms of an Hegelian dialectic of essence and appearance, in which essence is by no means to be opposed to appearance, let alone referent to some separate, noumenal reality, but is entirely manifested, through the successive stages of conceptual unfolding/development, through the sequences of inevitably partial appearances, though the “essence” is frequently manifested in inverted form by its appearance, (as when, e.g., falling real profits from production might be manifested in inflated financial asset prices). Hence DeLong has no recognition that his “criticisms” are based on his holding a completely inverted understanding of the actual content and thrust of Marx’ claims. No only is there no “transformation problem” of the sort DeLong and his ilk imagine, that labor-values need to be transformed into prices-of-production in order to take account of actual distributions across differing “organic compositions of capital” across sectors, but Marx’ actual point is that prices-of-production, (which after all are crucial to the “law of supply and demand”), can not be determined without first determining distributions (of surplus-value). (That’s oddly similar to Sraffa’s claim that technical co-efficients of production can not be determined separately from the rate of profit, or the distribution of the surplus product between wages and profits). Indeed, the whole claim that Marx’ deployment of LTV can not provide an empirical account of nominal price formation, as if that is what he should be aiming at and then all else would be settled, is not just wide of the mark, but entirely misses the point, since not only are nominal prices constantly changing, but Marx is intent on demonstrating how nominal prices can significantly deviate from underlying value formation. Which is especially the case in the Vol. 3 account of credit, financialization ,and the generation of fictional capital. No, Marx’ account is not only completely erroneous, but entirely outmoded, and has nothing left to teach us, not even heuristically.

I could go on about DeLong’s attempt to style Marx as a chiliastic-utopian religious fanatic. But I’ll just remark that Marx did not actually have a critique of religion. Instead, he had a critique of the critique of religion.

In case you weren’t paying attention, Marx could have been on season 1 of Mythbusters. Marx held the “sentimental” Fabian socialists in contempt. He claimed to distinguish himself from them by having discovered deep and irresistible forces of history that would make socialism not just right, but inevitable. The mechanism for this transformation hinges on the immiseration of the proletariat. This in turn was driven by the inevitable deterioration of profit margins, leaving the bourgeoisie no choice but to cut wages, leading to the impoverishment of the workers, who in turn had no choice but to overthrow the capitalist order as a matter of stark survival. No immiseration, no revolution. And yet the immiseration of the proletariat, which should have occurred first in the most advanced capitalist societies (which even Marx considered to be the US and Britain), never happened. By his own standards, which depended upon the predictive power of his theory, Marx was just plain wrong. Make sure you point this out to your class.

Marx was dealing with early and middle 19th century capitalism, and looking at industries that had never failed. It’s too bad he didn’t extend his observations a little further. His economic model only worked where the industrial outputs were fungible commodities, and every product was known. Now look at what Schumpeter, an admirer of Marx, found out: in the real world, capitalists try their damnedest to avoid falling into that trap. Some industries inevitably produce commodities (oil, coal, metals, etc.), but others, contrary to Marx, do not try to compete by reducing costs but rather by increasing value to the purchaser, reflected in increased price. They do this by product differentiation. Ever wonder why people pay extra for a Mac over an equivalent generic PC? Do you really think it’s an accident?

We now use 19th century engineering and physics only as a substrate for what we have discovered in the interim. A lot has happened in economics in the interim as well. Somehow this seems to have escaped you. You might as well incorporate phlogiston theory into a physics class as Marxist theory into an economics class. Of course, if this is a class in race-class-gender-giant-puppet-head-grievance-theater-transgressive-whatever, feel free to give them straight Marxism. Ptolemaic epicycles are kind of cool, too: see if the astronomers are still teaching that.

Re:57 (responding to them as I’m reading them) – I was joking about teaching the theorem. Usually the words “theorem” “teaching” and “newbies” don’t go together. But while we’re at it, it’s a perfectly fine theorem. The constant wage assumption comes straight from how Marxist analysis is done – exogenous “subsistence” wages, which then determine a bunch of other stuff. The perfectly elastic demand – not sure that’s quite the way to put it – is more or less the assumption of “equal rates of profit” across sectors (assuming this is the demand you’re talking about). Part of the reason why the theorem smarts the Marxist skin so much is because it’s very much in the Marxist tradition (rather than an outside, say, Neoclassical, or even “purely” Keynesian, one). It basically gashes another big theoretical hole (right next to the ones created by failings of LTV and the transformation problem) in the Marxist edifice – there’s no “natural” tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Which, of course, after 150+ years, should be empirically obvious too. Not sure what’s left over after that. Rejection of the paragraph as a tool of bourgeois oppression?

(Thanks, JD).

Notsneaky: I won’t insist that it was ‘piling on’ now that I’ve reviewed the tape, but I meant to refer to comments 16, 17, 23, and 45.

Still, although I won’t pretend to speak for Chris, I stand by my comment above. What do we learn about Locke by discussing the American Revolution? Basically, we find that a caricature of Locke’s work had come, by the 1770s, to offer a particular flavor of legitimacy attractive to the American revolutionaries. If we actually want to learn something about Locke, I would prefer to situate our reading in the 1670s or 80s, depending on when you think the book was written. If we reconsider the circumstances of authorship, he might not have been writing the book the 1770s thought he was writing. If that were to be true, placing the American revolution on his shoulders gets a little bit Jenga-ish. Now doesn’t that sound like the seed of an interesting lecture or two? Maybe a paper topic?

And lastly, I owe you an apology: I don’t really think you’re a Straussian.

Mitch 91: “And yet the immiseration of the proletariat, which should have occurred first in the most advanced capitalist societies … never happened. By his own standards, which depended upon the predictive power of his theory, Marx was just plain wrong.” Along with DeLong’s: “Western Europe over the past fifty years serves as a significant counterexample”

This could be explained by the dialectics of the Cold War. Western Europe had to compete, economically and (most importantly) ideologically, against the USSR – a powerful proto-marxist quasi-egalitarian entity – and, it could be argued, some sort of ‘finlandization’-like phenomenon significantly affected the development of Western Europe, and the US too (the New Deal, etc.).

You really have to start counting from the late 1980s, and, perhaps, it’s not an accident that around that time most (if not all) Western European social-democratic parties dropped any pretense of being opposed to neoliberalism. It’s a whole new game now.

several people on this thread need the word “newbies” explained to them, before we even get to marx: were i to lecture on him i think i would start with the apparent fact of the protean idea of him — “as many different marxes as there are people seeking to discuss him, is this as TRUE AS IT SEEMS, and if so, where does it come from? his strengths, his failings, his foes, the shape of the world at large?” — but i am not an economist, sadly

(yes, i would start the lecture by summarising the shape of the world at large, where have i ever seen that fail as a structuring tactic?)

but i am not an economist, sadly

Sadly?!

I didn’t know the world was at large but if newbies are those that don’t know the world’s shape – I fear it will be a loooong lecture. Everybody knows the world is circular & flat; at least all those familiar with google earth.

Chris @ 100

But what else? Marx’s views about exploitation can be stated without reference to the LTV.

Really? I’m not an expert on the exploitation literature, but from what I’ve read it seems like (without the LTV) there are serious difficulties formulating anything resembling a Marxian theory of exploitation that doesn’t count, say, state enforced transfer payments from the able bodied to the disabled as exploitation. I might be wrong, and if so I’d be very interested to read any articles on the topic.

Doubtless this comment will get lost in the chaff, but when I teach Marx in Western Civ, he gets set along side De Tocqueville. I have a primary source documents reader that compare K.M & D.T.’s views on History, the 1848 Revolution and the ideal form of government. It makes the Old Rhinelander more concrete and helps explain why some people would want to become Marxists, given the other options.

I used to give students a wind up lecture on Hegel too, but I think it confused them more than it helped explain Marx, so I stopped.

I guess the idea that the rate of profit will inevitably fall because of the rising organic composition of capital does [hinge on the labor theory of value being true.]

Not so, actually. It’s perfectly possible to talk about a rising OCC in terms of the ratio of fixed capital to either output, potential output, or the wage bill. In which case it’s an empirically testable proposition that turns out to be true in many, but not all, cases.

(wasn’t monroe one of the founding fathers?)

As to the link between LVT and exploitation, my understanding of it (and honestly it’s been awhile since I read Cohen and Roemer) is that yes, you can have a theory of exploitation without the LVT but it’s not really Marxism anymore. It’s a different theory of exploitation. And there’s some decidedly non-Marxist themes in this different theory of exploitation – exploitation is consistent with increasing wages (rather than the immiserization of the proleteriat) and you can get the weird result that it is capital that is being exploited. I believe that Joan Robinson also said roughly the same thing long time ago (something like “Marx is nonsense but his heart was in the right place”).
And then you can have a simple theory of exploitation where it happens if somebody somewhere doesn’t get their marginal product.

115 comments in and nobody has directly mentioned (rephrased for modern sensiblities) “People make their own histories in circumstances not of their own choosing.” Sigh. Never leave to economists or philosophers what should be handled by historians. As a high school history teacher, I’m usually newbies first encounter with Marx and that’s where we start. Next he’s positioned as an Enlightenment thinker who had a faith in science being able to explain the human condition, next as both an admirer and critic of capitalism who believed that class conflict could explain history and finally as a futurist who ran about par for the course in that profession – in other words- o-fer.

“(wasn’t monroe one of the founding fathers?)”
Not being a Signer or a leader at the time I thought he’d missed out on that title, but according to Wikipedia I’m wrong.
oh well.

I’m still trying to understand how one could introduce Marx without reference to the LTV (does surplus labor theory of profit work better?) DeLong doesn’t get Hegel, but he at least grapples with the core of Marx’s theory.

Re: Radek @94

There’s nothing you’re saying there that I don’t already know. Capitalists invest in productivity-enhancement under competitive conditions to reduce costs and thereby gain competitive advantage by lowering output prices and gaining market-share. And not the least of those costs are wage-costs. So in the short-to-medium-run, labor becomes dis-employed, even if wages of remaining workers rise”, only to be re-employed “at lower wages in more labor intensive sectors, output prices competitively decline, and less-productive capital stocks are competitively devalued and forced out, even as the costs of maintaining long-run, uncertain productivity-enhanced capital stocks rise. Hence the profits to innovative capital investment rise, even as the value of and return to aggregate capital stocks decline. Add to that, that the value of capital stocks is not to be booked at their initial historical cost, but rather at their reproduction/replacement cost, and you get a fairly paradoxical situation, in which increasing concentrations of capital/capital intensities, which increase the real distributable surplus-product, lower unit profits, lower the wage-share in aggregate demand, raise investment costs sine qua non, and require a further expansion of markets to dispose of excess output. Hence a “tendential law of the falling rate of profits”, which is a fairly plausible root account of the production/business/trade cycle and its recurrent crises, as over-investment meets up with under-consumption, deficient wage-based demand. Apparently, Marx thought that the accumulation of such crises would render them increasingly severe, as the accumulation of the “forces of production”, which include available technical means, as well as the work “force”,- and why should human knowledge, skill, and experience be arbitrarily re-designated “human capital”?- ran against the limits imposed by the “relations of production”, economically speaking, the capacity of the system to write down capital losses to re-balance them with the available “mass” of labor-value. But that “law” is a tendency, not a deterministic covering law, which ought to invite the question of possible countervailing tendencies or policy responses. Can excess public expenditures or transfers provide for the short-falls in consumption demand or provide extra, alternative avenues for capital investment,- (weapons, weapons, weapons!)-? Maybe, but to a fully sufficient extent? (At any rate, it was a Marxist economist, Michael Kalecki who first discovered the principle of real aggregate effective demand, but, since he wrote in Polish and a bit in French, no one noticed, though, in fairness, it would be another case of simultaneous independent discovery, like Newton/Leibniz or Darwin/Wallace). Schumpeter was to re-style this dynamic “creative destruction”, to the delight of gleeful yuppies everywhere, but then he too was worried about the prospect of “secular stagnation”. Again, Marx’ account was one of long-run dynamic dis-equilibrium. Why would you be so sure that general equilibrium accounts could so readily trump that prospect, (even if we now possess much better math to model Marx’ intuitions)?

““socially necessary labor time” is the point where, even if it was capable of explaining relative prices (and all else is metaphysics)”- Er, that’s a piece of positivist idiocy and philosophical illiteracy. You can’t distinguish a critique of metaphysics from metaphysics itself? And sheerly economically speaking, it expresses the sort of view that claims that aggregate cumulative debt doesn’t matter, only debt servicing costs, ’cause, ya know, interest rates won’t ever deviate from what’s required. “What the hey is it? Who determines whether labor time is socially necessary or not?”- Still, more basically, are you so hung up on methodological individualism that you don’t recognize that conditional constraints and cross-secting consequences of the activities of individual agents generate structures that were not intended by anyone? It’s certainly not Marx who invented hourly wages, and clearly his account is that it’s the “system” itself that “competitively” abstracts/extracts “socially necessary labor time”. Have you ever actually worked a factory job? Or managed a factory?

As to Marx’ deployment of LTV being simply and obviously false, well, since labor-value is always already alienated and abstracted/extracted, it’s not as if labor is “embodied” in its output, but rather labor-values are already “ghostly”. Labor-value is precisely not some sort of mysterious metaphysical substance with occult causal powers. (Hegel had already eviscerated such traditional notions of metaphysical substance). Rather labor-value amounts to an accounting convention rather than a unique explanatory force. To be sure, one can adopt a different system of accounting, just as one can adopt a different explanatory framework. But a convention is not simply and obviously false, but rather more-or-less useful within an explanatory framework. And in general, it’s not a good idea to attribute to Marx gross economic stupidities, since he was a mean economist and thoroughly well-read and critically responsive to virtually all the economic literature available in his day and age. So Marx is precisely not claiming. e.g., that labor intensive sectors are producing/extracting more labor-value than capital-intensive sectors, since labor is the source of all value, which would be utterly stupid. Marx is a good deal closer to common sense and more empirical than he’s often given credit for, and I think those readings whereby he takes commodity-money wages and prices as prima facie, rough-and-ready equivalents or indicators of labor-values are on the mark. (There’s no need to translate a wage into a basket of wage-goods and calculate the labor input to those goods, etc.) Rather he’s tracing out the pathways by which labor-values deviate from nominal prices, from the assumption of their ready equivalence. So concentrated, capital-intensive sectors are producing more value than diffuse labor-intensive sectors, because, due to oligopolistic market-power and the rents accruing to it, they are drawing labor-value off of those other sectors. There might be other accounting conventions and alternative explanations, but it’s hard to claim that such a phenomenon is unrealistic or not empirically evident. Similarly, Marx accounts capital goods, like labor-power, as always exchanged at value. But that does not mean that he’s claiming that capital goods, as “factors of production”, do not yield increased surpluses. Rather, since a capital good has no use-value other than the production of exchange-values, and since capital goods are valued at replacement costs, they can’t somehow produce their own value, independent from their realization in output. That’s a logically coherent accounting, even if others might be essayed. In fact, Marx’ LTV has been shown formally to be consistent, such that, given that labor is chosen as the numaire, labor-value input results “magically” in a surplus of labor-value output. The problem, of course, is that, by the same formalism, if corn were chosen as the numaire, then a corn-theory-of-value would result, with corn inputs producing corn-surpluses. So there must be some peculiar non-formal attribute of labor that would qualify it as a privileged numaire. The other generalized result of the formal-rational reconstruction of Marx’ economics is that, indeed, his LTV accounting holds up well, such that the “mass” of labor-values,- (and here the alleged transformation problem simply drops out “macro-economically”),- correlates with the flow of input-output prices, provided the economy is growing in an inter-sectorally balanced way, but, if not, his LTV falls apart. Somehow I think Marx would not have been surprised by such a formal result.

More generally, any economic framework of explanation must rely on some sort of standard of “value”, let’s call it, at minimum, a principle of least effort, just as purely physical explanations rely on a conception of energy as doing “work”, as with Carnot heat engine cycles. The core idea of “economy” is systematically producing more output/welfare/satisfaction from less “resources”. It is not obvious that the capacities, needs, and well-being of laborers should be held of no account in providing such a standard of “efficiency”. It’s also not obvious that the maximalization of individual utitility preference functions can actually do such “work”.

As for “exploitation”, it’s far more a functional than a normative concept in Marx. Capitalists “necessarily” exploit workers, since labor is already alienated and otherwise the extraction of surplus-value wouldn’t result. But then, Marx was not exactly averse to the extraction of social surpluses. He just wanted to re-organize the processes by which it was effected and distributed. Marx is constantly playing with the old freedom vs. necessity problem, such that human agents “freely” produce the conditions of their own unfreedom and subjection, so that workers, in objectifying and expressing themselves in their own products are already alienated from them and subjected to “the law of value” and capitalists, in seeking to maximalize profits, compulsively drive each other into bankruptcy and drive down the rate-of-profit, etc. But Marx remained wedded to the basic Hegelian framework, whereby norms only had meaning, let alone validity, if they were anchored and embodied in the recognitions of actual social relations and practices. Hence no matter how conflicted and self-divided the consciousness and recognition of social norms, they could only be resolved through the course of actual social conflict, rather than through any liberalistic appeal to moral “values”. Hence, I’m not sympathetic, on grounds of hermeneutic accuracy, to attempts to reconstruct Marx’ thought/work in terms of Analytic philosophy, normative political philosophy, methodological individualism, rational choice theory, technological functionalism, etc., while declaring Hegel “bullshit”. Like it or not, Marx is thoroughly rooted in Hegelian dialectics, even if he himself might have mis-understood Hegel somewhat and erroneously reified the latter’s conceptual-reflective method as a “materialist” reality. I think Marx is very much a “dead dog”, in roughly the same sense that he declared Hegel to be, in a letter written when he was re-reading Hegel’s “Logic” to bone up for writing “Capital”. The mystery is why Marx chose to present his epic account in a thoroughly Hegelian idiom, when, by the 1850’s, Hegel had been largely forgotten, was scarcely read, and even less understood. There’s a peculiar sense of rigor in that.

“In any case, the fact that many of Marx’s key claims have turned out to be wrong doesn’t justify the kind of treatment that he gets from DeLong”

I agree with the spirit of this, but I think it assumes that DeLong is being much harder on Marx than he actually is. In fact, in that lecture, he credits Marx with plenty of important insights. I agree that he misses one or two (or one, now I think about it), but it doesn’t strike me as spectacularly unbalanced, especially if you allow that the tone is quite lighthearted. I think it likely that a student hearing this lecture would feel inspired to read more by and about Marx.

“The wrong ideas of Smith and Ricardo were of the first kind, the wrong ideas of Marx of the second. ”

Isn’t that like, your opinion, man?

Anyway, let me see if I’ve got it straight:

1) We should teach Ricardo and Smith because their theories can be reinterpreted in useful ways.
2) Cohen and Roemer reinterpret Marx in useful ways.
3) We shouldn’t teach Marx.

I think Marx has about 4 main ideas that can be fit into a 1.5 hour lecture, provided the lecturer does not ramble and digress in excess.

Labor theory of value/surplus labor: An important contribution/perspective–capitalist systems are based on extracting surplus value (at least in Marx’s perspective)
Alienation: Of course you can’t talk about Marx with at least briefly discussing alienation. If explained well, this is an interesting points for newbies to Marx to think about. Included here is Marx’s argument that capitalism breaks down social relations and transforms them into money relations. This might also be a good place to introduce Marx’s economic relations=power relations argument.
Base-superstructure: the idea that economic structures can change social structures. This includes Marx’s historical argument about relations of production.
Commodity fetishism: This links to the labor theory of value, but I think it makes more sense to discuss that topic with surplus labor

I would move away from connecting Marx to Stalin, Pol Pot, etc, since students in your class will do this on their own, without your “help”. A brief discussion of Marx’s views on communism might be in order, but these are the least useful part of his work. It might be worth mentioning that Marx did think capitalism led to tremendous economic growth, but saw it as perpetuating inimical class relations. Some mention of the historical context might be useful as well–given the conditions of the time, Marx’s argument made a lot of sense, and the height of its influence probably came in the early 20th century, when nearly every Western country has a precarious balance between capitalist and non-capitalist forces.

Oh I’m also down with some of that Base/Superstructure thing. If taken with some salty caveats.

“Have you ever actually worked a factory job? Or managed a factory?”

Yes. No.

<i<This thinker was wrong, but in interesting ways.

I think in order to teach that somebody’s wrong you have to prove they’re wrong, which is probably beyond the scope of economics to actually do. (As per hidari at #110. When you can get economists to agree on something in the way that scientists agree on something, hidari will be wrong.)

Did you say anything about how he was reincarnated as a stuffed Tiger?

I find that doing Mill’s “Subjection of Women” before Marx helps. Students will eagerly agree that women resisted their own emancipation, that what it means to be a man or a woman is socially constructed, that it’s better for the oppressor if the oppressed don’t recognize their oppression, etc which makes it easier to make the point that Marx believes these things to be true of the proletariat. “But workers don’t act like they’re being exploited – they support capitalism!” “Yes, just like women opposed (and oppose) feminism and support patriarchy.”

The kind of Marxism liberalism that is done by folks like Cohen and Roemer Rawls and Nozick looks a lot different from the Marxism of Marx, from the Marxism of his immediate successors, or the Marxism as understood by most self identified Marxists today (in English, Anthropology etc. departments liberalism of Locke or Montesquieu, from the liberalism of the Founding Fathers, or liberalism as understood by most self-identified liberals today (in English departments, law schools, the NYRB, Amnesty International, etc). And IMNSHO the Marxism liberalism that is done by folks like Cohen and Roemer Rawls and Nozick is a very respectable endeavor and worthy of pursuit. Whether, at the end of the day, you want to call it Marxism or just Marx-inspired liberalism or just liberal inspired is just semantics.

Oh, and much as I would love to respond to your penetrating criticism that simply because I call myself a Marxist I must ‘insist… that everything (Marx) wrote (is) the gospel truth which (doesn’t) need amending, expending, or correcting’ I am going to have to pass. Maybe a patient Darwinist or Keynsean economist can explain that one to you.

J Edgar Hoover-approved Marx to newbies. Funny stuff.

(linked by infinite thØught)