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Karl Marx
(1818-83)

Marx and the Enlightenment

• Marx and science

– The materialist conception of history
– Base and superstructure
• Marx and individual rights
– Freedom versus equality
– Workmanship and the labor theory of value

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Part I:

The Marxian challenge and the

project of classical political
economy

Marx s Intellectual Biography

• The German Marx and the English Marx

• Early utopian politics; subsequent

disillusionment

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Project of classical political economy

– The search for theories of “natural” and

“market” theories of wages, prices, rents and
profits
– Need to explain declining tendency in the rate
of profit
– Use-value, exchange-value and “Value”
– Marx’s definition of a commodity

Commodity Exchange under Capitalism:

•C»M»C

•M»C»M

• M » C » M'
(where M' >M)

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The basic problem of classical political economy:

How is profit possible? According to Marx:

The transformation of money into capital has to be developed

on the basis of the immanent laws of the exchange of
commodities, in such a way that the starting point is the
exchange of equivalents. The money-owner who is as yet only
the capitalist in larval form, must buy his commodities at their
value, sell them at their value, and yet at the end of the process
withdraw more value from circulation than he threw into it at the
beginning. Its emergence as a butterfly must, and yet must not,
take place in the sphere of circulation. These are the conditions
of the problem.

Part II:

The Labor Theory of Value;

Exploitation, and Injustice

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Freedom: The Absence of Alienation

...[t]he division of labor offers us the first example, as long as man

remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists
between the particular and the common interest, as long,
therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, not naturally, divided, man s
own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which
enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the
division of labor comes into being, each man has a particular,
exclusive, sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and which
he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a
critical critic, and he must remain so if he does not want to lose his
means of livelihood; while in a communist society, where nobody
has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become
accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the
general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one
thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in
the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner,
just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman,
shepherd or critic The German Ideology (1845)

The Labor Theory of Value

The exchange value of any commodity is determined by

the amount of socially necessary labor time [SNLT] for its
production
!
SNLT is defined as The labor-time required to produce
any use-value under the conditions of production
normal for a given society and with the average degree
of skill and intensity of the labor prevalent in the
society.

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The Labor Theory of Surplus Value

Living human labor-power is the only source of new

exchange-value
!
Labor-power is a commodity like any other. Its exchange
value is determined by the SNLT needed to produce it.
!
Labor-power has one unique property: Its consumption as a
use value leads to the creation of fresh exchange.
!
Constant and variable capital
!
C=c+v

Relative & Absolute Surplus Value & Rate of Exploitation

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Exploitation, Immiseration, and Militancy

S' >S
v'>v

Socialism: A Society Based on Genuine Workmanship

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it

has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just
as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every
respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped
with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it
emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back
from society—after the deductions have been made—exactly
what he gives to it…. He receives a certificate from society that
he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after
deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this
certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of
consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost...

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Socialism: A Society Based on Genuine Workmanship

….Hence, equal right here is still in principle—bourgeois right,

although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads,
while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange
exists only on the average and not in the individual case….
!
In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly
stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is
proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the
fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.

Socialism s Limitations

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies

more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to
serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise
it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal
right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because
everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes
unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a
natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like
every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of
an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be
different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an
equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view,
are taken from one definite side only—for instance, in the present case,
are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them,
everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is
not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with
an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social
consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be
richer than another, and so on….

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Superabundance and Communism

….These defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist

society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs
from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the
economic structure of society and its cultural development
conditioned thereby.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving

subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and
therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor,
has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but
life s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased
with the all-around development of the individual, and all the
springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then
then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its
entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according
to his ability, to each according to his needs!

—Critique of the Gotha Program (1875)

Part III:

Marxism s Failure and Legacy

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• Persistence of scarcity and politics

• Marx s Historical predictions

• Teleological conception of history

5 Part Theory of Crisis

•Money

•Declining tendency in the rate of profit

•Monopolies and the elimination of competition

•Under-consumption

•Working-class consciousness

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Labor-theory of value

•Living human labor-power as the only source of surplus

-Contribution of dead workers
-Contribution of the capitalist
-Other contributions-the feminist critique

•The hidden moral argument

-Corn theory of value and exploitation
-Role of workmanship

•Alternative formulations

Moral assumptions behind workmanship

Consider Chief Seattle:

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to
the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all.
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand of it.
Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

Chief Seattle s letter to the American Government, c. 1854

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Moral assumptions behind workmanship

Or consider Robert Nozick s question:

Why does mixing one s labor with something make one the owner
of it? Perhaps because one owns one s labor, and so one comes
to own a previously unowned thing that becomes permeated with
what one owns. Ownership seeps over into the rest. But why isn t
mixing what I own with what I don t own a way of losing what I own
rather than a way of gaining what I don t? If I own a can of tomato
juice and spill it into the sea so that its molecules (made
radioactive, so I can check this) mingle evenly throughout the sea,
do I thereby come to own the sea, or have I foolishly dissipated my
tomato juice?

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974)

Labor-theory of value

•Living human labor-power as the only source of surplus

-Contribution of dead workers
-Contribution of the capitalist
-Other contributions-the feminist critique

•The hidden moral argument

-Corn theory of value and exploitation
-Role of workmanship

•Alternative formulations
-Exploitometer might not reward fairly, but nor do markets
-Freedom argument: class monopoly and domination

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