Routledge Handbook of Marxian Economics

David M. Brennan, David Kristjanson-Gural, Catherine P. Mulder, Erik K. Olsen, David M. Brennan, David Kristjanson-Gural, Catherine P. Mulder, Erik K. Olsen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138774933
• eBook ISBN: 9781317683711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Most developed economies are characterized by high levels of inequality and an inability to provide stability or opportunity for many of their citizens. Mainstream economics has proven to be of little assistance in addressing these systemic failures, and this has led both scholars and students to seek alternatives. One such alternative is provided by Marxian economics. In recent decades the field has seen tremendous theoretical development and Marxian perspectives have begun to appear in public discourse in unprecedented ways.

This handbook contains thirty-seven original essays from a wide range of leading international scholars, recognized for their expertise in different areas of Marxian economics. Its scope is broad, ranging from contributions on familiar Marxist concepts such as value theory, the labor process, accumulation, crisis and socialism, to others not always associated with the Marxian canon, like feminism, ecology, international migration and epistemology. This breadth of coverage reflects the development of Marxian economic and social theory, and encompasses both the history and the frontiers of current scholarship. This handbook provides an extensive statement of the current shape and future direction of Marxian economics.

The Routledge Handbook of Marxian Economics is an invaluable resource for students, researchers and policy makers seeking guidance in this field. It is designed to serve both as a reference work and as a supplementary text for classroom use, with applications for courses in economics, sociology, political science, management, anthropology, development studies, philosophy and history.

PART I

Dialectics and Methodology

1

Dialectics and Overdetermination

Antonio Callari

The dialectic refers to a process in which objects of interest (e.g., “capital,” “society”) are understood as developing through contradictions structured in relationship to an essence, a force which both sets things as they are (and appear) and yet propels them into a beyond (as they could be). Marx (1977, 103) wrote that he used a dialectical method he had extracted (removed from its “mystical [idealist] shell”) from Hegel. Arguing the impossibility of divorcing Hegel’s dialectic from his idealism, Althusser (1970) proposed overdetermination as an alternative materialist framework.

We begin with Hegel’s dialectic before turning to Marx’s use of it and then to overdetermination as it was proposed by Althusser and developed further, later, by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff.

Dialectics

Hegel

Before Hegel, as the idea of “progress” (“science,” “history”) was taking shape, Kant had posed a formidable challenge to any certainty regarding this progress. Considering “knowing” and “being” separate domains of existence, Kant had philosophically produced an unbridgeable gap between them: the unknowability of the “thing in itself.” To answer Kant, German Idealism rejected his premise of the separateness of knowing and being. Hegel’s dialectic became a way of thinking their “unity.”

German Idealism initially theorized this unity unidirectionally: Fichte (subjective idealism) made being the product of knowing (the “I”), Schelling (objective idealism) made knowing the product of being. Similarly situating knowing and being as two poles (one active and the other passive) of existence, both Fichte and Schelling placed them in a relationship of reflection, with the active element completely shaping the passive one, the latter thus being conceived as the mirror image of the former. With being and knowing thus philosophically absorbing each other, neither Fichte nor Schelling could give to history or science a positive place in their philosophies. They both turned to “genius” (“intuition”) as the guarantor of the sought-for certainty of knowledge. They both produced formal (“ideal”) systems, in which particular ideas or practices out of the axes of these systems could only be thought of as misrepresentations and could as such be erased or repressed. Both Fichte and Schelling took political positions that Hegel found problematic, Fichte viewing society as “tyranny” (over the “I”), and Schelling supporting authoritarianism (to weed out the ignorance of the masses) (Lukács 1976).

Considering Fichte and Schelling unable to respond to Kant, Hegel produced a philosophical system in which both being and knowing were active. Lukács labels Hegel’s idealism “absolute” not only because it included both “subjective” and “objective” domains, but also because the system he produced, by including them both as active elements, was greater than the sum of its parts: it made a place for elements that the separate idealisms of Fichte and Schelling could not accommodate positively. The codetermination of knowing and being required Hegel to include as positive elements of his philosophy all ideas that have practical effects on the world, even if/when they can (actually or potentially) be shown to be or to have been errors in some respect or another (compare with Schelling’s attitude toward popular ideologies). Hegel’s world thus has to be a totality, comprehending and treating as positive both elements of Truth/truths and Its/their limits. Of course, Hegel’s philosophy remains “idealist” because of the presence of a (one) source directing the codetermination of knowing and being. This direction is necessary if the choreography of knowing and being is to result in the required (versus Kant) certainty. The term “idealism” happens to comport well with the content(s) Hegel gave to this source: Notion (Reason, Spirit). Philosophically, however, the term refers to the presumption of the existence of one source, irrespective of the content of that source (a postulate that everything derives from “Matter” is as much an idealism as a postulate that everything derives from “Notion”). As we will see, only the existence of such a source could philosophically guarantee the unity of knowing and being Hegel was constructing.

Hegel laid out the “dialectical” (versus “formal”) logic necessary for his system in his Logic: Part I is the Objective Logic (dealing separately with “Being” and with “Essence”); Part II is the Subjective Logic (dealing with knowledge, the Notion) (Blunden 1997). The part on Essence is “by far the most important part” of the entire opus (Engels 1940, 26). Essence both has a structured relationship to the world as it is, and contains aspects that propel it (the world) into some other state (and, eventually, into an absolute unity of knowing and being). “Essence” is what makes existence not a state, but a process, history.¹

Hegel’s dialectic has been summarized with a few fundamental laws. Engels (1940, 26) lists them as: 1) the “transformation from quality into quantity and vice-versa” (emphasis in original), illustrating the iterative process through which a quality (an entity, e.g., capital) undergoes quantitative accumulations that, at some point (when the contradictions within it break its unity—see note 2 below), precipitate its transformation into another quality (e.g., capital moving from manufacturing, to machinery, to centralization, to socialization)—this law summarizes the nature of Being; 2) “the interpenetration [unity, in other renditions] of opposites,” pointing to the contradictory nature of being²—this law summarizes the nature of Essence; and 3) “the negation of the negation,” which Engels argued was the “the fundamental law for the construction of the whole [Hegelian] system,” speaking to the stage-structure of transcendence (see note 1 for the repeated transitions in the master-slave narrative). All three laws are important, but, for reasons that should become clear later, we will pay more attention to the second, the “interpenetration of opposites,” and to one of its manifestations in particular, the interpenetration of content and form.

In Hegel’s master-slave narrative, we saw that “content” (i.e., the being-and-knowledge of equality), although essence could be presumed always to push it beyond itself, could “exist” only in a particular form at a particular stage of the development of Spirit (i.e., the religious form in the stage of feudalism). The part of essence within the content that was yearning for more concrete determinations of equality could not exist per se, since the real being of equality was only given in its religious form. That part of the essence, therefore, cannot be discovered in the realm of ideas (that would have presupposed a sufficiency of thought Hegel could not accept), or in a logical analysis of the form in itself. It rather has to be discovered through an analysis of concrete ways in which the form imposed its logic on the content and of the fault lines (contradictions) in these ways. It is the task of theoretical work to discover, through analysis and synthesis,³ these fault lines and to deduce from them the essence pointing to the next phase of history.

We note, in conclusion, that the parts of the Logic have a circular relationship. In describing the world, we do not go from being to essence to ideas; or from ideas to essence to being; or even from essence to being on the one hand, and to ideas on the other. Rather, Being (universal, particular), Essence (unity of opposites, form and content), and Notion (abstract and concrete) coexist and codetermine each other in their structures (e.g., the codetermination of content and form). We can thus enter Hegel’s circle of existence at any point, move along its circumference, and return to the point of entry. But it is also important to note that this circle of Hegel does have a center (the search for certainty, the unity of knowing and being), which totalizes (captures every concreteness within) the space it defines by rotating a radius uniformly around itself. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk, but it also always finds its perch at the center of the world.

Marx’s Use of the Dialectic

We focus here on Capital (Marx 1977) and the work that, beginning in 1857 (Marx 1973), led Marx to it.⁴

When thinking of Hegel’s influence in Capital, contradiction comes to mind most readily. In fact, Marx starts by highlighting the dual nature of the commodity (use and exchange value) so as later to be able to theorize all the potential contradictions of that duality. We however begin our discussion of Marx’s relationship to the dialectic with the categories of content and form. When Marx wrote that, in the beginning chapter on value, he “coquetted with the mode of expressions peculiar to [Hegel]” (1973, 33), he had in mind “content andform” (the substance of value and the form of value in exchange) as well as “quality and quantity” (value and exchange value). Indeed, the two pairs mutually constitute each other.

It is instructive to trace the path that leads Marx to give prominence to the content-and-form relation. Marx (1973) sets out to work on his comprehensive critique of political economy (Grundrisse) on the occasion of the 1857 economic crisis and of an inadequate (in his mind) “socialist” response to that crisis, the Proudhonist Darimon’s proposal for a “free credit” monetary reform of capitalism (Negri 1984). A decade earlier, Marx (1963) had criticized Proudhon’s own concentration on money (as the presumed source of economic instability and injustice). He criticized as dilettantish Proudhon’s use of the Hegelian idea of contradiction as a simple “opposition” of good (represented by labor as the source of value) and evil (represented by the corrupting force of money), and condemned, as petty bourgeois, his proposal to resolve the contradiction one-sidedly (on the side of money, with “labor notes”). In 1857, Marx is confronting the one-sided Proudhonist schematism again.

Marx pays attention to the category of form immediately as he starts writing the Grundrisse (within 10 pages, in the printed edition). “Proudhon and his associates,” he writes, “never even raise the question [of ‘the relation of circulation to the other relations of production’] in its pure form.… Whenever it is touched upon, we shall pay close attention” (Marx 1973, 123).⁵ Marx’s intention to “pay close attention” to this question “in its pure form” means that he is visualizing a definite (pure in itself) space on which to fix the connection between production and circulation. Arguably, it is here that we can “see” Marx making an initial connection with the Hegelian category of form and taking a step toward the possibility of a grammar of content and form for his critique of Proudhonism.

Marx found a grammar of content and form also useful in his criticism of classical political economy. When he wrote to Engels that Hegel’s Logic “had been of great use” to him in “discover[ing] some nice arguments,” he gave his “complete demoli[tion of] the theory of profit as hitherto propounded” as the example (Marx and Engels 1983, 248; letter of January 16, 1858)—a clear reference to his invention of the concept of surplus value. It is not difficult to “see” how it is Hegel’s form-and-content relation that gave Marx (who already had the general form-and-content relationship in mind as a result of his engagement of Darimon) the idea of conceptually splitting profit into two related but separate modes, the mode of substance and the mode of form. In Hegel, as we saw, content is both given by form (does not exist other than in its form) and yet different from it (it contains, as we have seen essence do, both the form and a surplus to the form). A sympathetic sensitivity to this relationship could thus easily have suggested to Marx the analytical task of coming up with a concept (on the side of content/substance) that both included and was different from (larger than) “profit.” The concept, of course, needed its own distinct measure (as labor-value) in relation to the separate money-form measure of profit (price of production). The concept only needed a name: surplus value.⁶

Marx found the content-and-form relation useful in yet a third way. Hegel’s essence could not be known in advance of an investigation of the concrete and contradictory ways in which it found embodiment in the world (see notes 1 and 3). Marx deplored the dilettantish Hegelianism of his “utopian” rivals who thought that essence (the determining force) could be known philosophically, prior to a thorough investigation of its concrete manifestations. In addition to criticizing Proudhon thus (see above), Marx derided Lasalle for his attempt to derive money directly (i.e., ideally) from its function as a medium of exchange (as “the unity of affirmation and negation,” as an example of “the transformation of all things into their opposites”), without paying attention to the concrete ways of this function (letters to Engels of February 1, 1858 and February 25, 1859 [Marx and Engels 1983]). In contrast to Proudhon and Lasalle, Marx repeatedly prided himself (as Engels repeatedly praised him) for his “scientific” mode of investigation, his extensive analyses of concrete relations as a condition of his abstractions.⁷ Hegel’s form-and-content relation formalized Marx’s appreciation of scientific work in a way that exposed the philosophical dilettantism of his adversaries, and this too must have carried weight in his decision to formulate his work as an application of the Hegelian method (in its inverted form, of course).

We can see the entire architecture of Capital (four volumes) through the lenses of the content-and-form relationship. Marx sets up the analysis in the first chapter of Volume I, where, after introducing the commodity as containing within its unity the duality of use and exchange value (thus laying out the possibility of crisis at the very beginning)⁸ and after defining the terms of its measure (socially necessary labor-time), he moves directly to discuss the content (substance of value) and form (the form of value in exchange) relation. It is the grammar of content-and-form that allows Marx to define the specific mode of being of social labor in capitalism (the money form), and to do so in a way that would then enable all the concrete investigations that the remainder of Capital documents. These include 1) finding themotive force of capitalism (in Hegelian terms, the essence propelling itself beyond itself, the M – C – M' relation)—in chapters 2 and 3 of Volume I; 2) analyzing the forms (absolute and relative), mechanisms (capitalist accumulation, reserve army) and conditions (primitive accumulation) of the production of surplus value—in the remainder of Volume I; 3) analyzing the concrete processes of circulation and distribution associated with these forms, mechanisms and conditions—in Volumes II and III; and, last but not least, 4) analyzing the modes of knowing corresponding to real forms of being of social labor and of surplus value—respectively, in the section on commodity fetishism and in Volume IV (Theories of Surplus Value). It is in these concrete investigations, of course, that Marx finds the actualities of the contradictions (in both knowing and being) that the initial simple duality of the commodity (use and exchange value) could only posit potentially. The overall architecture of the work has a remarkable resemblance to the architecture of Hegel’s Logic.

Overdetermination

Althusser (1970) proposed the approach of overdetermination in order to distance Marxist theory from Hegel, and from the Hegelian contradiction in particular, in connection with the question of a revolutionary conjuncture. Althusser looked to 1917 (Lenin) for an example of good thinking about revolutionary conjunctures. His own political conjuncture, however, was defined by the question of what Marxist theory needed to be in the 1960s (and beyond), after the grammar of Soviet Marxism, and the inadequacy of the concept of ideology associated with it, were showing themselves to be poor guides for a more effective practice of politics.

Althusser (Chapter 5 of Althusser and Balibar, 1970) argued that Marxism had become characterized by essentialism, a habit (enabled by the Hegelian concept of contradiction, as tension emanating from within an essence conceived as a unity of two opposites)⁹ of reducing “society” to the expression of an essence. He saw a tendency for Marxist theory to reduce itself to two theoretical variations of essentialism, economism and humanism. In both, the dynamics of society are explained in terms of the operative dichotomous contradiction (forces and relations of production, or alienation), with the concrete relations of society being recognizable only as manifestat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Dialectics and Methodology
• PART II: Analytical and Theoretical Topics
• PART III: Capitalist Production and Reproduction
• PART IV: Capitalism, Non-Capitalism and Transitions
• PART V: Marxian Traditions
• Index