Radical Economics

[edwad]

There are only two kinds of institutions for [the economists], artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any.

Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847)

[edwad]

“If the capitalist merely executes the logic of capital, then it is not he, but rather capital, self-valorizing capital, that is the “subject” of the process. Marx refers to capital in this regard as the “automatic subject,” a phrase that makes the paradox clear: on the one hand, capital is an automaton, something lifeless, but on the other, as the “subject,” it is the determining agent of the whole process.”

— Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital (2012)

[radicaleconomics]

Vociferators for freedom while subjected to the lowest mental slavery — chained to the earth by the most violent and injurious passions — bound hand and foot by the worst habits and most degrading ignorance — and existing amidst intellectual and physical wretchedness, cry out to their deliverers not to touch their bonds, and beseech them to leave them in possession of all the liberty they enjoy! Mistaken hapless beings! They must not, they shall not, be left thus! Their deliverance is near at hand, and they shall enjoy true liberty, both of body and mind.

Robert Owen, A further Development of the Plan for the Relief of the Poor, and the Emancipation of Mankind (1817)

[edwad]

A social relation of production appears as something existing apart from individual human beings, and the distinctive relations into which they enter in the course of production in society appear as the specific properties of a thing – it is this perverted appearance, this prosaically real, and by no means imaginary, mystification that is characteristic of all social forms of labour positing exchange-value.

Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)

[historyofeconomics]

Among civilized and thriving nations… a great number of people do not labour at all, many of whom consume the produce of ten times, frequently of a hundred times more labour than the greater part of those who work…

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776)

[edwad]

When Marx says that this rate of surplus value is “the exact expression” for the degree of exploitation, he means that it is the scientific expression of the efficiency with which hired labor is put to work producing the basis of profits. However, despite his examples of the method of calculating it, Marx is committed to denying that the rate of surplus value can be measured. This is because the rate of surplus value requires as its basis, of course, a measure of value. The measure of value, according to Marx, is the labor time socially necessary to produce the valuable commodities given the current means of production. But […] it is a basic element of Marx’s theory of value that value, while it is determined by labor time, only ever appears as exchange value, as “the social relation between commodity and commodity.” There is no direct, empirical measure of labor time, since there is no way to know whether any given instance of labor actually performed—and hence empirically measurable—counts as an equivalent amount of socially necessary labor. Moreover, the fact that commodities sell on the market does not guarantee that they sell at their values. Hence, neither the prices of commodities (including the wages of labor), nor the empirically measurable hours of labor performed give us access to the value of things. Abstract labor and the value it determines are invisible gods, essences that must take on phenomenal forms, but that never appear as such. Therefore, the exact expression of the degree of exploitation is, by virtue of its exactness, never present in such a way that it can be measured. It is conceptually rigorous, not empirically precise.

William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (2017)

[edwad]

[A]s the neoclassical economists early on complained, if so much goes on in the price realm outside of the purview of value, then why not analyse market prices and their movements directly and forget about values entirely? The disadvantage of so doing is obvious: if we erase the dialectical relation between prices and values then there is no standpoint from which to mount a critique of the monetary representations of the social labour that labourers are called upon to do for others in the course of performing wage labour for capital. We will be powerless to explain where the monetary aspects of crises might come from and why crises in general are inevitably expressed in monetary form.

David Harvey, Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason (2017)

[radicaleconomics]

Political economy is not a science of the relations of things to things, as was thought by vulgar economists, nor of the relations of people to things, as was asserted by the theory of marginal utility, but of the relations of people to people in the process of production.

Isaak Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value (1924)

[kalecki]

Neoliberalism claims that free trade is the best way to foster economic development. But its doctrine is premised on the faulty notion that international competition levels the mighty and raises up the weak. Real competition operates quite differently: it rewards the strong and punishes the weak. From this perspective, the neoliberal push for unfettered free trade can be viewed as a strategy that is most beneficial to the advanced firms of the rich countries.

Anwar Shaikh, The Economic Mythology of Neoliberalism (2004)

[radicaleconomics]

It must never be forgotten ... that the demand for productive consumption, on our assumptions, is the capitalist's demand, and that his true purpose is the production of surplus-value, so that it is only with this in mind that he produces a particular kind of commodity. This does not prevent the capitalist, in so far as he is present on the market as a buyer of cotton, for example, from being the representative of the need for cotton, since it is completely unimportant for the seller of cotton whether the buyer transforms it into shirting or gun-cotton, or whether he uses it to stop up his own and the world's ears. And yet the capitalist's purpose exerts a great influence on the kind of buyer he is. His need for cotton is modified fundamentally by the fact that all it really clothes is his need to make a profit.

Marx | Capital, Volume III (1894)

[radicaleconomics]

Capital can, and indeed must, assume physical form, but its meaning can only be grasped if we perceive these material objects as embodying and symbolizing an expanding totality. A human being cannot exist without flesh and blood, but the essence of humanness is that flesh and blood are in the service of an organizing purpose, a life force. So it is with capital. Without the organizing purpose of expansion, capital dissolves into material building blocks that are necessary but not sufficient to define its life purpose.

Robert L. Heilbroner, The Nature and Logic of Capitalism (1985)

[historyofeconomics]

In every country where nature provides for the needs of men with prodigality, scarcity can only be due to the vices of the administration or the laws themselves; bad laws and bad administration originate in false principles and bad morals. It is a well-known fact that the soil of France produces far more than is needed to feed her inhabitants, and that the current scarcity is artificial.

Robespierre, On Subsistence Goods (1792)

[radicaleconomics]

How many examples I could give, of this assistance given to manufactures in different providences, where I have found the value of a day's work, of spinning, for example, not equal to half the nourishment of the person.

James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767)

[freuds-cokedealer]

[Luther] says in his booklet on commerce that the princes should make Common Cause with thieves and robbers. But in this same writing he is silent about the source of all theft. He is a herald who wants to earn thanks through the shedding of the people’s blood for the sake of temporal goods - which God has certainly not intended. Behold, the basic source of usury, theft, and robbery is our lords and princes, who take all creatures for their private property. The fish in the water, the birds in the air, the animals of the earth must all be their property, Isaiah 5[:8]. And then they let God’s commandment go forth among the poor and they say, “God has commanded, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’” But this commandment does not apply to them since they oppress all men. The poor peasant, the artisan, and all who live are flayed and sheared, Micah 3[:2f.]. But as soon as anyone steals the smallest thing, he must hang. And to this Doctor Liar says, “Amen.” The lords themselves are responsible for making the poor people their enemy. They do not want to remove the cause of insurrection, so how, in the long run, can things improve? I say this openly, so Luther asserts I must be rebellious. So be it!

Thomas Müntzer, A Highly Provoked Defense (1524)

[radicaleconomics]

If the velocity of circulation is given, then the quantity of the means of circulation is simply determined by the prices of commodities. Prices are thus high or low not because more or less money is in circulation, but there is more or less money in circulation because prices are high or low.

Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)

[radicaleconomics]

Free competition in the labor market, in so far as it implies individual bargaining in wage contracting, is certain to leave the workingman, in the more easily recruited occupations, in receipt of wages barely sufficient to maintain a decent livelihood. No amount of thrift or foresight will here provide for the "rainy day," because there is literally nothing that can be so set aside —save, indeed, at the cost of harmful deprivation. Under such conditions of low wages or irregular employment, life is at best a hard, unremitting struggle. When to it come the misfortunes of accident or of illness and the inevitable infirmities of old age, there is no recourse but desperate, unavailing resistance and ultimate poverty.

Jacob Hollander, The Abolition of Poverty (1914)

[radicaleconomics]

Even though masked in the more respectable phrases of biological analogy, laissez-faire has been repudiated alike by public sentiment and by expert opinion as the efficient corrective of social ills. Were it true that natural selection, working raw and unaided in social evolution, would eventually extinguish the evil of poverty, the process of elimination would yet be so wasteful, so brutalizing, as to insure its rejection as a social policy. But as a matter of fact it is not clear that the survival of even the socially fittest, through the operation of selection, would be unattended by poverty. Indeed, the very assumption of such a process is a struggling mass, crowded down to bare subsistence, from which survivorship is possible only at the expense of continuing misery and want on the part of the undertrodden. It is a lethargic optimism rather than any scientific warrant which forecasts the elimination of poverty through social inaction.

Jacob Hollander, The Abolition of Poverty (1914)