Marx The Economist

AS AN economic theorist, Marx was a very learned man.

I have called Marx a genius and a prophet.

Yet it is important to appreciate it. Geniuses and prophets do not usually excel in professional learning, and their originality, if any, is often due precisely to the fact that they do not. But nothing in Marx’s economics can be accounted for by any want of scholarship or training in the technique of theoretical analysis. He was a voracious reader and an indefatigable worker. He missed very few contributions of significance. And whatever he read he digested, wrestling with every fact or argument with a passion for detail most unusual in one whose glance habitually encompassed entire civilizations and secular developments. Criticizing and rejecting or accepting and coordinating, he always went to the bottom of every matter.

The outstanding proof of this is in his work, Theories of Surplus Value, which is a monument of theoretical ardor. This incessant endeavor to school himself and to master whatever there was to master went some way toward freeing him from prejudices and extra-scientific aims, though he certainly worked in order to verify a definite vision. To his powerful intellect, the interest in the problem as a problem was paramount in spite of himself; and however much he may have bent the import of his final results, while at work he was primarily concerned with sharpening the tools of analysis proffered by the science of his day, with straightening out logical difficulties and with building on the foundation thus acquired a theory that in nature and intent was truly scientific whatever its shortcomings may have been.

It is easy to see why both friends and foes should have misunderstood the nature of his performance in the purely economic field. For the friends, he was so much more than a mere professional theorist that it would have seemed almost blasphemy to them to give too much prominence to this aspect of his work. The foes, who resented his attitudes and the setting of his theoretic argument, found it almost impossible to admit that in some parts of his work he did precisely the kind of thing which they valued so highly when presented by other hands. Moreover, the cold metal of economic theory is in Marx’s pages immersed in such a wealth of steaming phrases as to acquire a temperature not naturally its own.

Whoever shrugs his shoulders at Marx’s claim to be consideredan analyst in the scientific sense thinks of course of those phrases and not of the thought, of the impassioned language and of the glowing indictment of “exploitation” and “immiserization” (this is probably the best way to render the word Verelendung, which is no more good German than that English monster is good English. It is immiserimento in Italian). To be sure, all these things and many others, such as his spiteful innuendoes or his vulgar comment on Lady Orkney,1 are important parts of the show, were important to Marx himself and are so both for the faithful and for the unbelievers. They explain in part why many people insist on seeing in Marx’s theorems something more than, and even something fundamentally different from, the analogous propositions of his master. But they do not affect the nature of his analysis.

Marx was a pupil of Ricardo. He was his pupil not only in the sense that his own argument evidently starts from Ricardo’s propositions but also in the much more significant sense that he had learned the art of theorizing from Ricardo.

He always used Ricardo’s tools, and every theoretical problem presented itself to him in the form of difficulties which occurred to him in his profound study of Ricardo and of suggestions for further work which he gleaned from it. Marx himself admitted much of this, although of course he would not have admitted that his attitude toward Ricardo was typically that of a pupil who goes to the professor, hears him speak several times in almost successive sentences of redundancy of population and of population that is redundant and again of machinery making population redundant, and then goes home and tries to work the thing out. That both parties to the Marxian controversy should have been averse to admitting this is perhaps understandable. Ricardo’s is not the only influence which acted on Marx’s economics but no other than that of Quesnay, from whom Marx derived his fundamental conception of the economic process as a whole, need be mentioned in a sketch like this. The group of English writers who between 1800 and 1840 tried to develop the labor theory of value may have furnished many suggestions and details, but this is covered for our purpose by the reference to the Ricardian current of thought. Several authors, to some of whom Marx was unkind in inverse proportion to their distance from him and whose work ran in many points parallel to his (Sismondi, Rodbertus, John Stuart Mill), must be left out of account, as must everything not directly pertaining to the main argument— so, for instance, Marx’s distinctly weak performance in the field of money, in which he did not succeed in coming up to the Ricardian standard.

Now for a desperately abbreviated outline of the Marxian argument, unavoidably unjust on many counts to the structure of Das Kapital which, partly unfinished, partly battered by successful attack, still stretches its mighty skyline before us!

1. Marx fell in with the ordinary run of the theorists of his own and also of a later epoch by making a theory of value the corner stone of his theoretical structure. His theory of value is the Ricardian one. I believe that such an outstanding authority as Professor Taussig disagreed with this and always stressed the differences. There is plenty of difference in wording, method of deduction and sociological implication, but there is none in the bare theorem, which alone matters to the theorist of today. 2 Both Ricardo and Marx say that the value of every commodity is (in perfect equilibrium and perfect competition) proportional to the quantity of labor contained in the commodity, provided this labor is in accordance with the existing standard of efficiency of production (the “socially necessary quantity of labor”). Both measure this quantity in hours of work and use the same method in order to reduce different qualities of work to a single standard. Both encounter the threshold difficulties incident to this approach similarly (that is to say, Marx encounters them as he had learned to do from Ricardo). Neither has anything useful to say about monopoly or what we now call imperfect competition. Both answer critics by the same arguments. Marx’s arguments are merely less polite, more prolix and more “philosophical” in the worst sense of this word.