Why Read Marx Today?
By Jonathan Wolff
Oxford University Press, 2002
136 pages, $26.95 (pb)
REVIEW BY ALEX MILLER
This book is intended to be both an introduction to the main lines of Marx's thought and also an answer to critics of Marx who question the relevance of his ideas in the 21st century.
The book has three chapters. The first is devoted to Marx's early writings and covers such topics as his critique of religion, his criticisms of Feuerbach, and his studies of alienated labour. The second chapter outlines the views of the mature Marx: historical materialism, the economic theories and the nature of communism. The third chapter attempts an assessment of the views attributed to Marx in chapters one and two.
Wolff's conclusion is that "although Marx's grandest theories are not substantiated ... Marx remains the most profound and acute critic of capitalism, even as it exists today ... [W]e may have no confidence in his solutions to the problems he identifies, but this does not make the problems go away."
On the face of it, then, Wolff attempts to separate Marx the anti-capitalist from Marx the communist. Although he doesn't put it in quite these words, what Wolff appears to be saying is that even though communism is dead in the water, Marx's work is still of profound importance in the 21st century because it highlights the manifold ills of contemporary capitalism. Marx thus emerges as the ideal torchbearer for middle-class radicalism: the project of dealing with the social ills engendered by capitalism without replacing it by a qualitatively different economic system.
Wolff's objections to Marx's "grandest theories" strike me as unpersuasive, and some also manifest errors of interpretation. I will illustrate this with respect to Wolff's "fundamental" objection to the theory of surplus value.
Famously, Marx adopts the labour theory of value that originates in the work of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, according to which the exchange value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour time socially necessary to produce it.
Marx uses the labour theory of value to answer a metaphysical question: what is profit? Or equivalently, what does profit consist in? Marx's answer turns on a peculiar property of one particular kind of commodity: human labour power. Under modern conditions of production, labour power has the property of actually increasing its exchange value in the course of its consumption, so although the capitalist hires the labour power of the worker at its exchange value, he nevertheless is able to expropriate the additional portion of exchange value that accrues during the labour process. This additional portion is surplus value and is, in effect, profit.
Wolff's fundamental objection is that "Once the theory is formulated in mathematical terms it turns out that there is nothing special about labour . That is to say, if one wanted, one could present a 'corn theory of value' , an 'oil theory of value', a 'steel theory of value', or indeed any theory of value at all. A steel theory of value would claim that steel is the source of all value. It also has the remarkable quality that it creates more value than it costs, and thus all capitalist profit comes from the 'exploitation' of steel. Economists would now argue that this is no less justified than the labour theory of value."
Now this is not good pedagogy: we want to know what is wrong with the theory, not an uninformative remark about what 'economists' have argued. What were their arguments, and should we accept them? In any event, Wolff goes on to deal with the rejoinder that's already on your lips: "The obvious reply is that this claim is absurd. All goods contain labour. They don't contain steel. So how can steel be the source of all value? But, unfortunately, this argument equally condemns the labour theory of value. For ... not all goods do contain labour. Uncultivated land ... [for] example."
If there are problems for Marx here, Wolff fails to bring them out. For one thing, he describes the labour theory of value in terms that Marx explicitly repudiates. According to Wolff, the theory states that "labour is the source of all value and all profits", while Marx writes at the opening of the Critique of the Gotha Program: "Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power."
Moreover, uncultivated land can hardly be cited as a counter-example to the labour theory of value, since the labour theory of value is a theory about what determines the exchange value of commodities. Commodities are objects produced by human labour for the purposes of exchange, so that uncultivated land simply falls outside the scope of the theory and thus cannot be cited as a counterexample to it. Marx is in fact quite explicit about this in chapter one of the first volume of Capital: "A thing can be a use-value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, etc."
Those seeking an appreciation of the difficulties faced by Marx's theory are thus likely to find Wolff's discussion unhelpful, as it depends on a statement of the theory in terms that Marx himself rejects and on an attempted counter-example that ignores the explicit scope of the theory. Indeed, having rejected the labour theory of value on the grounds outlined, Wolff's discussion accelerates rapidly downhill. He writes: "How, then, do we answer Marx's question? How, in general, is profit possible? I'm not sure. Perhaps by taking advantage of opportunities that are not available to, or seen by, everyone." This is clearly not even a candidate answer to Marx's metaphysical question "What does profit consist in?"
"Profit consists in taking opportunities" is not even a meaningful answer to the metaphysical question unless we specify opportunities for what. Possibilities include: for expropriating surplus value (Marx's own answer), for selling at a price higher than exchange-value (rejected by Marx and by classical political economy generally), for exercising "abstinence" (a popular answer gleefully demolished by Marx in chapter 24 of Capital volume one). In the absence of some account of what the opportunities are opportunities for, we don't even have the beginning of an answer to the metaphysical question, let alone a convincing one. So, in addition to misconstruing Marx's theory, Wolff apparently also misunderstands the nature of the question that the theory was designed to address.
Arguably, Wolff's objections to other aspects of Marx's "grandest theories" are equally unpersuasive. Since Wolff's attempt to separate Marx the critic of capitalism from Marx the communist is based on these objections, his book fails to persuade us that middle-class radicalism is the most that the 21st century can expect from Marx.
From Green Left Weekly, June 1, 2005.
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