Marx's Critique of Political Economy Volume One

Intellectual Sources and Evolution

Allen Oakley

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136509537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Volume One analyses the intellectual sources and evolution of Marx's critique of political economy leading up the writing of the main Capital manuscripts (1844-1860).The volume:
* Provides a clear illustration of the contents of the texts in a way that enables readers to understand the intellectual influences on Marx
* Clarifies Marx's own view of what he was trying to achieve through his critique of political economy
* The themes of value, income distribution and the law of motion of capitalism are traced to their origins.

Part I
Philosophical critique, capitalism and political economy

CHAPTER 1
Marx discovers political economy

INTRODUCTION

Marx moved from Kreuznach to Paris in October 1843 with one of his intentions being to collaborate with Arnold Ruge in editing the Deutsch-franzӧsische Jahrbücher. In Kreuznach Marx had been working on his critical reading of Hegel’s book The Philosophy of Right (1821) and the critique of political philosophy continued to preoccupy him in Paris. From his study manuscripts (CHPR,3ff. and CW,3,3ff.), he prepared two articles for the Jahrbücher on the theory and practice of human emancipation from oppressions. These were entitled ‘On the Jewish question’ (CW,3,146ff.) and ‘Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right: introduction’ (CHPR,129ff. and CW,3,175ff.) and they appeared in the one and only edition of the journal in February 1844.

In the present context, though, it is Engels’s contribution to the Jahrbücher that claims our attention. The ‘Outlines of a critique of political economy’ (CW,3,418ff.) gave Marx his first explicit insights into the nature of capitalism and stimulated his interest in political economy as the source of a critical comprehension of the contemporary human situation. This stimulus was catalytic in the sense that Marx’s reading of Engels’s piece did not define or limit the scope of his own studies. He did make some reading notes on the article (CW,3,375f.), but these were brief and sketchy and Marx did not express any recognition of the details of Engels’s critical arguments and insights. However, Marx’s appreciation of the article was soon to be heightened by his own reading of theworks of political economy. This is evident from the fact that soon after beginning his independent studies, Marx was able to write a similar sustained and passionate critical essay on the human ramifications of capitalism.

During early 1844, Marx made rapid progress in his study of political economy. Most of his reading was of French language translations of English works, but some original French and German sources were included. He recorded his studies in the series of nine Paris notebooks, most of which have been preserved although not all the notes have been published (ME GA,I/3,41 Off. and 447ff.).

The study records from this period comprise a series of excerpts from the works with some comments by Marx setting out his reactions to the argument he was reading. Only one of the commentaries was substantial enough to contain any sustained argument formulated by Marx himself. He wrote this substantial comment in the context of taking excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy (1821) and the resulting critical essay carries the editorial title ‘Comments on James Mill’ (MEGA, 1/3,53Off. and CW,3,211ff.). Its content, though, ranged across many topics not considered in the parts of the Elements that he was reading. The rest of the comments in the notebooks were fragmentary and rough-drafted in a mixture of French and German, but certain key ideas can be discerned in them. Of the sixteen other authors that Marx read and noted, his most thorough study was of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), Jean-Baptiste Say’s Traité d’ economie politique (third edition, 1817), and David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (second edition, 1819). He also took substantial excerpts from the lesser-known works of Friedrich List, Eugene Buret and Pierre le Pesant de Boisguillebert, although the notes on the former two have not been reprinted.

Beyond this, Marx abandoned the notebook format and began work on what we know as the Paris Manuscripts (CW,3,229ff.). This work comprised a reorganised and deeper investigation and extension of some of the ideas set out in the notebooks, especially those in the ‘Comments on James Mill’. Most of the writers whose works Marx studied and excerpted in the notebooks were not referred to in the Paris Manuscripts where he almost exclusively used Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations as the source of the political economy of capitalism. In addition to this, he found support for his critical view of capitalism in the lesser-known works of Wilhelm Schulz-Bodmer and Constantin Pecqueur together with Eugene Buret’s book that he had previously studied and noted.

In the Paris Manuscripts themselves, there are two stages in the early evolution of Marx’s social and economic critique. He began with an exposition of the image of capitalism that he found in political economy — especially in the Wealth of Nations. He structured this exposition around the basic class categories of income distribution, viz. wages of labour, profit of capital and rent of land, with an emphasis upon the role and situation of labour and private property in the system. This statement of the ‘facts’ of capitalism, for Marx did accept the image presented by Adam Smith as a faithful abstract replica of the reality of capitalism as it was comprehended at the time, was followed by Marx’s own critical expose of the nature of the system. He adopted a humanistic viewpoint for his critique, and through a detailed consideration of the adverse situation of labour under capitalism, which he linked to the dominance of private property, he concluded that the transcendence (Aufhebung) of private property is a necessary step towards man’s emancipation from oppression and man’s full human realisation through free labour.

Some of the key ideas in these 1844 manuscripts were reiterated by Marx in two immediately subsequent pieces of writing. In a part of the philosophical polemic The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (Chapter 4, Part 4), he considered the critical ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon on private property in the book Qu’est-ce que la propriety (second edition, 1841) (CW,4,23ff.). At this stage, he praised Proudhon’s critique as far as it went, but noted its limitations. Then, in a draft of a critical review of Friedrich List’s book Das nationale System der politischen Oekonomie, Erster Band (1841), Marx had another opportunity to restate his critical, humanistic interpretation of capitalism while condemning List’s distortions of the system to suit his own bourgeois ends (CW,4,265ff.). Each of these pieces must have helped Marx to clarify his ideas on the critique of political economy and capitalism as they were further developed during 1845—6 through another extensive reading of the available literature. During this period, Marx filled twelve notebooks with excerpts from and comments on the works of fifty-four writers (MEGA,1/6,597ff. outlines these studies).

Marx’s first studies of political economy and the nature of capitalism are considered in this chapter and the next. The present chapter deals with Engels’s article and Marx’s ‘Comments on James Mill’. Then, in Chapter 2, the Paris Manuscripts and the subsequent pieces referred to are discussed.

ENGELS’S ‘OUTLINES OF A CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY’

Marx’s notes on Engels’s ‘Outlines of a critique of political economy’ open with the idea that trade is a consequence of private property, an idea taken directly from the article (CW,3,422) -indeed, all of the notes comprised summary assertions of Engels’s arguments. In considering the capitalist economy at the level of exchange and circulation, Engels did not question the nature of the production process itself. The social division of labour was thus not recognised as the origin of the exchange-circulation phenomenon, although he was clearly aware that private property had a determining role to play in the process. He noted that the development of formalised trade based on private property was reflected in the development of political economy and the tone of his critique was set in the following opening passage:

Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.

This political economy or science of enrichment born of the merchants’ mutual envy and greed, bears on its brow the mark of the most detestable selfishness. (CW,3,418, emphasis added)

At first, in the earliest mercantilist period of organised trading, the selfish and competitive nature of the process was quite obvious:

The mercantile system still had a certain artless Catholic candour and did not in the least conceal the immoral nature of trade. We have seen how it openly paraded its mean avarice. . . . Public opinion had not yet become humanised. Why, therefore, conceal things which resulted from the inhuman, hostile nature of trade itself? (CW,3,422)

The ‘humanisation’ of the eighteenth century and reactions against mercantilism Engels saw as having led to the endeavour to present trade as a process of equity and harmony. This, he argued, began the obscurantism of political economy with respect to the essentially conflict-ridden and sub-human nature of life under capitalism. Adam Smith may have been ‘the economic Luther’ (CW,3,422) in his rejection of the constraints of mercantilism in favour of the spirit of free trade, but his human interpretation of such trade was false and misleading (CW,3,422–3). Engels referred to the ‘sham humanity of the modern economists [that] hides a barbarism of which their predecessors knew nothing’ (CW,3,421). The true basis for exchange at all levels would always be competition and self-interest, although as Engels pointed out, the so-called ‘free’ trade of modern capitalism is based on a ‘hidden’ monopoly that is more dominant and restrictive than the mercantilist formalities, viz. the rule of private property (CW,3,421). And yet, ‘It did not occur to economics to question the validity of private property’ (CW,3,419), an institution which is responsible for the worst facets of capitalism in Engels’s view:

The premises [of ‘freedom’ and private property] begot and reared the factory system and modern slavery, which yields nothing in humanity and cruelty to ancient slavery. Modern economics — the system of free trade based on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations — reveals itself to be that same hypocrisy, inconsistency and immorality which now confront free humanity in every sphere.(CW,3,420)

Thus Engels wanted to expose private property’s role as a socio-legal instrument of oppression, an objective which Marx, too, was to set himself in his Paris writings.

The category value also caught Marx’s attention in Engels’s article. It was presented as being an immediate consequence of the compulsion to trade under the rule of private property, but its origin in the production system based on the social division of labour was not made clear. In Marx’s summary of his reading of Engels’s treatment of value, he did note the distinction drawn by Engels between two ‘determining features’ of ‘abstract real value’ evident in political economy, viz. utility and cost of production (CW,3,375). It is evident that Marx sensed the more essential status and logical priority of production costs in value determination, although adequate utility, implying demand, remained a necessary condition for the production decision to be rendered viable in the exchange process through the realisation of real value. He went on to note also that Engels had distinguished the existence of an exchange value, or price, that emerged as a consequence of the distortion of the cost of production-based real value by the exercise of monopoly power in the market (CW,3,375).

Engels’s own arguments concerning capitalist value determination were more elaborate and critical than revealed in Marx’s notes. For Engels, the immediate focus of his critique was the self-interest pursued by traders in the exchange process. He interpreted the cost of production concept of real value as an attempt by political economists to render the value form objective and free from association with the subjective evils of ‘huckstering’. Such an abstract value form had no effective meaning in a world where the ultimate determinant of realisable value in the exchange process is utility and the maximisation of self-interest (CW,3,425—6). It was Engels’s conclusion that:

The difference between real value and exchange-value is based on a fact — namely, that the value of a thing differs from the so-called equivalent given for it in trade; i.e., that this equivalent is not an equivalent. This so-called equivalent is the price of the thing, and if the economist were honest, he would employ this term for ‘value’ in exchange’. But he has still to keep up some sort of pretence that price is somehow bound up with value, lest the immorality of trade become too obvious. (CW,3,427)

Under the demands of competition, participants in the world of exchange are forced to become speculators, each out to take selfish advantage of market situations at the expense of others. Against this self-seeking behaviour as the basis for economic society, Engels set the humanistic ideal of a co-ordinated relation of production to consumption needs as developed in the works of the English socialists and of Fourier (CW,3,435).

In the treatment of value considered above, there is no mention of the role of labour. There was no attempt by Engels to formalise value in embodied-labour terms. He did make the point that labour is the ‘main factor in production, the “source of wealth” ’ (CW,3,431)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Philosophical critique, capitalism and political economy
• Part II Critical analyses in the Grundrisse
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index