Erich Fromm’s Marxist Sociology Forty Years Later — Kieran Durkin

Remembering Erich Fromm on the fortieth anniversary of his passing. Most people remember him for his book, The Art of Loving, but he wrote several other important works in sociology.

Fromm’s critique of contemporary capitalism continued a year later in The Art of Loving, perhaps his best-known work. Not the most obviously socialist or Marxist book (in fact, Herbert Marcuse criticized Fromm for supposedly betraying radical thought, and becoming a “sermonistic social worker”) Fromm was nevertheless adamant that “[t]he principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompatible,” and thus that the criticism of love (which, as he understood it, referred to the antithesis of narcissistic, racist, sexist and other forms of interpersonal relations) was also a criticism of capitalism and the ways in which it mitigated against genuine forms of love that would manifest in a more human society. Fromm believed that we must analyze the conditions for the possibility of realizing love and integrity in the present society and seek to strengthen them.

It is also during the 1950s that Fromm joins American Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation and seeks to rewrite its program. The resulting document, although rejected for this purpose, was published as Let Man Prevail (1958). It marks out Fromm’s distinctive form of Marxism, which he here calls “radical humanism” and characterizes as a democratic, humanist form of socialism. This analysis is deepened in 1960, in May Man Prevail?, an analysis of Soviet Communism that was intended to influence the move to unilateral disarmament during the Cold War.

Fromm’s most significant contribution to U.S. Marxism, however, was Marx’s Concept of Man (1961). Containing the first full English translation of Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, prefaced by a few short essays by Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man helped to popularize Marx in the U.S., as well as counteract some of the more common misinterpretations of Marx....

In Marx’s Concept of Man, Erich Fromm presents Marx as a humanist libertarian, but not an anarchist in the 19th century meaning of the term. Marx agreed with Aristotle that genuine human freedom includes from from constraint and freedom to experience, choose and act as prerequisite for freedom for self-creation as an individual (Mann) and self-actualization as a human person (Mensch). Marx viewed capitalism as necessarily collectivist for most, with only the owners of  capital free and the rest dependent economically on them for their livelihood.

Since humans are social animals, they have social and political requirements; social order requires governance, for example. Thus, community is a requirement for the expression of freedom in human life, also reflecting Aristotle's view, although Marx rejected Aristotle's view of slavery, of course. Marx and Lincoln corresponded, and Lincoln famously asserted the superiority of labor over capital in his first Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861. He is also on record as stating, "Labor is the true standard of value." The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume IV, "Speech at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania" (February 15, 1861), p. 212. Cited here.

Marx was not so  naïve as to think, however, that all this would happen spontaneously if the workers of the world suddenly lost their chains by rising up, as the finale of the Communist Manifesto suggests. This was the view of 19th  century anarchists that Marx criticized as being unrealistic. It would take time and considerable cultural adaptation to a new means of production. As the superstructure of society began to shift enough, humans would gradually realize the potential for living a genuinely free life, creating themselves as they saw fit in accordance with individual temperament. Wage earners had suffered the psychological ravages of alienation under capitalism and adapting to new material conditions of production would take time. Erich Fromm was psychologist enough to understand this.

Marx was more a philosopher than economist. His doctoral thesis was on ancient Greek materialism. In fact, neither economics nor sociology were academic fields at the time he was writing, and his work shaped both. Erich Fromm argued that Marx is properly viewed as a radical humanist thinker that sought to shape history in the present rather than as a communist collectivist whose work led to the excesses of the Russian and Chinese revolutions and their aftermath, which Marx's work does not presage. He believed that capitalism would mature and be replaced in capitalist countries rather than come to fruition in pre-industrial agricultural ones that were still feudal.

My own views regarding Marx owe a lot to Fromm's work. He is still worth reading and paying attention to.

Marxist Sociology Blog
Erich Fromm’s Marxist Sociology Forty Years Later
Kieran Durkin | Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at University of York, and Visiting Scholar at University of California Santa Barbara, where he is conducting the first dedicated study of the Humanist Marxist tradition.

Michael Roberts — Marx’s law of profitability at SOAS

Last week I gave a lecture in the seminar series on Marxist political economy organised by the Department of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). The Marxist Political Economy series is a course mainly for post-graduates and has several lecturers on different aspects of Marxian economics. Course Handbook – Marxist Political Economy 2019-20 (8)
Mine was on Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Not surprisingly, the department team has noticed that I am apparently ‘obsessed’ by this law, at least according to critics of it.
Anyway, I thought it might be useful to go through my lecture in a post, with the accompanying slides referred to. So here goes....

Michael Roberts Blog — blogging from a marxist economist
Marx’s law of profitability at SOAS
Michael Roberts

See also

Short summary of Karl Marx's view of property relations.

Most interesting:

 Karl Marx sought to further distinguish between the personal possession of (mainly) consumer goods, which he termed “personal property”, and the absentee ownership of capital goods, which he somewhat confusingly termed “private property”. Marx then went on to critique the exploitation that arises structurally when the means of production are privatised.

Hence we arrive at the first problem with private property, in that there exist two conflicting interpretations, neither of which has gained universal acceptance. That said the broader Lockean take tends to prevail in common usage, which can be somewhat problematic when discussing the abolition of exploitative arrangements arising from private property.... 

The phrase "private property" is ambiguous. In the terminology of John Locke it includes personal property. In the terminology of Karl Marx it doesn't. When Marx spoke of the need to abolish private property to put an end to capitalist expropriation of surplus value from workers, he meant changing the relations of production. He excluded personal property from the category of private property and he was not advocating collectivizing a tradesperson's tools, for example.

Here, Marx was making a connection between capitalists as absentee owners and the landlords of feudalism that either owned slaves or collected rents.

In the industrial age under capitalism, factories and machines became the dominant mode of production rather than agricultural land, which was the dominant mode of production in the agricultural age that was characterized politically by feudalism. 

Marx sought to show how surplus value was the "rent" that capitalists extracted from hired workers and not having contributed to production.

Thus, in this view both feudalism and capitalism are related forms of oligarchy that stand in opposition to liberal democracy. Under capitalism, land was simply folded in to capital.

Black Cat Workers Collective
The problem with private property

Karl Marx’s Law of Value in the Twilight of Capitalism — Murray Smith

Global capitalism, with humanity in tow, is now facing a triple crisis: a deepening structural contradiction of the capitalist mode of production, one manifested as a multi-dimensional crisis of ‘valorisation’ – that is to say, a crisis in the production of ‘surplus-value’, the very lifeblood of the profit system; an acute crisis in international relations stemming from the fact that the global productive forces are bursting the confines of the nation-state system, whose individual units continue to address their gravest problems in primarily ‘national’ ways; and a growing ‘metabolic rift’ between human civilisation and the ‘natural conditions of production’ – the ecological foundations of human sustainability. Together, these interrelated crises suggest that we have now entered a ‘twilight era’ of capitalism – one in which humanity will either find the means to create a higher and more rational order of social and economic organisation, or in which decaying capitalism will bring about the destruction of human civilisation....

Counterpunch
Karl Marx’s Law of Value in the Twilight of Capitalism
Murray Smith | Professor of Sociology at Brock University, St. Catharines, Canada

Productivity, Labor Complexity, and Wage Determination Procedures — Peter Cooper

This post concerns an implication of Marx’s treatment of productivity and labor complexity for the appropriateness of alternative processes of wage determination. For simplicity, it is assumed that all activity is productive in Marx’s sense (that is, productive of surplus value) and that conditions are competitive in the Marxian (and classical) sense that investment is free to flow in and out of sectors in search of the highest return. Introducing unproductive labor, including a substantial role for public sector and not-for-profit activity, and non-competitive elements would considerably complicate the analysis. The point of the exercise is to consider the incentive effects of alternative wage-determination procedures, from the perspective of Marx’s theory. It is suggested that Marx’s distinction between abstract and concrete labor implies that centralized wage determination, more than alternative wage-setting approaches, will be conducive to productivity growth....

heteconomist
Productivity, Labor Complexity, and Wage Determination Procedures
Peter Cooper

Michael Roberts Blog: blogging from a marxist economist — Minsky and socialism

Minsky’s journey from socialism to stability for capitalist profitability comes about because he and the post-Keynesians deny and/or ignore Marx’s law of value, just as the ‘market socialists’, Lange and Lerner, did. The post-Keynesians and MMTers deny/ignore that profit comes from surplus value extracted by exploitation in the capitalist production process and it is this that is the driving force for investment and employment. They ignore the origin and role of profit, except as a residual of investment and consumer spending.Instead they all have a money fetish. With the money fetish, money replaces value, rather than representing it. They all see money (finance) as both causing crises and, also as solving them by creating value!

In my view, far from Minsky providing the “necessary ingredients to a to a rethinking of Marxian theory of capitalist dynamics and crises”, as Bellofiore argues, Minsky’s theory of crises, like all those emanating from the post-Keynesian think tank of the Levy Institute, falls well short of delivering a comprehensive causal explanation of regular and recurring booms and slumps in capitalist production. By limiting the searchlight of analysis to money, finance and debt, Minsky and the P-Ks ignore the exploitation of labour by capital (terms not even used). They fail to recognise that financial fragility and collapse are triggered by the recurring insufficiency of value creation in capitalist accumulation and production.

Moreover, by claiming that capitalism’s problem lies in the finance sector, the policy solutions offered are the regulation and control of that sector, rather than the replacement of the capitalist mode of production. Indeed, that is the very path that Minsky took: from his socialism and ‘’socialisation of investment’’ in the 1970s to ‘stabilising finance’ in the 1990s.

Michael Roberts Blog — blogging from a marxist economist
Minsky and socialism
Michael Roberts

Marx’s concept of socialism — Peter Hudis

Marx of course supports collective ownership of the means of production. But by this he does not mean simply transferring ownership deeds from private to collective entities, but rather ensuring that the working class owns and controls the means of production. He makes this clear in writing, “When one speaks of private property, one is dealing with something external to man. When one speaks of labour, one is directly dealing with man himself. This new formulation of the question already contains its solution” (MECW 6: 281). The abolition of private property is a step towards liberation only if it leads to the transformation of human relations at the point of production.

This is further underscored by Marx’s statement, “Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence of alienated labour” (MECW 3: 279). It may seem that Marx has it backwards. Does not private ownership of the means of production cause workers to become alienated from their labour? His point is that so long as workers are alienated from the very activity of labouring, an alien group or class must exist that compels them to labour. Private property in the sense of class property—of a class other than the workers controlling the means of production—will continue to exist so long as alienated labour exists.

This emphasis on the priority of social relations of production over property forms carries through all of Marx’s later work, especially Capital. He there reiterates his early criticism of the notion that collective or state-owned property represents the new society:

Capital … now receives the form the social capital … in contrast to private capital, and its enterprises appear as social enterprises as opposed to private ones. This is the abolition of capital as private property within the confines of the capitalist mode of production itself. (Marx 1981: 567)….

Marx views "public" or "social" as the opposite of "private," that is, worker control and not state control, as is often misconstrued. This did get misconstrued in the supposedly necessary "dictatorship of the proletariat" as a transition phase, or perhaps better hijacked than misconstrued.

Monthly Review

Marx’s concept of socialism

Peter Hudis

Michael Roberts — US rate of profit measures for 2018

Every year, I look at measuring the US rate of profit a la Marx. Official data are now available in order to update the measurement for 2018 (not 2019 yet!). As usual, if you wish to replicate my results, I again refer you to the excellent manual for doing so, kindly compiled by Anders Axelsson from Sweden.

There are many ways to measure the rate of profit a la Marx (for the various ways, see http://pinguet.free.fr/basu2012.pdf). As previously, I start with an update of the measure used by Andrew Kliman (AK) in his book, The failure of capitalist production. AK measures the US rate of profit based on corporate sector profits only for the numerator and uses the historic cost measure of net fixed assets as the denominator (ie s/C). AK considers this measure as the closest to Marx’s formula, namely that the rate of profit should be based on the advanced capital already bought (thus historic costs) and not on the current cost of replacing that capital.

Marx approaches value theory temporally so the value of the denominator in the rate of profit formula is at t1 and should not be changed to the value at t2. To do the latter is ‘simultaneism’, leading to a distortion of Marx’s value theory. For more on this, see AK’s book, Reclaiming Marx’s Capital. This seems correct to me. But the debate on this issue of measurement continues and can be found in the appendix in my book, The Long Depression, on measuring the rate of profit. 

What are the results of the AK version for the US rate of profit up to 2018?...

The post is instructive if you are interested in the Marxian methods of measuring the rate of profit, but it's a bit wonkish, so here is the conclusion, if you don't want to wade through the math.

In contrast, the profitability of capital (a la Marx), profit margins (the gap between costs and revenues per unit of production) and the mass of corporate profits are all falling. From 2006, the fall in profits in productive investment eventually led the economy down into recession despite record fictitious profits. That situation beckons again.

Michael Roberts Blog — blogging from a marxist economist
US rate of profit measures for 2018
Michael Roberts

Some comments about Marx’s epistemology — Prabhat Patnaik

Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feurbach: “the philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it”, has been often taken to mean that interpreting the world and changing the world are two separate and disconnected activities….

In my view, in drawing this distinction, Marx was not referring to two separate activities, but to two separate ways of interpreting the world: one is interpreting the world from the perspective of changing it, which means interpreting the world from a point of view that entails the construction of the image of an alternative world different from it; and the other is interpreting the world from a point of view that does not do so, that continues to remain trapped within the vision of the world as it exists....

An example will make clear what I have in mind. One can argue in the context of a slave society that it is in the interest of the slave to be obedient to his master, for otherwise the master will lose his temper and whip him; and one would not necessarily be wrong in arguing in this manner. On the other hand, one can say that a slave society is itself dehumanizing and must be replaced by a society of free men, and that it is in the interest of the slave to work for achieving such a society, even though he would inevitably incur the wrath of the master; and one would not certainly be wrong in saying so either.

The difference between the two positions really lies in the fact that the second position is from a perspective that transcends the slave society, i.e. from a perspective that is epistemically exterior to the slave society, while the first position is from a perspective that is epistemically interior to the slave society. In arguing for changing the world rather than merely interpreting it, Marx was really arguing for interpreting the world from a perspective that is epistemically exterior to it.

The importance of the difference between these two positions is particularly great today in the context of neo-liberal capitalism. The argument which says that there should be “labour market flexibility”, that wages should be kept down, that trade union activities should be restricted, and that social wages should be cut, all in order to attract investment, so that the growth rate of output and employment in the economy could be increased, is exactly analogous to the argument that said that the slaves should remain meek before the masters for their own good. It represents an epistemically interior perspective, which is being assiduously promoted at present by much of “liberal opinion”. An epistemically exterior position in contrast will recognize the necessity for transcending neo-liberal capitalism for human freedom.

II
When we see Marx’s remark in this way, his criticism of Classical Political Economy also falls into place. Marx says apropos Classical Political Economy in The Poverty of Philosophy, that, according to it, “hitherto there has been history but not from now on”; this corresponds to the perception of Classical Political Economy that the bourgeois order is in conformity with the laws of nature. This is why the categories of bourgeois economy according to it are christened as “natural”, such as the “natural price”, the “natural rate of profit”, the “natural rate of wages”, and so on.

In saying this about Classical Political Economy, Marx was in effect asserting that Classical Political Economy which had taken a position of epistemic exteriority vis-a-vis all preceding social formations did not do so vis-à-vis capitalism. By contrast, the hall-mark of Marx’s own analysis of capitalism was that he adopted a position of epistemic exteriority vis-à-vis this system. This was how he could accord centrality to the phenomenon of exploitation and class struggle within capitalism, and thereby see the necessary incompatibility between capitalism and human freedom.

Because of this epistemic position, all the categories that Marx used for analyzing capitalism, were, as Georg Lukacs had pointed out long ago, class categories, i.e. categories informed by a class perspective, in contrast to those of Classical Political Economy....

Marxists criticize MMT economists along these lines, that is, for describing the world as it is, implying acceptance of the current world order based on  bourgeois liberalism manifesting economically as capitalism.

Marxists hold that thinkers as change agents should show the weaknesses and failures of the present system that have led to the precarious state of the world in which humanity now lives.

The appropriate task is envisioning a new order based on a classless society, class structure being the chief cause of the present dysfunctional order. Marxist analysis show that this dysfunctionality results from the current mode of production being based on private ownership of the means of production, This arrangement gives the ownership and top managerial classes that overlap control of the commanding heights and the ability to extract rents exorbitantly.

In the Marxist view, this is a system based on expropriation based on rent extraction justified economically by claims of "naturalness" and spontaneous natural order, with all problems accounted for by government intrusion in otherwise free markets. They point out that Marx and subsequently those working in this school of thought showed that this is not natural at all, but the result of historical processes that can be changed in the course of time. They view now as the time. MMT and other reforms simply delay that historical wave but cannot stop it.

As institutionalists, MMT economist are in agreement that the world that conventional (neoclassical) economics is not describing a natural world that exists but rather a possible world that does not exist, since the assumptions on which the modeling is based are unrealistic compared with data.

So the economic analyses may not be too divergent, but the strategy and tactics are with respect to policy. Even Marxists do not agree completely with how Marx's works should be interpreted. That is somewhat arcane and of historical interest. The issue now is what in Marx remains relevant to analysis and action based on it. In my view as philosopher, a lot.

Generally, Marx is not considered one of the greats in the history of the Western intellectual tradition. When I was a graduate student in philosophy in a department that specialized in history, Marx was not prominent although one cannot study social and political philosophy without accommodating him.

Conversely, Marx exerted as much influence on the course of the world events as any of the great thinkers, and perhaps more, since there are many more people and his influence is global. IN a sense this surprising, since Marx wrote like an academician rather than a popular author, even though he could do so, since he sidelined as a newspaper columnist. And his influence was not damaged by his not completing his project. Das Kapital was completed by Friedrich Engels from notes and conversations. The published work is only half the work that Marx had projected, so a lot of Marx's project will never be known.

Even more ironically, Marx is scarcely mentioned in the study of economics in the US other than in specialized areas. Marx is still studied assiduously outside the US, and in the non-West in particular. Prabhat Patnaik is an Indian economist, for example, and he worked at the core rather than in the periphery.

We are far from hearing the end of Marx, even though those that the control the narrative under bourgeois liberalism have tried to bury him. I believe that Marx deserves a lot more attention and recognition in the history of world thought as one of the pioneers of a more expanded concept of social, political and economic freedom than had appeared in the past. And this has been progressively realized globally through class struggle, bolstering his assertion that the proper philosophical method involves changing the world.

This project is far from complete, however, since the mode of production has not changed substantially. Yet, the assumption that bourgeois liberalism constitutes the end of history seems premature. Humanity has a way to go before Marx's expanded concept of social, political and economic freedom is concretized in world of universal values and rights derived therefrom.

This requires a considerable expansion of the level of humanity's collective consciousness, which means on the abstract level the expansion of the appreciation of universality, while on the concrete level it manifests as universal unconditional love as in "love thy fellow as oneself." Marx never got to mentioning this, but who knows where he was headed when his passing cut his work short. Yet, it seems clear from early writings that he was basing his work on an "enlightened" humanism that in a sense sacralized the dignity of the human person.

We see this sacralization the American Declaration of Independence, but the founding documents established a country based on bourgeois liberalism, where universal suffrage had to be fought for later, and slavery was included in the constitution. Marx's writing on America show his admiration of the ideal and disappointment in the real. He believed we could do better.

MR
Some comments about Marx’s epistemology
Prabhat Patnaik | Professor of Economics (retired), Centre for Economic Studies and Planning (CESP) at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.
Originally published: IDEAS (August 30, 2019)

Bill Mitchell — Spending equals income whether it comes from government or non-government

It is now clear that to most observers that the use of monetary policy to stimulate major changes in economic activity in either direction is fraught. Central bankers in many nations have been pulling all sorts of policy ‘rabbits’ out of the hat over the last decade or more and their targets have not moved as much or in many cases in the direction they had hoped. Not only has this shown up the lack of credibility of mainstream macroeconomics but it is now leading to a major shift in policy thinking, which will tear down the neoliberal shibboleths that the use of fiscal policy as a counter-stabilisation tool is undesirable and ineffective. In effect, there is a realignment going on between policy responsibility and democratic accountability, something that the neoliberal forces worked hard to breach by placing primary responsibility onto the decisions of unelected and unaccountable monetary policy committees. And this shift is bringing new players to the fore who are intent on denying that even fiscal policy can stave off major downturns in non-government spending. These sort of attacks from a mainstream are unsurprising given its credibility is in tatters. But they are also coming from the self-proclaimed Left, who seem opposed to a reliance on nation states, and in the British context, this debate is caught up in the Brexit matter, where the Europhile Left are pulling any argument they can write down quickly enough to try to prevent Britain leaving the EU, as it appears it now will (and that couldn’t come quickly enough).

Bill addresses the charge from the Left that MMT is not Marxian enough.

I would also say that my career in economics has been inspired by the basic insights about Capitalism provided by Karl Marx (and Friedrich Engels) and the writers that followed in that tradition.

But I would also be sure to disagree with Michael Roberts assertion that “MMTers deny the validity and relevance of Marx’s key contribution to understanding the capitalist system: that is it is a system of production for profit; and profits emerge from the exploitation of labour power – where value and surplus value arises” (Source).

As one of the developers of MMT, I have always made it explicit that Marx’s ideas on class and exploitation lie at the basis of Capitalist dynamics and should be the starting point for a progressive understanding.

So it is hard at times to know what being ‘Marxist’ means, which is especially the case when we consider the post-modern distractions that made ‘Marxism’ appear recondite, to say the least....

Longish and detailed, but one of Bill most significant posts on political economy. Necessary to understand nuances of MMT from a left perspective, and MMT is now being attacked from both right and left.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Spending equals income whether it comes from government or non-government
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Review of Money and Totality by Fred Moseley — The Internationalists

This is a substantial book which the author admits has been 20 years in the making. [1] It deals primarily with Moseley’s own “Macro-Monetary” interpretation of Marx’s economic writings and takes up and rebuts criticisms of this interpretation. However, the book also looks critically at the major interpretations of Marx’s economic work, by Marxist academic economists, which have emerged in the last 100 years, giving a brief description of them and critically examining their failings. Many people may not realise this, but for the greater part of the twentieth century the accepted view among academic Marxist economists, which was generally known as the Standard Interpretation (SI), was that Marx made a fundamental mistake in his economic analysis which needed to be corrected. The key issue behind this is the so-called “transformation” problem, namely the transformation of values into prices of production. The SI and its offshoots claim that Marx failed to do this correctly and his work needs to be corrected. A number of corrections have been proposed and a further number of variations of these corrections themselves put forward in ever greater complexity. Moseley shows how these criticisms and corrections are founded on a misinterpretation of Marx’s work; and that the corrections each violate some other key aspect of Marx’s work. Moseley argues that Marx did not make a mistake and there is no transformation problem whatsoever....

Important if at all interested in Marx and Marxist/Marxian economics.

Monthly Review
Review of Money and Totality by Fred Moseley

Originally published: The Internationalists (August 22, 2019)

Hegel [and Marx] on labor and freedom — Daniel Little

So does labor fulfill freedom or create alienation? Likewise, does technology emancipate and fulfill us, or does it enthrall and disempower us? Marx's answer to the first question is that it does both, depending on the social relations within which it is defined, managed, and controlled.

It would seem that we can answer the second question for ourselves, in much the same terms. Technology both extends freedom and constricts it....

Adding to what David Little says in this post, Hegel and Marx were chiefly interested in the expansion of human freedom, although they provided different analyses that appear to be at odds. Marx was writing in reaction to Hegel but also operating strongly under Hegel's influence, adopting his dialectical method, for example.

Daniel Little draws a connection between them through Alexandre Kojève's commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology, specifically the master-slave passage that he regarded as highly influential on Marx. When I was studying Hegel in grad school, I recall the professor strongly emphasizing this. We were expected to know that passage from the Phenomenology in detail.

Hegel, following the ancient Greeks, distinguished freedom from constraint, freedom to chose, and freedom for self-determination. Hegel emphasized that genuine freedom requires only freedom from constraint and freedom to chose but also freedom for self-determination. Human's share "natural freedom" — freedom from and freedom to — with other animals. This is the "law" of the jungle as set forth by Hobbes. The human challenge is to reach ethical and political freedom and this requires the application of rationality. This occurs in the liberal state.  (This is obviously a thumbnail sketch that needs elaboration. Here is short article on this. Hegel's view is still quite relevant to contemporary liberal societies.)

Hegel held that these conditions are met in the rational state, ideally in a state governed by the rule of law based on due deliberation. Self-determination occurs in a state in which those governed by the rule of law chose the laws in contrast to a state governed by dictate. Hegel is thinking here of the Greek polis or "city-state," and more specifically of Athens, where citizens voted after debating the issues publicly in the agora.

A central question in Greek political thought was, what does it mean to be a good person in a good society. Greeks considered themselves not only individuals but also citizens. Or better, they could not consider themselves other than as citizens. This distinguished the civilized as those that lived in city states from those that did not – the barbarians.

While Greeks provided the foundation for the subsequent Western intellectual tradition, a considerable superstructure was erected on this foundation based on may influences whose interaction were aspects of a historical dialectic, which Hegel attempted to trace. (Incidentally, the American founding fathers also read the Greeks and Romans on politics, and they were familiar with the great orators and statesmen as well as thinkers. The American founding documents and the debates that led up to their writing and adoption show this influence.)

For the Greeks it was not a great challenge between a person's will as individual and as a citizen. This was not so in modern times. Then the challenge became one of reconciling personal liberty with community. The motto of the French revolutionaries was liberty, egality and fraternity, where egality means absence of privilege, and fraternity means solidarity in community. This is still a driving force in the historical dialectic and far from resolved. Hegel did not think that the Prussian state was "the end of history," as many American exceptionalists do of the US. He saw the Prussian state only as the epitome of the time, to be transcended as the concept of freedom expanded through the historical dialectic and became objectified in ongoing historical moments.

Marx rejected Hegel's view that the individual wills of the members of a society merge, so to speak, into the collective will of the society that is expressed in the rational state. Marx viewed Hegel's rational state being the locus of a people's ethical and political life as inherently bourgeois.

In this sense, Hegel was a liberal in the broad sense, albeit a German one that presaged the later German adoption of ordoliberalism, while Marx was a left libertarian.

While Hegel was a "liberal" in the broad sense of the Enlightenment, he would likely be regarded as conservative like Edmund Burke. But both Hegel and Burke sought to synthesize and harmonize liberalism and conservatism. As did John Maynard Keynes. Conversely, Marx rejected the assumption that all are equal as persons before the law but are so varied as individuals that only the most qualified should govern as essentially a bourgeois rationale for the continued rule of a few on the shaky ground of "rationality."

But while the analyses differed, the objective of expanding human freedom was essentially the same as the "Zeitgeist." This remains true in the West, but now it is beginning to be questioned as liberalism and traditionalism clash on the world stage.

Marx presents somewhat of a dilemma that needs to be mentioned. On one hand, he agreed with Hegel that the historical dialectic was foundational and events are dependent on the timing owing to changing conditions. On the other hand, he also assumed that this process could be commanded by working actively on changing mode of production that he viewed as foundational. Since this is a historical process, "only time will tell."

But at least we can say that Marx apparently got the timing wrong in that he looked for this to happen in the capitalist (industrialized) countries in the near future. That did not happen. On the other hand, the march of time was accompanied in the expansion of freedom, the remnants of the feudal era of aristocracies were all but eradicated in the West post-WWI.

In my view, Hegel and Marx are not necessarily far apart in terms of the ideal. They both viewed the direction of history as involving the expansion of freedom, with the contradiction between individual will and social requirements resolved by expansion of collective consciousness toward altruism as expressed in the golden rule that Kant made rational in his categorical imperative to act on the principle of universal reciprocity. This has a scientific basis now as research shows that reciprocity is an evolutionary trait and that human morality is a rational form of it.

Recurring to David Little's post, the labor-technology dichotomy is directly relevant to the degree that increased productivity and technological innovation make greater distributed leisure possible, and leisure is foundational for the expansion of freedom as the uniting of freedom from, freedom to, and freedom for. The future of humankind is bright if we can get beyond the challenges emerging with the opportunities. This will require concerted action and coordination in adapting to swiftly changing conditions.

Understanding Society
Hegel [and Marx]  on labor and freedomDaniel Little | Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Professor of Philosophy at UM-Dearborn and Professor of Sociology at UM-Ann Arbor

Labor Power as the ‘Money Commodity’ — Peter Cooper

For Marx and many Marxists, money is based in a commodity; in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), it is not, being based instead in a social relationship that holds more generally than just to commodity production and exchange. Even so, to the extent that commodity production and exchange are given sway within ‘modern money’ economies, operation of the Marxian ‘law of value’ appears to be compatible with MMT. It is just that, from an MMT perspective, private for-profit market-based activity will be embedded within, and delimited by, a broader social and legal framework that is – or at least can be – decisively shaped by currency-issuing government. Therefore, even though in MMT money is not regarded as a commodity, it seems that a commodity theory of money can be reconciled with MMT provided, first of all, that the connection between a money commodity and currency is understood to apply only to the sphere of commodities and, secondly, that it is legitimate to regard labor power as the ‘money commodity’. An earlier post gave some consideration to the social embeddedness of commodity production and exchange. The present focus is on the notion of labor power as money commodity. On this point, MMT can be understood as directly linking currency to labor power, which, as Marx demonstrated, is a commodity under capitalism. This raises the question of whether labor power can serve the role of money commodity in Marx’s theory.For Marx and many Marxists, money is based in a commodity; in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), it is not, being based instead in a social relationship that holds more generally than just to commodity production and exchange. Even so, to the extent that commodity production and exchange are given sway within ‘modern money’ economies, operation of the Marxian ‘law of value’ appears to be compatible with MMT. It is just that, from an MMT perspective, private for-profit market-based activity will be embedded within, and delimited by, a broader social and legal framework that is – or at least can be – decisively shaped by currency-issuing government. Therefore, even though in MMT money is not regarded as a commodity, it seems that a commodity theory of money can be reconciled with MMT provided, first of all, that the connection between a money commodity and currency is understood to apply only to the sphere of commodities and, secondly, that it is legitimate to regard labor power as the ‘money commodity’. An earlier post gave some consideration to the social embeddedness of commodity production and exchange. The present focus is on the notion of labor power as money commodity. On this point, MMT can be understood as directly linking currency to labor power, which, as Marx demonstrated, is a commodity under capitalism. This raises the question of whether labor power can serve the role of money commodity in Marx’s theory....

Interesting post. It brings to mind the notion that if labor power is the "money commodity," then "money," which in modern time is government currency, has "commodity power." In mercantilist times, the basic "money commodity" was gold or gold and silver, or silver, depending the historical period. However, Marx's analysis of the extraction of surplus value by the ownership (rentier) class from the working class — farmers in a (feudal) agricultural society and factory workers in a (capitalist) industrial society shows that labor (time and power) are fundamental. The factory workers that dominate the "working class" in numbers are subject to expropriation of property similar to that of serfs and peasants under feudalism. Under capitalism the managerial class has greater bargaining power than the working class since their quality of labor power is scarcer, being more highly skill and specialized. So the rate of expropriation may be less and at the upper levels top management has managed to "split the profits" with the owners.

A monetary system that is based on precious metals or other objects of barter conceals that labor power is foundational. A state money system makes it clear that the "money commodity" is actually labor power. This somewhat obscured in a fixed rate convertible monetary system in which "money" is anchored to a commodity other than labor power, especially when the "money thing" is a natural commodity like stamped coins minted from precious metals. But the reality is that all monetary exchange is based on labor power as the "money commodity" since it is not "money" that creates commodities but rather labor power.

I am not sure to what degree labor power is correctly categorized as a commodity, however. At the very least, labor power is not a naturally existing commodity since labor power other than unskilled labor is a function of time and ability and specialized ability has to be acquired. Nothing similar to this pertains to commodities defined as goods produced for exchange rather than use, which equates to good produced for sale in a monetary production economy.

As a philosopher, I am skeptical about "commoditizing" humans, which, of course, is what the institution of slavery does. The deep ethical question is whether there is a progression from slavery to serfdom to work for hire in which workers are income dependent. Some serious thinker posit that there is such a connection.

This seems to me to be fundamental to the thinking of Marx. Labor is not a natural commodity for Marx, but only becomes a commodity in a monetary production economy. His analysis of capitalist production shows how work for hire is another from of expropriation of real value from workers through the equation of value with price in a market-based capitalist society whose foundation is a monetary production economy. His solution is to change that foundation for one that supports real freedom rather than the illusion of freedom characteristic of 18th century bourgeois liberalism, a foundation that persists today.

As a philosopher, it strikes me that the fundamental issue in economics is value theory. The equation of value with price is based on either assumption or handwaving. Marx got this. He realized that there is much more to economic value than can be captured by price in markets, and also that that markets are not necessarily reflective of true cost where cost includes real resources.

A good example of this is the present existential crisis presented by climate change, which can be trace in part at least to negative externality, where gain is capitalized while part of the cost is socialized through the false assumption that the "the solution to pollution is dilution." Similarly, for Marx, extraction of surplus value is also a negative externality that workers "pay for" through labor that is not justly compensated for it full contribution. This is concealed by the conventional economic theory of reward being determined on the basis of marginal product.

Forced unpaid work is a form of slavery. In a monetary production economy where income from work is a vital necessity, the extraction of surplus value from workers that have insufficient bargaining power to exact just compensation for the contribution of their labor time and power is forced unpaid work.

The MMT job guarantee (JG or ELR) is a step toward connecting "the commodity power of money" directly with labor power through a living wage. However, this just returns workers under capitalism to the position of serfs and peasants that were self-sufficient in terms of their own production and limited needs in agricultural societies. With the advent of the industrial age and the mass moving, often forced, of former agricultural workers to factories that all changed as urban workers became income-dependent, forced to "work for a living" by bidding their labor power in markets at the going offers.

heteconomist
Labor Power as the ‘Money Commodity’
Peter Cooper

Imperialism and profitability at Lille — Michael Roberts

G Carchedi and I are working on a paper on the economics of imperialism that covers measuring unequal exchange in trade, factor income flows on the current account; and foreign investment on the capital account. We reach similar conclusions to Ricci in that imperialism is alive and well and inequality between the imperialist economies and the rest is just as wide as it was 100 years go. Value produced in the dominated countries get appropriated and transferred to the imperialist economies in ever-increasing amounts...

Michael Roberts Blog
Imperialism and profitability at Lille
Michael Roberts

Magpie — Getting all Tied Up (2)

Magpie critiques Paul Mason's criticism of MMT from the POV of a Marxist.

Magpie's Asymmetric Warfare
Getting all Tied Up (2)

Magpie

Peter Cooper — Currency Acceptance, Currency Value, and Transcending Capitalism

Distinguishing currency acceptance from currency value therefore carries a social significance. So long as a sovereign government’s currency is accepted, neither the currency nor society is ultimately beholden to the law of value.

Since a currency can be made viable irrespective of (marxist) value considerations, a currency-issuing government can override the law of value whenever this is the political will. This opens the way for an extension of not-for-profit activity and, if desired, a transcending of capitalism.

To reiterate what was stated earlier, however, this does not mean that policy is feasible “within any context whatsoever” or “under any circumstances”. For instance, it might be that certain policy options negatively affect the profitability of capitalist firms. In that case, certain policy options might not be compatible with a preservation of capitalism.

This only means that society, in such instances, will face a choice between reinforcing capitalist social relations or transitioning to socialism. Ultimately, the viability of the capitalist class is contingent on the actions of currency-issuing governments, not the other way round....

heteconomist
Currency Acceptance, Currency Value, and Transcending Capitalism
Peter Cooper

Andy Merrifield — Marx at his limits

Marx’s dialectic is unique, Marshall says, because it straddles two distinctive ideas of modernization and modernism. Typically, analyses of each have been set apart. Modernization, on the one hand, has meant sustained economic development and industrial expansion, large-scale social planning and urban growth, bureaucratic regulation and rationality, the shattering of traditional cultures, perpetual progress and productivity. On the other hand, modernism suggests something more artistic and experimental, a movement more iconoclastic, sometimes destructive, occasionally destructive to its proponents as well. With modernism, Marshall says, “we find ourselves in the midst of an endless series of spiritual upheavals and cultural revolutions—the death of God, the theatre of cruelty, Dada, jazz, the twelve-tone scale, Existentialism, abstract art, and so on.” 

Enter Marx, the first thinker, Marshall believes, to make these two worlds connect. It was Marx, after all, who wanted to discover the underlying unity of life. Marx’s horizon is vast and his vision packs together an enormous range of things and ideas that nobody had thought of throwing together before, breaking down boundaries, piling things together that seem to clash and totter on the brink. Take one of his central images from Part I of The Communist Manifesto (1848): “All that Is solid melts into air.” “The cosmic scope and visionary grandeur of this image,” Marshall says, “it’s highly compressed dramatic power, its vaguely apocalyptic undertones, the ambiguity of its point of view—the heat that destroys is also super abundant energy, an overflow of life—all these qualities are supposed to be hallmarks of the modernist imagination.”

I was not aware of this critique before, but it is along the lines of the dialectic between liberal (modern) and traditionalism (historical) that is going on worldwide now and is reflected in Western politics in the liberal-conservative dichotomy within bourgeois liberalism in its latest iteration as neoliberalism.

Marx was a philosopher, litterateur, historian, anthropologist and sociologist who wrote about economics in light of those fields. This makes his economics difficult to pin down. Actually, Marx was writing before the birth of economics as a "scientific discipline," which occurred largely though the influence of Alfred Marshall's attempt to mathematize what was previous called "political economy."

This can be said of Adam Smith and, to some degree, of John Maynard Keynes. Smith and Marx were trained in philosophy and Smith was employed as a professor of philosophy. Keynes was trained in mathematics, and he also had a penchant for philosophy. It might be argued that Keynes "backed into" economics owing to circumstance — the need of the time.

Marx’s prose, says Marshall, hurtles along with the same breathless energy and reckless momentum as the society he depicts. The need for a constantly expanding market has the bourgeoisie settle everywhere, nestle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. A world market rapidly emerges, absorbing and destroying local and regional markets; improvements in communication draw everybody under the sway of bourgeois economy and culture; capital concentrates into the hands of fewer and fewer bigger and bigger producers; “Modern Industry” rationalizes production, in both the factories and on the land; rural labourers are uprooted and pour into ever-expanding cities; a factory proletariat swells its ranks, learning the hard way about machines and modern exploitation.

Before long, “no other nexus exists between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’.” A brave new world of capitalist modernity sprouts. Mountains are moved, railroads laid down, and canals rerouted, all of it done in the name of bourgeois modernity—should the price be right. Everything we once thought solid suddenly disintegrates into air. “By the time Marx’s proletarians appears,” Marshall says, “the world stage on which they were supposed to play their part has disintegrated and metamorphosed into something unrecognizable, surreal, a mobile construction that shifts and changes shape under the players’ feet”:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

This is the reduction of modern life to economics and finance. The age of myth (traditionalism) is over. Cultural myths, which had been the glue of civilizations, is replaced by "the market," whose invisible hand is assumed to act as a natural force that can be compared with gravity. Everything settles into its rght place and all receive their just deserts if only this force is unleashed in full.

See John Foster Bellamy's Absolute Capital, linked to here previously.

Marx had anticipated the development of neoclassical economics in his analysis of what he called "vulgar economy."

Vulgar economy really does nothing else but to interpret, in doctrinaire fashion, the ideas of persons entrapped in capitalist conditions of production and performing the function of agents in such production, to systematize and to defend these ideas. We need not wonder, then, that vulgar economy feels particularly at home in the estranged form of manifestation, in which economic conditions are absurd and complete contradictions, and that these conditions appear so much more self-explanatory to it, the more their internal connection is concealed. So long as the ordinary brain accepts these conceptions, vulgar economy is satisfied. But all science would be superfluous, if the appearance, the form, and the nature of things were wholly identical. Vulgar economy has not the slightest inkling of the fact that the trinity from which it takes its departure, namely Land—Rent, Capital—Interest, Labor—Wages of Labor (or Price of Labor), are on their very face three incompatible propositions. First we have the use-value Land, which has no value, and the exchange-value Rent. Here a social relation is conceived as a thing and proportioned to nature. Two incommensurable magnitudes are supposed to be proportional to each other. Then we have Capital—Interest. If capital is conceived as a certain sum of values independently represented by money, then it is manifestly nonsense to say that a certain value shall be valued higher than its value. It is precisely in the formula Capital—Interest that all intermediate links are eliminated, and capital is reduced to its most general formula, which for this reason is inexplicable by itself and absurd. It is also for this reason that the vulgar economist prefers the formula Capital—Interest, with its occult faculty of making a value unequal to itself, to the formula of Capital—Profit, which approaches more nearly to the actual capitalist relations. Then again, driven by the restless thought that four is not five and that 100 dollars cannot be 110 dollars, he flees from Capital as an exchange-value to the material substance of capital, to its use-value as a material requirement of labor, as machinery, raw materials, etc. By this means he succeeds in putting into the place of the first incomprehensible relation, which makes four equal to five, a wholly incommensurable one between a use-value, a thing, upon the one hand, and a definite relation of social production, surplus-value, upon the other, as he does also in the case of private property in land. As soon as the vulgar economist has arrived at this incommensurable magnitude, everything becomes clear to him, and he no longer feels the need of thinking any further. For he has arrived at what is "rational" in bourgeois conception. Finally we have Labor—Wages of Labor, or Price of Labor. This last expression, as we have shown in Volume I, contradicts on its very face the conception of value as well as of price. Price, generally speaking, is but a definite expression of value. And "Price of Labor" is just as irrational as a yellow leogarithm. But here the vulgar economist is all the more satisfied, because it brings him to the deep understanding of the bourgeois, that he pays for labor with money, and because the fact that this formula contradicts the conception of value relieves him from all obligation to understand value.

— Karl Marx. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. III. The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, VII.XLVIII.III (VII.XLVIII.1.2)

So the age of myth is not actually over, after all. Now we are ruled by the myth of the market.

Monthly Review

Marx at his limits
Andy Merrifield

Bill Mitchell — Marxists getting all tied up on MMT

Marx, MMT, wage labor and surplus value.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Marxists getting all tied up on MMT
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

See also

The Radford Free Press
A Quick Note: Utopian or Real?
Peter Radford

Also

libcom
The Iron Fist Behind Exchange: The Problems With The Freed Market

Ivysyn

Paul Cockshott — What then is the escape from capitalism?

What then is the escape from capitalism?

What would be the essential features of a socialist economy, one the would be really achievable?

Exactly the right question. It's not just about there but getting from here to there. The former is utopian, the latter involves being realistic. This is not primarily a theoretical question but a practical one.

Marx concluded that capitalism is based on a monetary production economy, and that monetary production economies tend toward capitalism, as China suggests after the introduction of "market socialism" and "socialism with Chinese characteristics."

What would a socialist economy look like then? Paul Cockshott explains Marx's view on this based on "labor credits" as the unit of account. He also explains why he believes that the economic calculation problem that Ludwig von Mises advanced no longer applies owing to technological innovation.

This also has interesting implications for the MMT job guarantee that anchors the value of a currency to an hour of unskilled labor based on governments' power to set the price it is willing to pay in a market, provided the government is sovereign in its currency and has a monopoly on currency issuance. Currency sovereigns have monopoly power, hence, are price setters rather than price takers, regardless of whether they chose to use it.

Paul Cockshott's Blog
What then is the escape from capitalism?

Paul Cockshott

Robert Paul Wolff — "The Future of Socialism" (article)

I  (Tom Hickey) recommend reading this paper now that "socialism" is the new buzz word. You may recall Professor Wolff from The Poverty of Liberalism, In Defense of Anarchy, and A Critique of Pure Tolerance (with Herbert Marcuse and Barrington Moore, Jr.), which were popular at the time of the "countercultural revolution" in the Sixties and Seventies. He also published scholarly works on Emmanuel Kant and Karl Marx. He blogs at The Philosopher's Stone, which I follow and occasionally offer comment.

In what follows, I propose to take as my text a famous statement from Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy—a sort of preliminary sketch of Das Kapital—and see what it can tell us about the capitalism of our day. I shall try to show you that Marx was fundamentally right about the direction in which capitalism would devel- op, but that because of his failure to anticipate three important features of the mature capitalist world, his optimism concerning the outcome of that development was misplaced. Along the way, I shall take a fruitful detour through the arid desert of financial accounting theory.

Here is the famous passage, from the preface of the Contribution, published in 1859:

"No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed, and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society."

"The Future of Socialism"
Robert Paul Wolff | Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Published in Seattle University Law Review [Vol. 35:1403-1428]

Michael Roberts — MMT, Minsky, Marx and the money fetish

This is a good historical backgrounder and it should be read for that reason alone. But Michael Roberts also brings up other issues that follow upon this history that are relevant to the current debate, at least some of which that have been brought up previously in the comments here. Highly recommended.

As Maria Ivanova has shown, there remains a blind belief that the crisis-prone nature of the latter can be managed by means of ‘money artistry’, that is, by the manipulation of money, credit and (government) debt. Ivanova argues that the merits of a Marxian interpretation of the crisis surpass those of the Minskyan for at least two reasons. First, the structural causes of the Great Recession lie not in the financial sector but in the system of globalized production. Second, the belief that social problems have monetary or financial origins, and could be resolved by tinkering with money and financial institutions, is fundamentally flawed, for the very recurrence of crises attests to the limits of fiscal and monetary policies as means to ensure “balanced” accumulation.

None of the ‘money fetish’ schemes have worked or will work to get the capitalist economy going. Instead such measures have just created financial bubbles to the benefit of the richest. That’s because these “tricks of circulation” are not based on the reality of the law of value.

Now that we are in the midst of a debate over capitalism and socialism, these issues are coming to the fore. Michael Roberts provides perspective from a Marxian POV.

We are going to hearing a lot of Marx as this debate unfolds and also learn about the rich history of socialist thought. Here is a quick reference on socialism.

Michael Roberts Blog
MMT, Minsky, Marx and the money fetish
Michael Roberts