Marx The Teacher

In the Marxian argument sociology and economics pervade each other.

In intent and in actual practice, they are one.

All the major concepts and propositions are hence both economic and sociological and carry the same meaning on both planes—if, from our standpoint, we may still speak of two planes of argument.

Thus, the economic category “labor” and the social class “proletariat” are, on principle at least, made congruent, in fact identical.

Or the economists’ functional distribution—that is to say, the explanation of the way in which incomes emerge as returns to productive services irrespective of what social class any recipient of such a return may belong to—enters the Marxian system only in the form of distribution between social classes and thus acquires a different connotation. Or capital in the Marxian system is capital only if in the hands of a distinct capitalist class. The same things, if in the hands of the workmen, are not capital.

There cannot be any doubt about the access of vitality which comes to analysis thereby. The ghostly concepts of economic theory begin to breathe.

The bloodless theorem descends into agmen, pulverem et clamorem; without losing its logical quality, it is no longer a mere proposition about the logical properties of a system of abstractions; it is the stroke of a brush that is painting the wild jumble of social life. Such analysis conveys not only richer meaning of what all economic analysis describes but it embraces a much broader field—it draws every kind of class action into its picture, whether or not this class action conforms to the ordinary rules of business procedure.

Wars, revolutions, legislation of all types, changes in the structure of governments, in short all the things that non-Marxian economics treats simply as external disturbances do find their places side by side with, say, investment in machinery or bargains with labor—everything is covered by a single explanatory schema.

At the same time, such procedure has its shortcomings. Conceptual arrangements that are subject to a yoke of this kind may easily lose in efficiency as much as they gain in vividness. The pair, worker-proletarian, may serve as a telling if somewhat trite example.

In non-Marxian economics all returns to services of persons partake of the nature of wages, whether those persons are tophole lawyers, movie stars, company executives or street sweepers.

Since all these returns have, from the standpoint of the economic phenomenon involved, much in common, this generalization is not futile or sterile. On the contrary, it may be enlightening, even for the sociological aspect of things. But by equating labor and proletariat we obscure it; in fact, we entirely banish it from our picture.

Similarly, a valuable economic theorem may by its sociological metamorphosis pick up error instead of richer meaning and vice versa.

Thus, synthesis in general and synthesis on Marxian lines in particular might easily issue in both worse economics and worse sociology. Synthesis in general, i.e., coordination of the methods and results of different lines of advance, is a difficult thing which few are competent to tackle.

In consequence it is ordinarily not tackled at all and from the students who are taught to see only individual trees we hear discontented clamor for the forest. They fail to realize however that the trouble is in part an embarras de richesse and that the synthetic forest may look uncommonly like an intellectual concentration camp.

Synthesis on Marxian lines, i.e., coordination of economic and sociological analysis with a view to bending everything to a single purpose, is of course particularly apt to look like that.

The purpose—that histoire raisonnée of capitalist society—is wide enough but the analytic setup is not. There is indeed a grand wedding of political facts and of economic theorems;

But they are wedded by force and neither of them can breathe.

Marxists claim that their system solves all the great problems that baffle non-Marxian economics.

But it really solves it by emasculating the problems.