Behind the crisis : Marx's dialectics of value and knowledge

317 Pages·2011·3.104 MB·English

by  Marx, Karl, Marx, Karl, Carchedi, Guglielmo

Behind the Crisis
Historical
Materialism
Book Series
Editorial Board
Paul Blackledge, Leeds – Sébastien Budgen, Paris
Stathis Kouvelakis, London – Michael Krätke, Lancaster
Marcel van der Linden, Amsterdam
China Miéville, London – Paul Reynolds, Lancashire
Peter Thomas, Amsterdam
VOLUME 26
Behind the Crisis
Marx’s Dialectics of Value and Knowledge
By
Guglielmo Carchedi
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2011
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carchedi, Guglielmo.
Behind the crisis : Marx’s dialectics of value and knowledge / by
Guglielmo Carchedi.
p. cm. — (Historical materialism book series, ISSN 1570-1522 ; v.26)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-18994-2 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Marxian economics. 2. Dialectical materialism. 3. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883. I. Title.
HB97.5.C373 2011
335.4’112—dc22
2010039396
ISSN 1570-1522
ISBN 978 90 04 18994 2
Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
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Contents
Foreword: On Marx’s Contemporary Relevance ...................................... vii
Chapter One Method .................................................................................. 1
1. The need for dialectics .............................................................................. 1
2. Dialectical logic and social phenomena ................................................. 3
3. The dialectics of individual and social phenomena ............................. 22
4. Class-analysis and the sociology of non-equilibrium .......................... 31
5. A dialectics of nature? .............................................................................. 36
6. Formal logic and dialectical logic ........................................................... 39
7. Induction, deduction and verification ................................................... 44
Chapter Two Debates ................................................................................. 53
1. Recasting the issues .................................................................................. 53
2. Abstract labour as the only source of (surplus-) value ........................ 55
3. The materiality of abstract labour ........................................................... 60
4. The tendential fall in the average profit-rate (ARP) ............................. 85
5. The transformation-‘problem’ ................................................................. 101
6. The alien rationality of homo economicus ................................................ 124
Chapter Three Crises .................................................................................. 131
1. Alternative explanations .......................................................................... 131
2. The cyclical movement ............................................................................. 143
3. The subprime debacle ............................................................................... 157
4. Either Marx or Keynes .............................................................................. 170
Chapter Four Subjectivity .......................................................................... 183
1. Crisis-theory and the theory of knowledge .......................................... 183
2. Neither information-society nor service-society .................................. 185
3. Individual knowledge ............................................................................ 192
vi • Contents
4. Social knowledge .................................................................................... 203
5. Labour’s knowledge ............................................................................... 208
6. Knowledge and value ............................................................................ 220
7. The general intellect ............................................................................... 225
8. Science, technique and alien knowledge ............................................. 244
9. Trans-epochal and trans-class knowledge .......................................... 256
10. Knowledge and transition ..................................................................... 267
Appendix One The Building Blocks of Society ....................................... 273
Appendix TWO Objective and Mental Labour-Processes ...................... 277
Appendix Three Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts ............................. 279
References ....................................................................................................... 291
Index ................................................................................................................ 299
Foreword: On Marx’s Contemporary Relevance
As these pages are being written, we are witnessing a deep crisis of the West-
ern capitalist civilisation – overlapping environmental, energy-, and eco-
nomic crises, social exclusion, and famines. The roots of these as well as other
evils should be sought in an economic system whose basic aim is produc-
tion for profit, and that therefore requires human and environmental exploi-
tation, rather than the production for the satisfaction of everybody’s needs
in harmony with each other and thus with nature. The thinker, whose work
offers the sharpest tools for an analysis of the root causes of these and other
social ills, is undoubtedly Marx. Much has been written since Capital was first
published, and more recently after the demise of the Soviet Union and the
consequent triumph of neoliberalism, about the irrelevance, inconsistency,
and obsoleteness of Marx. This book goes against the current. It argues that
Max’s work offers a solid and still relevant foundation upon which to further
develop a multi-faceted theory highly significant to understand the contem-
porary world, both its present condition and its possible future scenarii.
More specifically, this book is about the present crisis. But it is also and
perhaps mainly about what lies behind the crisis. In this, it differs from other
works on this topic, whose focus is essentially the economic causes and conse-
quences of crises. The basic thesis is that, to understand the crisis-ridden nature
of this system, one needs to develop Marx’s own method of enquiry, that is,
to rescue it from the innumerable attempts to see Marx through an Hegelian
lens. This is the task of Chapter 1, which provides a specifically Marxist inter-
pretative template, a distinctive dialectical method of social research extracted
from Marx’s own work rather than from Hegel’s. The starting point is the
conceptualisation, through the application of a clear and workable notion of
dialectics as a method of social research, of social phenomena as the unity-
in-determination of social relations and social processes. This method rests on
three fundamental principles: that social phenomena are always both poten-
tial and realised, both determinant and determined, and subject to constant
viii • Foreword
movement and change. On this basis, the capitalist economy is seen as being
powered by two opposite rationalities: one is the expression of capitalism’s
tendency towards its own supersession and the other is the expression of the
counter-tendency towards reproduction, even if through crises as potential
moments of supersession. In other words, the dialectical method reveals the
dynamics of capitalism, namely, why and how it attempts to supersede itself
while reproducing itself. From this perspective, the economy and thus society
do not and cannot tend towards equilibrium. The notion that the economy
is in a state of equilibrium, or is tending towards it, which is the mainstay of
neoclassical economics and of almost all other economic theories, are, it will
be argued, highly ideological and scientifically worthless. The thesis that capi-
talism tends not towards equilibrium and its own reproduction but towards
its own supersession requires the introduction of a novel distinction, that
between concrete and abstract individuals and thus between individual and
social phenomena. Central to society’s contradictory movement and tendency
towards its own supersession is the dialectical interplay of individual and
social phenomena and thus of subjectivity and objectivity. This subjectivity is
informed by the internalisation by each individual of a double and contradic-
tory rationality in its endless forms of manifestation: capital’s need for human
exploitation and labour’s need for human liberation.
It follows that subjectivity and more generally knowledge, both individual
and social, are contradictory because class-determined. Of great significance
is the question as to whether this principle holds only for the social sciences
or whether it can be valid for the natural sciences and techniques as well.
To anticipate, Chapter 4 examines both similarities and differences between
the dialectics of society in Marx on the one hand and Engels’s dialectics of
nature on the other hand. While there are many common features, one basic
difference stands out: for Marx, all knowledge is class-determined and thus
has a class-content. This includes also the natural sciences and techniques.
Not so for Engels, even though it would be difficult to find in Engels a clear
statement to this effect. Therefore, the difference between the two great think-
ers revolves around the class-determination, as opposed to class-neutrality,
of the natural sciences and techniques and thus of the forces of production.
The importance of the implications of this issue for a theory of social change
cannot be overestimated. Finally, social analysis on the basis of the above-
mentioned three principles of dialectics cannot avoid the question of the use
Foreword • ix
of a dialectical logic as opposed to formal logic. Section 6 in the first chap-
ter considers the basic features of formal logic and its relation to dialectical
logic. On this basis, it distinguishes between formal-logical contradictions
(mistakes) and dialectical contradictions, those which arise from the contra-
diction between the realised and the potential aspects of reality. The conclu-
sion is reached that the rules of formal logic (rather than formal logic itself,
whose class-content is inimical to labour) apply to the realm of the realised
(which without the potentials is a static reality) and that only dialectical logic
(which incorporates the rules of formal logic but not formal logic itself) can
explain movement and change. Substantiation for this approach comes from
Appendix 3, a re-examination of Marx’s mathematical manuscripts. Contrary
to all commentators of the manuscripts, the thesis of this appendix is that the
manuscripts’ real importance resides in providing key insights into, and sup-
port for, the notion of dialectics submitted here as being an explicit rendition
of Marx’s own implicit notion.
Each work bears the imprint of the scientific debates within which it is
formed. At present, Marx’s work is deemed to be, even by many Marxist
authors, logically inconsistent and thus useless as a guide for social action,
unless corrected and modified. The charge goes far beyond the dusty walls of
academia. It challenges no less than Marxism’s claim to be labour‘s theoreti-
cal compass in its struggle against capital. Chapter 2 examines, on the basis
of the method developed in Chapter 1, whether the charges of inconsistency
hold water. Specifically, Chapter 2 focuses on and introduces the reader to the
debates about whether labour is the only source of value, whether abstract
labour is material, whether the average profit-rate tends to fall, and whether
the transformation of values into prices is logically (in)consistent. These are
the four major charges purportedly showing that Marx’s theory is in need of
a major overhaul. This chapter’s basic argument is that the debates have been
misled by an exclusive focus on the quantitative and formal-logical aspects,
thus disregarding those basic traits of Marx’s method, including the temporal
dimension, that reveal the internal consistency of his work. From this perspec-
tive, labour is indeed the only source of value, abstract labour is indeed mate-
rial, the average rate of profit does indeed tend to fall (through the zigzags
of the economic cycle), and Marx’s procedure to transform values into prices
is indeed perfectly logically consistent. In the end, the issue of consistency in
its four aspects should be seen as part and parcel of a wider theory of radical