Tag Archives: Marx

The trouble with this idea of Marx is that, as formulated in volume 3 of Capital, Marx has insulated it against empirical refutation. As Michael Heinrich has argued here, it collapses into an anti-empirical and analytic tautology, which cannot be proven by empirical evidence. For Marx, it becomes a long-run tendency so that even if we had 1,000 years of capitalism and there was no long-run tendency of the rate of profit to fall visible in the data, Marx can evade criticism by claiming that...

This can be clearly seen from Marx’s statement in Chapter 3 of volume 1 of Capital: “The State puts in circulation bits of paper on which their various denominations, say £1, £5, &c, are printed. In so far as they actually take the place of gold to the same amount, their movement is subject to the laws that regulate the currency of money itself. A law peculiar to the circulation of paper money can spring up only from the proportion in which that paper money represents gold. Such a law...

Chapter 13 of volume 1 of Capital is called “Co-operation” and it deals with the concept of cooperation of workers in production process and with historical aspects of the development of capitalist modes of production.Marx sees cooperation in capitalism as having three historical forms (1) simple co-operation, (2) manufacture, and (3) modern industry, but the earlier forms can persist within modern capitalism (Brewer 1984: 50).At the beginning of capitalist history, Marx sees changes in the...

From Louis Boudin’s book The Theoretical System of Karl Marx in the Light of Recent Criticism (1920): “The appearance in 1894 of the third volume of Capital created a sensation in interested circles. While it does not stand in any direct relation to the Revisionist movement, it can hardly be denied that it made its formal argumentation more plausible. The solution of the Great Contradiction contained in the third volume, and the rest of the matter therein contained and intimately connected...

From Alexander Gray’s book The Development of Economic Doctrine: An Introductory Survey (1956): “… the Marxian explanation suffers from two inner inherent contradictions (or two aspects of the same contradiction) from which it never escaped, and on which it finally made shipwreck in the third volume. In the first place, if all profit springs from variable capital and none from machinery, then it is the height of folly ever to introduce machinery, and it is a poor explanation to suggest that...

Chapter 11 of volume 1 of Capital is called “The Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value” (Marx 1990: 417), and it deals with further aspects of surplus value.In essence, Marx makes a number of points in this chapter as follows: (1) the rate of surplus value is dependent on the duration of the working day and the value of labour-power;(2) the total mass of surplus value can be measured by s/v multiplied by the value of total variable capital, and capitalists wish to maximise the mass of...

The expression “Engels’ Pause” was coined by Robert C. Allen and refers to the period of real wage stagnation or low real wage growth in Britain in the early 19th century from about 1800 to 1840, even when real per capita GDP was rising in an historically unprecedented manner. You can see the “pause” in the graph of historical British real wages and per capita GDP per worker here.First, it is important to note that some economic historians have challenged the data on GDP and real wages in...

The following proposition is asserted as true by Marxists (e.g., Foley 1986: 16): Proposition 1: Socially necessary labour time is the only source of value. Marx asserted this numerous times, though not necessarily in these words, and here are some examples: “A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? Plainly, by the quantity of the...

In 1904, Rudolf Hilferding wrote a response to Böhm-Bawerk (1896) called “Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx” (Hilferding 1949 [1904]).In this essay of Hilferding, we have a fascinating confirmation of the way in which the early Marxists were concerned to still vindicate the law of value in volume 1 of Capital – the idea that commodities tend to exchange at pure labour values – as an empirical theory.Like Engels, they seized on Marx’s statement in Chapter 10 of volume 3 of Capital as follows:...

It is not difficult to identity them: (1) the use of a proto-effective demand theory by Marx;(2) endogenous money theory;(3) Marx’s rejection of Say’s law;(4) the notion of a monetary production economy (also developed as a theory by Keynes); and(5) a conflict theory of the distribution of income, and the recognition that workers and capitalists have unequal power. However, the trouble is that none of these insights prove that Marx’s overall theory was right: far from it.There are many...