Saturday, October 6, 2018

David Norman Smith — Sharing, not selling: Marx against value

In 1975, when I began to study Capital as a first-year graduate student, I was looking for the errors that my undergraduate economics teachers had told me rendered Capital obsolete. Several of these teachers belonged to the Union of Radical Political Economists and saw themselves as Marxists. But they agreed with their non-Marxist colleagues that Marx’s core value concepts were naively Hegelian. The good news, they said, was that the superstructure of Marx’s theory–class, capital exploitation–was sociologically valid. I had already begun to write about capital and class so I found this perspective congenial.(20) But, since I was also drawn to Capital’s value-logic, I was perplexed. I was still a raw beginner, and I was open to the premise that the critical theory of the future would sail from harbors other than Capital. But a simple question remained unclear to me: Was Capital actually wrong?
To see for myself I annotated Chapter 1 of Capital word for word, day after day, for a year, searching for Marx’s fundamental error. Decades later I still haven’t found it. I’ve now been immersed in Capital and Marx’s ancillary texts for a long time, and I always find them profound and convincing.(21) I find it jarring to set Capital aside to read lesser works. But I’ve also taught Capital for decades, and I know from experience that readers find his terminology confusing. So, in what follows, I attempt to explain Marx’s ABCs in a fresh way. My goal is not to reproduce every nuance of Chapter 1 but to capture Marx’s enduring, essential logic....
Monthly Review
Sharing, not selling: Marx against value
David Norman Smith | Professor of Sociology, University of Kansas
Originally published at Continental Thought & Theory 1 (4), 2017, 653-695

4 comments:

AXEC / E.K-H said...

#DeleteEconomics #DeleteMarx

The Profit Theory is False Since Adam Smith
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-profit-theory-is-false-since-adam.html

Karl Marx, fake scientist
https://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/08/karl-marx-fake-scientist.html

If we only had classes
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2018/10/if-we-only-had-classes.html

Profit for Marxists
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2414301

Marx’s bicentennial ― nothing to discuss, nothing to celebrate
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2018/05/marxs-bicentennial-nothing-to-discuss.html

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke

#Economics #FailedScience #FakeScience #CargoCultScience #ScientificIncompetence #Economists #PoliticalEconomics #OrthodoxEconomics #HeterodoxEconomics #Pluralism #ProfitTheory #DistributionTheory #NewEconomicThinking #ParadigmShift #NewParadigm #Science

Matt Franko said...

Uh oh:

“Many critics fault Marx for his dialectical style. I regard that as one of his strengths....”

Oh... oh.... I thought methodology was immaterial????? Uh oh!!!! Seems like this guy thinks it’s important?!?!? Uh oh!!!!

Matt Franko said...

“Karl Marx, fake scientist”

Marx isn’t “faking” anything... he used a dialectic methodology which is a different methodology from a didactic methodology used in empirical science ...

You are remaining ignorant of method...

Andrew Anderson said...

Speaking of "sharing", why should anyone with equity share it via common stock issuance when they can instead use that equity (as collateral) to acquire what is, in essence*, the public's credit but for private gain?

*Due to government privileges for the banks and other depository institutions.