marxism

Apologies for the delayed response. I have not had time to give a thoughtful reply.

David Harvey was also my very first entry into Marx. I listened to all of the many hours of his lectures and read a couple of his books. Then I learned about Michael Heinrich, one of the leaders of the value-form school — the interpretation of Marx which this blog accuses Harvey of implicitly repeating. I listened to many hours of Heinrich as well, and read a couple of his books, including actually a pretty good biography of Marx's early years.

I posted this article because it expressed some frustrations about Harvey's exposition of Marx; frustrations which I share after having shed things like Harvey's Companion for the source text written by Marx, and after having devoured all Marx's other canonical works. In the Companion, Harvey takes position as the expert, so he can and must be criticized for any inaccuracy intentional or not. Harvey repeatedly describing Capital chapter one as a "cryptic" and "a priori" is anything but an idle point. It's an attack that was levied at Capital almost immediately after publication, to which Marx had to reply:

"Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction."

Here (and in the subsequent paragraphs) Marx refers to the dialectical method used to obtain his result which, when laid out sequentially as in chapter one, might give an impression as a contrived model, produced entirely from Marx's own imagination and fancy.

There are many critics of Capital, especially from the Austrian school e.g. the classical anti-Marx critique by Bohm-Bawerk, who claim that Marx did not succeed in proving that labor is the content of value. A certain interpretation prevails among anti-Marx critics, and even certain Marxists, that the third thing argument in chapter one does not necessarily lead to a conclusion of that third thing being precisely labor; that the third thing could be energy, utility, or any other thing you like that could be conceived as common between two commodities. I think that critique is quite spurious, yet it has trapped even many well-meaning Marxists, including, apparently, David Harvey. Andrew Kliman I think is the one who has most directly discussed Marx's third thing argument and its critics in the last few decades.

On this question of how Marx identifies labor as the unique third thing it is my opinion that I. I. Rubin gives the most correct interpretation of how Marx was able to conclude it. In brief, Marx's method required both analysis and "genetic" (dialectical) construction, a bi-directional movement:

my bold format there at the end.

I believe Rubin is correct about Marx's methodology here. For Marx to be able to deduce specifically labor in his third thing argument, what is "a priori" is something already established in earlier of Marx's works and those parts of Political Economy which he accepted, i.e. certain categories like commodity, exchange-value, use-value, etc. (of course not without Marx's further categorical critique).

Marx mostly accepts the analysis done by prior political economists:

"Political economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour time by the magnitude of that value."

... the point of Capital, besides critiquing some aspects of that earlier analysis, is to reverse direction using a dialectical approach, reconstructing the theory on the basis of a corrected understanding of value and of (the dual character of) labor. It is not needed to prove that labor is the third thing because that was already known during the analytical phase of the investigation. Marx then starts from labor in order to discover value, as Marx writes in a letter:

"Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish. And every child knows, too, that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour. It is self-evident that this necessity of the distribution of social labour in specific proportions is certainly not abolished by the specific form of social production; it can only change its form of manifestation. Natural laws cannot be abolished at all. The only thing that can change, under historically differing conditions, is the form in which those laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself in a state of society in which the interconnection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products."

This was a bit of a detour, but I had to point to some of the context surrounding this notion that Marx had contrived his labor theory of value, and why Harvey should be criticized for repeating it.