Search results

The purpose of this paper is to assess Marx's enduring significance in the center of his thought, the first volume of Capital. In Capital and related writings, Marx systematically works out his theory of value. Although Marx's value theory has been widely thought to be internally inconsistent, the “myth of inconsistency” in reclaiming Marx's “Capital” has been recently refuted by Kliman.

Based on Kliman's refutation, a logically coherent interpretation of Marx's theory is on hand. The paper therefore aims to bring out the philosophical character of Marx's critique of political economy, to which the terms and relations of value theory are essential. It is rooted in the abiding humanism he first discovered through his critical appropriation and transformation of Hegelian philosophy.

Following Raya Dunayevskaya in Marxism and Freedom, this paper interprets Marx to have founded a new critical science of society “that was at the same time a philosophy of history.” Hence Marx's use of ontological categories in Capital (“substance,” “essence,” “appearance”) is fully methodologically self‐conscious and deliberate. Categories derived from Hegel's Science of Logic (as Lenin rightly grasped) explain the “bewitched and distorted world” of capitalist social relations.

This paper shows that, thinking historically, Marx works out the “notion” of capital from the standpoint of its negation. As if seen through a camera obscura, capital is the domination of alienated, past, objectified, abstract, and dead labor over living labor power. In conclusion, emphasis is placed on the subjective as well as the objective condition necessary to the revolutionary transcendence of the law of value.

During the last two decades, many Marxian economists have brought forth empirical evidence that supposedly supports a version of the “labor theory of value” that Marx rejected, namely the theory that individual commodities’ prices tend to equal their values. However, recent studies have challenged this conclusion. The present paper offers additional evidence and arguments against it. Firstly, the theory in question implies that prices will be higher, ceteris paribus, in industries in which variable capital is a relatively large component of total cost, but regression analysis of U.S. data compels us to reject this hypothesis. Secondly, although sectoral values and prices are very strongly correlated, simulation results indicate that the observed correlations are no higher than the correlations that can be obtained by aggregation, even if the disaggregated values and prices are uncorrelated and extremely far apart. Finally, many studies have found that average price-value deviations are small, but it is shown here that this finding is meaningless, since aggregation of the data tends systematically to reduce measures of average deviation.

Research in the temporal single-system (TSS) interpretation of Marx's value theory has refuted the Okishio theorem, which had supposedly disproved the law of the falling profit rate. In response to critics who confirm the correctness of the TSS refutation but, curiously, still uphold the Okishio theorem, this paper clarifies what the theorem actually asserts and why that assertion is false. It also shows that TSS results do matter: the contradiction between value and use-value, and the difference between temporal and simultaneous valuation, are crucial. Finally, the paper examines the role the Okishio theorem has played in suppressing Marx's work.

For Marxists, the present controversies are rooted in Marx's own development and exposition of the labor theory of value, especially its presentation in Volumes I (Marx, 1954 [1867]) and III of Capital. As is well known, in Volume I, Marx begins with his analysis of commodities, emphasizing the role of human labor in both its concrete and abstract aspects, and from that he develops (1) the concepts of (exchange) value, of socially necessary labor time, and of its expression in the form of money and the distinction between value and price; (2) the concepts of capital and of surplus value; and (3) the concept of the commodity labor power. With these concepts, his analysis of capitalist production lays bare the nature of capitalist exploitation and links the phenomenon of profit to surplus value (i.e., the unpaid labor time of productive workers). In Parts I and II of Volume III, Marx, explicitly allowing for the interplay of many different capitals, endeavors to show how surplus value is converted into profit, how the rate of surplus value is converted into the rate of profit, how the general rate of profit is formed, and how the values of commodities are transformed into prices of production. He claimed that the transformation preserved the following equalities: total value=total prices; total surplus value=total profits; and, the rate of profit=the rate of surplus value. Marx's presentation of this material in Volume III is, unfortunately, quite rough, since this material is comprised of manuscripts that he had prepared prior to the publication of Volume I in 1867. These manuscripts were not, however, in a final, finished state, and unfortunately Marx never got around to getting them ready for publication.

To challenge the validity/usefulness of teaching mainstream neo‐classical/new‐classical economics, by contending that Marx provides a superior understanding of the essential nature of the capitalist system.

To explain Marx the hermeneutic issue of which Marx must be addressed. Simultaneous and dualistic interpretations of Marx question Marx's key conclusions, suggesting that Marx's value theory is inconsistent. In contrast the Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI) of Marx contends that all of Marx's key conclusions/results hold if one adopts a sequential and non‐dualistic methodological approach, restoring Marx's central message/power.

Explains how Marx endogenously accounts for the inevitable cyclical behaviour of capitalism, its tendency to concentrate and the development of the financial system. In short, Marx can explain the tendencies observed in the globalising world, whereas it is contended that mainstream analysis is hampered by prioritising an ideal simultaneous equilibrium and investigating how it might be exogenously disturbed.

If, as is contended, Marx's economics provides a superior understanding of the world, then research into Marx and analysis based on Marxian foundations should be prioritised.

Marx should be widely taught to improve students' understanding of the economy.

Quite simply challenges orthodoxy by rediscovering value.

This chapter challenges the denial of “underconsumption” – the role of consumption demand in capitalist reproduction and its paucity in crises – in contemporary Marxism. At stake are better understandings not only of crisis theory but also, inter alia, of imperialism, “reformism,” and Marx's intellectual legacy. The chapter shows how the centrality of consumption demand is underlined in the three volumes of Capital and the Grundrisse, and goes on to discuss the origins, weaknesses, and persistence of this denial. The chapter also shows that Marx did not regard underconsumption as a moralistic argument about unfulfilled need. The denial originates not in Marx but in productionism, the idea that capitalism is a system of “production for production's sake.”

Originating in the overkill of Tugan Baranowski's refutation of the Russian populists’ view that capitalist development was impossible in Russia due to lack of a home market, productionism is based on his attempt to force Marxism into the marginalist and the general equilibrium framework. Despite its antipathy with Marxism, most contemporary Marxist economics are based on it. Inevitably its adherence to Say's Law – the denial of the possibility of gluts in the market – infects the tendency to assume that capitalism's contradictions do not lie in circulation. Productionism's denial of the importance of consumption demand also rests on nonsequiturs, nondialectical thinking, and an underestimation of the contradictions in capitalism Marx identified, other than the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The chapter ends by showing the centrality of demand in the recent historical evolution of capitalism as reconstructed by Robert Brenner, followed by a discussion of whether underconsumption is “reformist.”