Prof: Okay,
this morning we're going to finish talking about Marx,
and we're going to focus on the failures of Marxism and the
legacies of Marxism, and the failures are connected
to the legacies in important ways that we'll unfold as we
proceed with today's discussion. I began this already on Monday
by talking about the difficulties with Marx's
assumptions about scarcity and superabundance.
And we saw that just as Mill
couldn't banish politics from politics through the mechanism
of a neutral definition of harm, Marx is unable to banish
politics from politics by somehow wishing distributive
conflict could, in principle, go away.
We saw that that notion of
superabundance that informs his communist utopia is incoherent
in principle, and that means that
distributive conflict is endemic to human society no matter how
much wealth there is. And some principles for the
distribution of income and wealth are going to have to be
argued about and defended regardless of what is produced
in society, or what could be produced in
society. The second failure of Marxism
is well known, but we should,
nonetheless, mention it,
which is that his historical predictions turned out to be
hopelessly wide of the mark. Not only was he wrong in 1830
and 1848 when he thought that communist revolutions were about
to sweep through Europe. They were both (a) not
communist and (b) quickly reversed, in any event,
within a couple of years. His larger historical
predictions were also wrong. He thought communism would
come, socialist revolutions, for reasons that you now know
because we've worked through the macro theory.
He thought that socialist
revolutions would occur in advanced capitalist systems that
had become uncompetitive because of the replacement of
competitive capitalism with monopoly capitalism,
and in fact where we saw revolutions bearing the
communist label was in peasant societies: in Russia,
and in China, or in Eastern Europe in
countries where it was actually more or less imposed from the
outside by the Soviet Union after World War II.
We didn't really see any
society go through the sort of path Marx was thinking of in his
larger teleological theory of history,
namely from feudalism, to capitalism,
to socialism, to communism. It simply didn't happen.
And as the reversals of the
revolutions of 1830 and 1848 remind us on a smaller scale,
Marx's bigger idea that there's some purpose or direction to
history seems questionable by the first decades of the
twenty-first century. History doesn't go in a single
direction, and this is a theme to which we
will return, but you can see movements
toward more egalitarian systems and then movements away from
egalitarian systems. You can see democracy created
and then you can see it collapse into authoritarianism,
so that there isn't a single teleological or directional
focus of history of the sort that Marx was looking for.
So on the big predictions,
Marxism doesn't look very good from the vantage point of the
twenty-first century. But some of his smaller
predictions were also wrong in ways that in some respect is
more interesting for our purposes,
and so I'm going to go back through some of his arguments
and focus on things that were wrong with those arguments that
we can, nonetheless,
draw some interesting conclusions about as we go on
our way in examining the moral foundations of politics.
And I'm going to start with his
macro theory and talk about some difficulties with that,
and then I'm going to go backwards into the micro theory.
So we're doing the reverse,
if you like, of what we did on the way in.
We started with the micro
theory and we saw how that generated the macro theory.
Now we're going backwards
through the macro theory, and then we will go back into
the labor theory of value and the assumptions about
workmanship that underlie it that he took over from Locke and
secularized and modernized, as you know.
So if you'll recall from
Monday's lecture, Marx's macro theory was an
invisible hand theory like Smith's,
except it was a malevolent invisible hand whereas Smith's
was a benign invisible hand. And one element of it was the
argument about the potential for liquidity crises,
that there would be the possibility that people would
horde money, that money would stop flowing
through the system, and the system would thereby
become sclerotic. It is the case that capitalist
systems have the potential for liquidity crises,
but one of the things Marx greatly underestimated was the
capacity of capitalist states in capitalist societies to address
things like liquidity crises and other things as well,
we'll see. It's almost as if he didn't
really take it seriously when he and Engels said,
in The Communist Manifesto,
that the state in capitalist society is the executive
committee of the bourgeoisie. He underestimated what the
state could actually do to preserve capitalism.
A good example,
in the early years of this system was a huge liquidity
crisis in Mexico where the whole Mexican economy was on the verge
of complete collapse, but the western governments,
led by the United States, put together a fifty billion
dollar package to pump liquidity into the Mexican economy until
the crisis was over, and they succeeded.
And so we didn't see the kind
of collapse in the Mexican economy that that liquidity
crisis had the potential to create.
So the argument about the
potential for liquidity crises is valid,
but we have no particular reason to think they can't be
managed once the sources of liquidity crises are understood,
and governments have the levers available to them that were made
available to the Mexican government during the Clinton
Administration in the U.S. Secondly, Marx has this
argument about the declining tendency in the rate of profit.
As I said to you,
every classical political economist believed that there
was a declining tendency in the rate of profit in market
systems, and they thought one of their
jobs was to account for it. They thought it was definitely
the case that there is this phenomenon, and you had to
explain why it occurs. In fact, if we look over the
long course of capitalism since the nineteenth century,
it's far from clear that there is, as an empirical matter,
a long-term declining tendency in the rate of profit.
In Marx's case,
as you know, his story about the declining
tendency and the rate of profit had to do with the increasing
capital intensity of production. That as capitalists compete by
relying more and more on what he calls constant capital,
there's less and less fresh value created,
and so what capitalist entrepreneurs do at the margin
to be more profitable in the medium run makes them less
profitable. So the capitalist who puts the
spinning jenny in increases his profits in the short run,
but when there are spinning jennies in every cotton factory
in the economy the rate of profit is lower than before the
first spinning jenny had been put in.
And Marx identified that as the
basic dynamic driving the declining tendency in the rate
of profit. Two problems with it;
one is that it assumes there's this sort of finite number of
industries. Because you could grant his
argument and say, "Yeah, it's true that the
rate of profit in the cotton industry will fall as it becomes
more and more capital intensive,"
but there are all kinds of new industries that are going to
come into being all the time. So capital will flow eventually
into other industries and they'll start out with big
profit margins, and then the profit margins
will get competed away, but then capital will so
somewhere else. So unless you have this idea
that there's a sort of fixed number of lines or production
such that once profits start to fall in all of them they're
going to fall economy-wide, there's no particular reason,
even working from Marx's own premises,
to think that he's come up with any lasting account of why the
rate of profit would fall in capitalist systems.
Moreover, even putting that
problem to one side, if you think about it,
even if it is the case that making production more
capital-intensive reduces profit margins in the long run,
nonetheless, if productivity goes up at a
more rapid rate than capital displaces labor in the
production process then you wouldn't necessarily see the
rate of profit fall. So if the rate of increase in
productivity exceeds the rate at which capital is displacing
labor, or to put it in Marx's jargon,
constant capital is displacing variable capital,
then there's actually no reason to expect the rate of profit to
fall. So it all depends on how much
more productive capital makes labor, and there's no
theoretical answer to that question.
It's an empirical question.
So even though Marx thought
there was a declining tendency in the rate of profit it's
debatable whether in fact there is,
and it's certainly not the case that his theory explained why it
should occur. His third argument,
competition eliminates competitors,
and because production is becoming more and more capital
intensive, entry costs are going up and
you're not going to see new people coming in to the market.
I told the story about NASA and
the O-rings on the Challenger blowing up.
There was nobody to come into
the market and take over then, so you have a monopoly,
a not-very-efficient monopoly producer who lacks the incentive
to innovate, and we have the sorts of
problems we saw that developed with Morton Thiokol in that
instance. So that's also true only under
a fairly restrictive set of assumptions which might not turn
out to be true. After all, there are some
industries in which there are economies of smallness.
Think about Apple Computers
invented in somebody's garage in California completely upending
IBM and the big established capital-intensive computer
firms, and totally transforming that
market. So it's not necessarily true.
Marx had in his mind
nineteenth-century industrial production,
steel works, cotton factories,
this sort of thing, but it's a very
historically-bounded perception of what it is that goes on in
economic systems. And there might be all sorts of
sectors in the economy that tend to resist the development of
monopolies, and in which there are various
economies of smallness that actually lend themselves to the
constant entry of new players that keep revitalizing the
system. And I think the information
technology revolution that has accompanied your generation
would be exhibit A in defending that proposition.
Under-consumption,
or sometimes it's said over-production,
obviously it means the same thing.
The way we put it into Marx's
sort of conceptual scheme was the argument that the workers
collectively couldn't buy everything they produced.
Smith believed that.
Ricardo believed that.
Marx believed that,
and early theories of imperialism were partly dreamed
up in order to explain that; that you get imperialism partly
as a result of the search for new markets to address the
endemic weak demand in capitalist systems.
Marx is not the only person who
thought there was endemic weak demand in capitalist systems.
Indeed, Keynes,
the great English economist of the first half of the twentieth
century, and the theorist whose ideas
informed the policies to end the Depression also thought there
was endemic weak demand in capitalist systems because of a
diminishing marginal propensity to consume.
Keynes' idea was if you have no
money and I give you a dollar you'll spend it,
but if you have a million dollars and I give you a dollar
you'll save it. And so when you get into
recessions the problem is weak demand,
and so you get the Keynesian answer to recessions or
depressions is to spend money at the bottom,
for governments to do that largely through borrowing.
And this is,
of course, what first, the George W. Bush
Administration in its final year, and then the Obama
Administration in its first year, have been doing.
A classic Keynesian response to
what's now being called The Great Recession to prevent it
from becoming a great depression.
Namely, the state borrows
money, tries to spend it in the part of the economy that will
stimulate demand and then will get the economy going back up.
So, again, this is an example
of Marx's chronic underestimation of the capacity
of the state to do things that will stave off crises,
or manage crises, or prevent them from becoming
catastrophically bad. And so I think we've seen a
vivid illustration of that in the last couple of years.
Finally, working class
consciousness; as all of these other things
were going on and making the system creak at the joints and
become less and less functional, Marx thought that the workers
would start to become a class-for-itself.
The workers would start to see
that they were getting ripped off and get angry about it,
become mobilized and militant, and reach the point where they
believe that they had nothing to lose but their chains.
Now there are two problems with
that. One we already mentioned last
Wednesday. This is that Marx was
half-right in thinking that people judge their utility by
what others get. They don't just ask the Reagan
question, "Am I better off than I
was four years ago," they do pay attention to what
others get, but they generally,
and this is the part where he was wrong and a hundred years of
industrial sociology has now pretty much established this,
they tend to compare themselves to similarly-situated people.
So workers in the auto industry
compare themselves to steel workers or coal workers,
not to the executives who run the firms in which they actually
work, and that's true up and down the
occupational scale. I think I mentioned a professor
would be much more upset to learn that their salary is five
thousand dollars less than the professor in the next office
than they will be to learn that their salary is five hundred
thousand dollars less than the attorney who lives down the
street. People compare themselves to
others, but to similarly-situated others,
not to people very far from them in the socioeconomic order.
And so that kind of militancy
doesn't eventuate. More importantly,
Marx actually conflates the relative immiseration of the
proletariat with the absolute immiseration of the proletariat.
So if we went back through the
slides and we went back to the discussion of the theory of
exploitation, remember when we did that
little exercise and we saw that you would all actually agree to
be more exploited on his definition than less exploited
when you had the choice of either going to a ten-hours
working day with new technology or an eleven-hours working day
without it. But that measure was a relative
measure. It was what you get as a
proportion of the total surplus as compared with what the
capitalist gets. It wasn't an absolute measure,
and we saw that it's perfectly possible for the rate of
exploitation, as he defines it,
to go up while the level of wages remains constant or even
increases. So wages might be going up as
well as exploitation at the same time.
Well, but if that's true you're
never going to reach absolute immiseration.
You're never going to actually
reach the point where workers are literally falling into
poverty. And if it's the absolute
immiseration that has to trigger the militant action,
the working class consciousness,
it's not going to happen. And indeed, here again Marx
greatly underestimated what governments can do to make sure
that the workers don't reach the point where they have nothing to
lose but their chains. In the 1950s,
an English Marxian political economist called Ralph Miliband,
whose son now is a British cabinet member,
by the way, David Miliband, and is the likely next leader
of the Labor Party after they lose the elections in May to
David Cameron. David Miliband's father,
Ralph, wrote a book called The State in Capitalist
Society in the 1950s-- I think it was 1954 but don't
hold me to it-- in which he said,
"The welfare state is capitalism's best friend."
The right always attacks the
welfare state, but it's capitalism's best
friend because it buys off working class discontent,
and it ensures that workers have a stake in the existing
order, and that they will never reach
this preverbal situation where they have nothing to lose but
their chains. So when you work your way
through this macro theory it's riddled with holes and doesn't
add up to the collapse of capitalism and not,
therefore, particularly surprising that capitalism
didn't collapse in the ways that Marx predicted.
But now let's dig in a little
bit more to the micro theory, and the micro foundations of
Marx's thinking, because I think this is where
we will find some interesting lessons for our own project in
this course going forward. At the heart of the micro
theory is the labor theory of value, and we're going to say
something about three aspects of it.
We're going to talk about
Marx's assumptions about living human labor,
the moral argument behind the labor theory of value,
which many people you will find in this room find appealing
despite the problems with the labor theory of value,
and then some alternative formulations of what it is that
he was trying to do.
If you think back to when we
were doing the exposition of the labor theory of value I said
that Marx defends it, living human labor-power as a
source of value, by saying it's the only thing
that creates fresh surplus value, okay?
So one difficulty is,
and John Roemer points this out in that piece that I had you
read, it ignores the contribution of dead workers.
That living workers,
for instance, when we talked about the
introduction of machinery, the spinning jenny or whatever,
what about the workers who made the spinning jenny?
Aren't they part of this
calculation? Aren't they being exploited
either by the capitalist or by the living workers who use the
spinning jenny? So if you took it seriously
you'd have to say those exploitation indexes are way too
simple because they don't capture the contribution of dead
workers. But then a second thing it
doesn't capture, the labor theory value assumes
the capitalist contributes what, nothing?
But why isn't it the case that
the labor that the capitalist performs also goes into the
creation of the surplus? And again, I think you've got
to imagine, get yourself back into this
nineteenth-century mindset where intellectual work doesn't seem
particularly important. You're just running these big
factories. But, of course,
when we think about what the role of entrepreneurial ideas is
in the creation of productive systems,
it's absurd to say that the work of the capitalist doesn't
contribute anything to the value of what's produced.
But then you get into the
problem, well, how do you discover what
is the result of the work of the worker and what is the result of
the work of capitalist, and there's no mechanism for
dealing with that.
And then what about the fact
that the worker in Marx's typical model has a spouse at
home feeding him, making his sandwiches as he
goes to the factory and so on and so forth.
What about the spouse at home?
Why is it just the worker who's
being exploited? And various theorists have said
if you take Marxism seriously on its own premises,
it seems that, again, just as with the dead
worker, the stay-at-home spouse is
either being exploited indirectly by the capitalist or
is being exploited by the worker who goes to work for whom she is
doing unpaid labor. And so we've had a series of
feminist critiques of the labor theory of value.
And this gets recognized in
daily life. There is a very interesting
1986 divorce case in the State of New York in which a couple
had gotten married, he had gone to medical school,
she had stayed at home and darned his socks and made
sandwiches for him, and helped him through medical
school. Anyway, many years later they
get divorced. And apart from the usual issues
in the divorce, the court said that the
stay-at-home wife had a property interest in her husband's
medical practice that was a byproduct of the work that she
had put into it by darning his socks and making his sandwiches,
and he went to class and built up his practice.
And so they awarded her a forty
percent property interest in the practice and required him to
maintain life insurance in her name for the rest of his life so
that her property interest could be protected.
So what you can see once you
start to do this, you know, I've just given three
areas where this runs into trouble,
once you take seriously the idea that labor-power,
the capacity to work, is the source of value,
why zero-in in this monomaniacal way on what one
worker does in the production process?
What about all of the others
who contribute to the productivity of the process
either directly as with the capitalist or indirectly?
And of course once you make
this point about the stay-at-home spouse,
what about the Sunday school teacher that drummed the work
ethic into the worker? Didn't that Sunday school
teacher contribute something to the productivity of the worker
and so on? So you're going to get this
huge web of indecipherable entangled entitlements if you're
trying to trace out who contributed what work to the
creation of something of value. More fundamentally let's dig
into the assumption that making creates entitlements.
After all, for Marx this is
what seems to give the theory its ideological edge.
As I said, it's a secular
version of Locke's workmanship. It's the claim that workers
produce something for which they're not compensated.
They produce something and the
capitalist takes it, right?
That's the claim.
And when we were doing the
exposition of that I said that what differentiates labor-power
from all other commodities is that it's necessary for the
production of every commodity. It's the common denominator of
all commodities. Remember I gave you the example;
I said if I have a certain amount of money and I spend it
on a meal, I consume the meal and it's
gone, whereas if I spend it paying somebody to paint my
house, at the end of having consumed
their labor-power I have a more valuable house.
If I go to sell the house I'm
going to get more from it than I would have gotten but for not
having had it painted. And so that's the idea that the
consumption of living human labor-power leads to the
creation of fresh exchange value,
whereas mere consumption of a meal doesn't.
Terrible argument.
What's wrong with it?
Nobody can see what's wrong
with it? Come on.
It's a terrible argument,
hopelessly bad argument, anybody?
Yes, ma'am?
Student: Could the meal's value
be that it keeps you alive? Professor Ian Shapiro:
Say a little more. You're dead right.
Student: So the meal,
even though you can only use it once, it is necessary for the
sustained value of yourself. Professor Ian Shapiro:
Okay, and just take that thought a little further.
Where does it go?
You're dead right.
Student: So the value is
constant, or something? Professor Ian Shapiro:
Well, not exactly, but the point is it's just
wrong to say when I consume that food it goes,
because after all I have more calories of energy which I could
then use to paint my own house with, let's say.
Of course I might sit on the
couch and watch the Super Bowl and just get fat,
but that's my own decision, right?
I can use that energy to paint
the house. So a very interesting Cambridge
economist called Piero Sraffa wrote a book called The
Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities.
Even though it's about an
80-page book, it took him thirty years to
write. That's a whole different story
which I don't have time to go into.
But this is what he said that's
of interest to us. He said, "Imagine an
economy that has three commodities, corn,
books, food, I'm sorry, corn,
books, labor. Corn is food;
corn, books and labor. Yes, it's true that it takes
labor to produce corn and to produce books.
Yes it's true that it does not
take books to produce corn or labor, but it's not true that it
doesn't require corn to produce labor and books.
So corn, or food,
or anything that's necessary for the production of
labor-power is going to have the same property that labor-power
has. It's going to be present
necessarily, directly or indirectly, in all lines of
production. And so Sraffa said,
based on that idea, you can do a corn theory of
value for this economy that will have exactly the same
mathematical properties as the labor theory of value,
and then you can have your theory of the exploitation of
corn by capital, the rate of exploitation of
corn by capital that will be exactly analogous to the rate of
the exploitation of labor by capital.
There's no difference,
mathematically identical. Why is that interesting to us?
It's interesting to us because
it shows you that whatever Marx says about exploitation merely
being a technical notion, it's not.
It's a moral idea.
Colloquially we talk about the
exploitation of natural resources, but we don't say that
the corn owns what was produced with the corn.
We don't say the corn was
exploited in the way the worker was exploited,
we just don't. Think about an intermediate
case; the horse down a mineshaft in a
coalmine hauling trucks of coal from the face to the elevator
that's going to take it out. We could do the whole Marxian
story. We could say the horse covers
the cost of its feed in the first hour of the day,
and it works ten-hour days, so the other nine hours it's
producing surplus that accrues to somebody other than the
horse. Is the horse exploited?
Yes?
No?
Nobody thinks the horse isn't
exploited. So a much trickier case,
and the reason it's tricky is some people are much more open
to the idea of animal rights than others, right?
So Locke said animals were the
waste of God put there for our use, but we're not that
hard-hearted, some of us.
So if you think of the horse as
in some sense a kind of moral agent then it's not a happy
thing that it's being exploited in this sense.
But whether or not we want to
say the exploitation is unjust-- not just cruel if the horse is
suffering, but unjust--depends upon some
prior idea that creatures are entitled to the product of their
labor. That's the workmanship idea.
And that is why even if you
reject the labor theory of value, you're still left with
this nagging idea that there's something to workmanship.
Most people are not going to
want to totally get rid of workmanship.
If I write a book I think,
"I put all that blood, sweat, and tears into that
book, it's mine. It's mine, my work."
Somebody takes it,
"You've stolen something that I made."
It's a very powerful thing in
people.
But not everybody accepts it,
right? Not everybody accepts this
idea, this very individualist-centric conception
that we own what we make. We have this kind of
exclusive--to go back to the language of Locke in The
First Treatise, that God made us with the
capacity to be miniature gods, to have the same ownership
rights over what we make as he has over his creation.
Look at Chief Seattle.
He has a very different view.
"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 in it.
Whatever he does to the web,
he does to himself." Very different view of the
world and our place in it; not man-centric.
One of the reasons we start
this course with Locke is this is where the individualism comes
from. It's this workmanship ideal.
Doesn't look individualist at
all in Locke's formulation because at the end of the day,
it's a theological argument; it's an argument about God
having maker's rights over his whole creation.
But it's the move of saying we
are miniature gods that can behave in a god-like fashion,
and then secularizing it, which leads to the
individualism. Or consider something that
Robert Nozick, a writer we're going to read
later in the class, pretty soon,
actually, starting next week-- he makes fun of the labor
theory of value. He says, Why does mixing one's
labor with something make one the owner of it?
Perhaps because one owns one's
labor (self-ownership, if you like),
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?
Why is it that we want to say
when I put effort and energy into something that it's mine?
Very, very perplexing and
tricky thing and we will come back to it in considerably more
detail later in the course when we read John Rawls,
because interestingly it's not until we get to John Rawls that
we find anyone who's really willing to radically question
workmanship and the self-ownership postulate that
goes with it. Okay, so Marxism seems
problematic, so what's left? And I think there are really
two main things left. One is a negative argument that
comes out of Marxism, rather than any of its positive
claims, and that is the fact that his
theory of exploitation fails doesn't mean that he lacks a
good critique of markets as distributors of either good or
harms in society.
We could go back to our story
about Trump and the bag lady, for example.
The Pareto superior result in
that example, if you remember,
was for the bag lady to die because there was no Pareto
superior exchange that could occur between Trump and the bag
lady. Markets reflect the
inequalities that come into them, but they don't give any
account of the justice of those inequalities.
So there's this problem,
if you like, of the tyranny of the status
quo, and we saw that in the economic realm with the analysis
of that problem, and in the political realm when
we talked about the corn dealer problem with Mill,
right? That the market systems are
biased towards the status quo, but market principles are
purely procedural principles. They tell you nothing about how
you got the status quo, and so there's a kind of
garbage-in/garbage-out problem with market systems.
Nozick, we will see,
makes this point explicit when he says any remotely plausible
theory of justice is going to have to have three parts,
a theory of justice in acquisition (i.e.
a theory of staring points),
a theory of justice in transfer (i.e.
a theory of exchanges),
and a theory of the rectification of past injustice
(i.e. a theory for addressing
accumulated injustices of the past).
And Nozick will,
for reasons which we will go into, thinks he has accounts of
all of those things. But it's the negative argument
of Marxism, that markets are not justified by reference to the
failure of Marx's own alternative theory,
is good. If you're going to have a
justification for the distribution that occurs through
markets it's going to have to be something else.
It's going to have to be
provided. Maybe it can be provided,
but so far in the utilitarian and neoclassical traditions it
hasn't been provided. So there's a kind of unfinished
agenda there that's put on the table by the Marxian critique of
markets even though Marx's answer to that problem,
is unconvincing. And then I think secondly what
Marxism leaves us to address is not an argument about the
sources of value. The labor theory of value is
just a hopeless analytical mess, and can't be resuscitated.
There's no way to fix the labor
theory of value. But there is an argument about
freedom. Remember where we started;
I said unlike the conventional wisdom that Marx is an
egalitarian, no. He's a theorist of freedom.
His utopian ideal is a world in
which the free development of each is the condition for the
free development of all, where our labor in not
alienated. We saw that the utopian version
of that is unsustainable. Nonetheless,
Marx's definition of class, when you think about it,
is really an argument about freedom.
When he says you're working
class if you have to sell your labor power to somebody else in
order to live, it's the compulsion,
right? It's the compulsion.
It's not whether you choose to.
I like lecturing here having a
captive audience of people who have to listen to me ramble on
endlessly. It makes me feel good,
but that's not what makes me working class,
right? It's that I have to work for
somebody else in order to survive.
It's that element of compulsion.
That's your lack of freedom.
So as Roemer puts it in the
essay that I put on the syllabus, it's that there's a
class monopoly of the means of production which creates that
power; that some people have the power
to insist that other people work for them.
So it's really not about the
calculus of contributions and who puts what,
and whether the rate of exploitation's two point
three-three, or one point six or anything.
It's not about that.
It's really about the
distribution of power in the production process.
And if we're going to take
anything from Marx that is of enduring value it's going to be
an argument about power. It's going to be an argument
which says that a world in which we organize things so that one
class effectively has power to control a different class's
behavior, that is an unjust world.
And much of the neo-Marxist
literature that people take seriously jettisons the labor
theory of value and explores this power-based argument as the
root of what it was Marx was trying to get at with the
concept of exploitation. See you on Monday.
