Three Essays on Marx's Value Theory

Samir Amin

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781583674253
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

In this slim, insightful volume, noted economist Samir Amin returns to the core of Marxian economic thought: Marx’s theory of value. He begins with the same question that Marx, along with the classical economists, once pondered: how can every commodity, including labor power, sell at its value on the market and still produce a profit for owners of capital? While bourgeois economists attempted to answer this question according to the categories of capitalist society itself, Marx sought to peer through the surface phenomena of market transactions and develop his theory by examining the actual social relations they obscured. The debate over Marx’s conclusions continues to this day. Amin defends Marx’s theory of value against its critics and also tackles some of its trickier aspects. He examines the relationship between Marx’s abstract concepts—such as “socially necessary labor time”—and how they are manifested in the capitalist marketplace as prices, wages, rents, and so on. He also explains how variations in price are affected by the development of “monopoly- capitalism,” the abandonment of the gold standard, and the deepening of capitalism as a global system. Amin extends Marx’s theory and applies it to capitalism’s current trajectory in a way that is unencumbered by the weight of orthodoxy and unafraid of its own radical conclusions.

I. SOCIAL VALUE AND THE PRICE-INCOME SYSTEM

I BEGIN WITH A PERSONAL NOTE. I first read Marx when I was twenty years of age and then reread him every twenty years at moments that corresponded to major changes in the course of history. I read him in 1950, when hidden behind the East-West conflict and the first Southern awakening was taking shape, revealed in the 1955 Bandung Conference. In 1970, as director of the African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP) in Dakar, I formed the project of making Marx a focus for training and discussion that would contribute to radicalization of the way forward opened by the African and Asian peoples’ reconquests of their independences. In 1990 the problem Marx could give guidance to was to know what could be salvaged from the shipwreck of the twentieth century’s historic socialism. In 2010, with the implosion of the capitalist system that had declared itself the “end of history,” Marx’s work opened possibilities for new ways forward whose outcomes are yet to be discovered. My readings at each of those moments were directed by my concern to respond to the current challenge. And every time I discovered that Marx was coming to our aid with incomparable power, though obviously on the condition of extending the radical social critique he had begun, rather than to be content with exegesis of his texts.

Smith and Ricardo had founded the new political economy upon their discovery of the law of labor value. As thinkers of the rising bourgeoisie, nourished by the Enlightenment and its praise of reason, they found it natural to put labor at the center of the challenge whose meaning they proposed to decipher. Without, for all that, refusing recognition to the merit of the entrepreneurs whose charge it was to organize efficacious labor processes and whose profit was their legitimate compensation.

Marx, contrary to what has often been said, did not endorse this “law of value,” even in a better formulated form. His was a more ambitious project: he aimed to found a radical critique of society in general, starting from a critique of the capitalism then building. He discovered that the concept of social value lay at the heart of his project. In any case that is what results from my reading of Marx, which gives high importance to anthropology. In this reading, labor is unique to the human species and is central to the construction of society. Labor as such, and the social value that it produces, are thus transhistoric concepts. Nevertheless, in the successive stages of history the forms of organization of labor display themselves in particular modes of dress. Seeking to understand these forms, Marx discovered different instances of social organization and how each is specifically articulated with each stage of history. The specific instance for the capitalist stage is economic, which becomes dominant over all others. The critique of capitalism is thus the critique of that dominance—by definition an “anti-economism”—whose efficacy is revealed through the reign of economic/mercantile alienation. The concept of social value allows us to discover the historicity of capitalism.

Marx’s critique of classical bourgeois political economy (Smith and Ricardo) started from the requirement that, of necessity, the center of gravity of the analysis be shifted from phenomenal appearances (the observed system of prices and incomes; the “market” and the waves agitating the surface of the sea) to the depths of production governed by the law of value and the extraction of surplus-value, which is capitalism’s distinctive form for the extraction of surplus labor. Without this shift of analysis from the phenomenal to the essential, from appearances to the hidden reality, no radical critique of capitalism is possible.

From whatever angle we examine society, especially and obviously from the economic angle, human labor is central to all thought. There is no society, whether ancient, contemporary, or future, in which it is possible to abstract from this basic reality. It is this that defines the human being, both as an individual and as a social being. But the particular conditions through which labor shows itself define the particular nature of every society. Marx’s intelligence is shown not in understanding this—others had seen this before him—but in his rigorous analysis of those conditions, starting from the capitalism then being formed and then going back in time, reading what they had been in the past (it is human anatomy that allows us to understand—to read—simian anatomy). It was not by chance that the eighteenth century’s Encyclopedia was the great book of labor—the labor of farmers, of artisans, of the constructors of canals, wells, fortresses, and palaces—described with precision in all its domains. The rising bourgeoisie, despite the limitations of its project for a new class society, could not, in the elaboration of its social thought, fail to understand the central place of labor. I say “social thought” rather than “social science” in order to avoid the trap into which empiricist positivism fell by confusing social and natural sciences.

Once more let me reiterate: at all stages of human history and whatever the social power relations conditioning its workings, labor is inseparable from the scientific and technological knowledge proper to the period and from the natural (ecological) circumstances in which it takes place. To treat these inseparable dimensions as separate is to act like the theologians for whom body and soul are separate substances. Labor is always material, in the sense that its real deliberate actions produce real effects, whether or not embodied in objects, this distinction being secondary not primary as those two forms (embodied and not embodied in objects in objects) are complementary to one another, not alternative.

I therefore consider that the movement of bourgeois social thought toward the rejection of labor’s central place is the natural accompaniment of the evolution that turned the triumphant bourgeoisie into a new parasitic class. Thence-forward it was the task of this class to find a way to legitimize idleness. To do this they were compelled to believe that proprietorship in and of itself is the source of proprietary incomes. So the bourgeoisie abstracts from the labor that it exploits to put in its place an invented productivity of time or of money: money “gives birth” (which is true for its owner) without any role for labor and production, without which money can have no “offspring.” Marx analyzed that mental process as the form of alienation needed for the bourgeoisie to establish its conception of social reality, and for me that analysis has unequalled power.

The title of economist Piero Sraffa’s book—Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities—is a fine example of such alienation. Lay on the ground all the commodities considered in Sraffa’s model—the finished products, raw materials, food for workers’ comsumption—and what happens? Obviously nothing without the labor that puts those things together to transform them into each other. The reality is always commodity production with the help of commodities and labor.

Contemporary postmodernist rhetorics continue the discourse of that thought, which has to deny reality in order to replace it with the alienated image needed for its representation of the real. For example, to say that contemporary society is one of services and no longer of material production because tourism and out-of-the-home meals are increasing as a share of GDP while manufacturing industry declines makes little sense. When reality is examined beneath its immediate appearance these services require a considerable production of things: no tourism without automobiles, airplanes, roads, and railways; no outside meals without restaurants, foodstuffs, and the like.

The disappearance of labor from the scope of bourgeois social thought, sufficient to term that thought decadent (an adjective I have no hesitation in using), is accompanied by an equally strange discourse on the disappearance of the proletariat. A discourse pronounced at the very moment when the opposite process is taking place: accelerated generalizing of proletarianization. This acceleration takes the form of a generalization of wage labor in the centers and the growth of such labor at dizzying speed in the peripheries. Of course, the new generalized proletariat, confronting the generalized monopolies, is segmented. Among other things, it is divided on the one hand between its preponderant forms in the centers, which are implicitly linked to the modes of control of the worldwide system and to the international division of labor, and on the other hand, to its particular forms in the dominated formations. In the centers, an increasing proportion of workers, sellers of their labor power and thus proletarians, find a place in the economic sectors that secure worldwide domination for the globalized capital of the generalized monopolies: research and development in the fabrication of new needs, information and the deformation of information, finance, and military industries. In the peripheries, there coexist a rapidly growing manufacturing proletariat, an impoverished and oppressed peasantry, and a dizzying growth of the mass of workers in what is called the “informal sector.”

What we need is not empty and false chatter about the disappearance of the proletariat but concrete analyses of the generalized proletariat’s segmentation. For it is only such analyses that allow movement toward an answer to the sole real question: Can this generalized proletariat develop a class consciousness in the Lukácsian sense of being prepared for the challenge of becoming the universal class, an actor in the project of a classless society, bearer of a communism understood as a higher stage of civilization? I do say “become,” since the observation of reality suggests no such thing. The consciousnesses (not consciousness) of belonging to defined social groups (and not to the generalized proletarian class) hold sway. Is it possible to go beyond this infantile stage of social consciousness? Or is that only a utopian (in the banal sense of impossible) wish because it would be foreign to, if not in conflict with, human nature? Bourgeois social thought tries to make us think so, by substituting for Marx’s anthropology the anthropology of geneticism or psychologism by way of arguments that seem very weak to me. Marxism, understood not as exegesis of Marx but as the effort to analyze reality critically in order to transform it, seems to me to be by far the most effective toolkit for advancing in response to the challenge, both by thought (inventive and creative in imagination, accurate in concrete analysis) and by action (identification of strategic objectives for the struggle at each stage of its development). Marxism is not outlived; on the contrary, it is more necessary than ever. That does not make me see in Marxism a religion revealed for all time to come. No, by applying Marxism to Marxism we will understand that it will necessarily be surpassed if and when humanity reaches communism, the higher, classless-society stage of civilization. Meanwhile Marxism remains the most effective social thought, therefore the most scientific, for understanding class society and acting to dismantle it.

The divergences thus separating what is produced by the workings of “the market” (a weak term that hides the capitalist relationships framing it) from what the higher logic of social value puts to work do not show Marx’s “mistake.” On the contrary, they show the whole radical critical bearing of his project, and the success of his demonstration of capitalism’s historical nature.

In this study I will put forward an overall picture of the divergences separating the capitalist system’s observed system of prices and incomes from one corresponding to such values as those defined by Marx.

The operative forces determining those gaps did not remain unchanged and self-identical throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and because of this it is important to specify the particular characteristics of each successive phase the capitalist system went through as it unfolded into its finished form, from the Industrial Revolution, starting from the close of the eighteenth century, to our own time, and to identify the nature of the forces to be considered as their activity manifested.

In other respects, these forces show their particular individual aspects according to whether we are dealing with a particular historical social formation (Victorian England, the German Empire from 1870 to 1914, the United States before or after the Civil War, British India, the Ottoman Empire or the Egypt of the nineteenth century, colonial Africa, the countries of today’s European Union, or today’s emerging countries) or whether we are dealing with the globalized capitalist system at a particular moment of its history (1840, or 1880, or 1930, or 2010). So what counts is to specify the field of play—local or global—in which those different forces operated.

The way in which social value, as formulated by Marx, operates expresses the rationality of a choice of production of definite use-values based on their measure of social utility, which is to say, their usefulness for human society. This rationality transcends such rationality as rules the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalist rationality is that which governs the accumulation of capital, based as it is on the extraction of surplus value...