The Chief Defect in Marx's Theory

 

It's difficult to express the chief defect in Karl Marx's theory concisely, but if I had to sum it up in a sentence, I would put it this way: Marx presents the problem of capitalism in such a way that it cannot be solved.  This is for several reasons, but one of them is that, in some of his writings, he fails to distinguish adequately between capitalism and the market.  That is not to say that he makes no distinction at all.  I don't want to be one-sided, here - I recognize his accomplishments, which were considerable, and I want to give credit where credit is due.  Marx does indeed admit a distinction, or at least seems to point towards an implied distinction - but then he blurs this distinction.  Of course, it's perfectly fine to be a bit nuanced - one could imagine a theorist who went too far in the opposite direction, overly concretizing, making everything a little too black and white.  But I think we're far from that danger, and that to analyze capitalism rigorously, we should sharpen and clarify this distinction as much as we can, without distorting reality.

To make matters worse, I would even go so far as to say that, rather than clearing things up as he developed his "scientific" theory, Marx went in the opposite direction, so that in his most mature work, the distinction is the most blurred - particularly after the development of his theory of commodity fetishism, and the related conceptual innovations that appear in the first three chapters of Capital Volume One (and, in the first edition, also in the appendix on the Value-Form).  To overgeneralize a bit, I would put it this way: when Marx is describing capitalism so to speak "diachronically," that is, when he is describing the historical development of the bourgeois mode of production, a fairly clear distinction can be inferred between markets and capitalism.  But when he is, so to speak, presenting a "synchronic" model of capitalism - when he is describing the abstract structure of political economy - the distinction disappears.

Markets have existed for thousands of years, in a wide variety of forms.  But capitalism is a much more recent development, having only existed for a few centuries.  In Capital Volume One, Part XIII, Chapters 26-33, Marx creates an excellent historical outline, by which we can understand capitalism's development.  But chapters which come before this (but which were probably mostly written afterward, if I understand Michael Heinrich's analysis correctly) analyze the commodity as such.  Marx presents a fascinating and insightful analysis, but it leaves me with many questions.  

Under what conditions is a product a commodity?  More importantly: under what conditions does it cease to be a commodity?  We can think of several desirable consumables that are not commodities, or do not seem to be, such as the air we breathe, or the sunshine that gives us vitamin D.  But these are not the products of human labor.  Then again, we can also imagine a commodity that would be a product, but not directly a product of human labor - something built entirely through automation - though this would indeed be the product of what Marx calls "dead" labor, in the sense that it was humans who originally conceived and built the machines at the beginning of this process.  But when Marx writes about a commodity, he imagines something with a value-form - a "form of appearance" which consists of relations to other commodities, "no matter which one".  

This seems to me to lead to several confusions, in several areas.  I'm not saying that these are unresolvable problems, but only that Marx leaves them unanswered, and so the way that we understand them will necessarily be a matter of interpretation, and two readers can reach quite different conclusions in good faith. Let's work our way through some of them, so to speak, backwards.  The most glaring unanswered question here is a practical one: how do we abolish the value-form?  Is there a set of state policies that a "dictatorship of the proletariat" could employ?  Which ones?  How would it work?  How would you even know whether it was working?  How would you measure it?  Marx leaves all of these questions, and many more, especially granular questions, completely unanswered.  As a result, any potential socialist government will always be open to the "left-communist" accusation that it is not socialist, but rather still capitalist - perhaps "monopoly state capitalist," and maybe even, as a "defensist" regime, dedicated to maintaining itself, one that hampers rather than facilitates the transition to socialism - and the regime will have no factual way to defend itself against this accusation.  But precisely the fact that "left-communists" can always level this accusation against any form of socialist regime, no matter what the regime does, makes the accusation meaningless.  But all this goes to show that Marx's theory scarcely offers us any specific, pragmatic, quantifiable conceptual tools for the practice of socialism.

More confusions arise in the Marxian analysis of history.  Even though Part VIII of Volume One is dedicated to the history of the emergence of the bourgeois mode of production, squaring this section with the preceding sections will not render unambiguous answers to several questions.  One thing that's fun to do, if you're in a group of Marxists, is to ask someone the simple question "When did capitalism begin?" and then sit back and watch as everyone tears their own hair out in frustration as they debate this, often quite angrily.  (If you aren't familiar with it, look up the "Brenner debate" as one brief example of this more-than-a-century-long, ongoing, tangled dispute.)  Just as it's difficult to say how commodity production will end, it's difficult to say when it began, because there's no clear demarcation between a commodity and not-a-commodity.  It is generally understood that there is a distinction between what Marx calls "formal subsumption" and "real subsumption" but putting specific dates on this, or even narrowing it down with any kind of specificity is awkward and controversial at best - in fact, the formal subsumption/real subsumption distinction, to my mind, only clouds the issue in greater complexity.

Beyond this, there is the simple conceptual ambiguity.  What is meant by "value"?  Does abolishing value entail some kind of psychological, neurological change?  If so, how could that happen?  If not, how does that work?  

It behooves us to make our theory more rigorous and to clarify how capitalism is distinct from markets in general, so that we can work toward, and prepare for, a post-capitalist mode of production.