Marx The Teacher

Marx’s synthesis embraces:

• all those historical events—such as wars, revolutions, legislative changes
• all those social institutions—such as property, contractual relations, forms of government

Non-Marxian economists are treat these as disturbing factors or as data, which means that they do not propose to explain them but only to analyze their modi operandi and consequences.

Such factors or data are of course necessary in order to delimit the object and range of any research program whatsoever.

If they are not always expressly specified, that is only because everyone is expected to know what they are. The trait peculiar to the Marxian system is that it subjects those historical events and social institutions themselves to the explanatory process of economic analysis or, to use the technical lingo, that it treats them not as data but as variables.

Marxists regard the following as class warfare and thus enters the domain of Marxian economics:

• the Napoleonic Wars
• the Crimean War
• the American Civil War
• the World War of 1914
• the French Frondes
• the French Revolution
• the revolutions of 1830 and 1848
• English free trade
• the labor movement
• colonial expansion
• institutional changes
• the national and party politics of every time and country

Class warfare is the revolt against:

• exploitation
• accumulation
• qualitative change in the capital structure
• changes in the rate of surplus value and in the rate of profit.

No longer is “politics” an independent factor that may and must be abstracted from in an investigation of fundamentals and, when it does intrude, plays according to one’s preferences either the role of a naughty boy who viciously tampers with a machine when the engineer’s back is turned, or else the role of a deus ex machina by virtue of the mysterious wisdom of a doubtful species of mammals deferentially referred to as “statesmen.”

No—politics itself is being determined by the structure and state of the economic process and becomes a conductor of effects as completely within the range of economic theory as any purchase or sale. Once more, nothing is easier to understand than the fascination exerted by a synthesis which does for us just this.

The young are:

• impatient to have their innings
• longing to save the world from something
• disgusted with textbooks of un-describable tedium
• dissatisfied emotionally and intellectually
• unable to achieve synthesis by their own effort

They crave for Marx.

Yes, of course—but apart from that, what does this service of the Marxian synthesis amount to? I wonder. The humble economist who describes England’s transition to free trade or the early achievements of English factory legislation is not, and never was, likely to forget to mention the structural conditions of the English economy that produced those policies.

If he does not do so in a course or book on pure theory that merely makes for neater and and more efficient analysis. What the Marxist has to add is only the insistence on the principle, and a particularly narrow and warped theory by which to implement it.

This theory yields results no doubt, and very simple and definite ones to boot. But we need only apply it systematically to individual cases in order to grow thoroughly weary of the unending jingle about the class war between owners and non-owners and to become aware of a painful sense of inadequacy or, worse still, of triviality—of the former, if we do not swear by the underlying schema; of the latter, if we do.

Marxists are in the habit of pointing triumphantly to the success of the Marxian diagnosis of the economic and social tendencies that are supposed to be inherent in capitalist evolution.

There is some justification for this: more clearly than any other writer of his day Marx discerned the trend toward big business and not only that but also some of the features of the consequent situations. We have also seen that in this case vision lent its aid to analysis so as to remedy some of the shortcomings of the latter and to make the import of the synthesis truer than the contributing elements of the analysis were themselves. But this is all. A

nd against the achievement must be set the failure of the prediction of increasing misery, the joint result of wrong vision and faulty analysis, on which a great many Marxian speculations about the future course of social events had been based, He who places his trust in the Marxian synthesis as a whole in order to understand present situations and problems is apt to be woefully wrong. 2 This seems in fact to be felt by many a Marxist just now.

2 Some Marxists would reply that non-Marxian economists have simply nothing to contribute to our understanding of our time so that the disciple of Marx is nevertheless better off in that respect. Waiving the question of whether it is better to say nothing or to say something that is wrong, we should bear in mind that this is not true, for both economists and sociologists of non-Marxian persuasions have as a matter of fact contributed substantially though mostly on individual questions. Least of all can this Marxist claim be based on a comparison of Marx’s teachings with that of the Austrians or of the Walras or Marshall schools. The members of these

In particular there is no reason for taking pride in the manner in which the Marxian synthesis accounts for the experience of the last decade. Any prolonged period of depression or of unsatisfactory recovery will verify any pessimistic forecast exactly as well as it verifies the Marxian one. In this case an impression to the contrary is created by the talk of disheartened bourgeois and elated intellectuals which naturally acquired a Marxian hue from their fears and hopes.

But no actual fact warrants any specifically Marxian diagnosis, still less an inference to the effect that what we have been witnessing was not simply a depression, but the symptoms of a structural change in the capitalist process such as Marx expected to occur.

For, as will be noted in the next part, all the phenomena observed such as supernormal unemployment, lack of investment opportunity, shrinkage of money values, losses and so on, come within the well-known pattern of periods of predominating depression such as the seventies and eighties on which Engels commented with a restraint that should set an example to ardent followers of today.