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The game's afoot againnow that Kliman and team have accused Michael
Heinrich of attacking Marx's Capital("The Unmaking of Marx's 'Capital':
Heinrich's Attempt to Eliminate Marx's Crisis Theory"). It's a curious
game because Kliman et al have created a particular avatar to represent
Marx's Capital through their single-system reading (TSSI) of Capital and
then have proceeded to substitute that earthly presence for Capital in
all their work. It seems to generate interesting and fruitful results,
and that is to be lauded. Nevertheless, as I commented here earlier (13
May 2013), 'for me, it is not consistent with Marx (however inventive
its mathematical and empirical exercises may be). However, if the
practitioners of TSSI were to demonstrate their consistency with Marx's
distinction between form and essence [as in 'the price of production is
already a completely externalized and /prima facie/ irrational form of
commodity value, a form that appears in competition' and profit is a
'transformed form of surplus value, a form in which its origin and the
secret of its existence are veiled and obliterated'], I might think
differently.' In effect, the TSSI practitioners place the category
'Fruit' and the peach pit on the same level and then choreograph their
dance. Now, as devotees of the so-called 'transformation problem' will
recognise, they are not at all alone in this. What makes them unique,
though, is that Kliman et al then proceed to substitute their avatar for
the original 'deity', Capital, in all their discussions. Thus, if they
can demonstrate the consistency of their avatar with a conclusion of
Marx, they announce-- Marx was right! And, if someone is critical of
some of their conclusions, they announce that Marx is under attack. Such
substitutionism is familiar: we have seen it displayed dramatically
recently in a political organisation which substituted its own practice
for 'Leninism' and then announced that any criticism of its practice was
an attack on 'Leninism'.
In contrast, Heinrich does offer a reading of Marx far more sensitive to
what Marx actually wrote--- what has now been labelled a 'philological'
exercise. In my view, his recent Monthly Review Press introduction to
Capital offers the best understanding of what Marx was doing, and I
would assign it to my classes in Marxian economics (if I were still
peddling my wares in classrooms). Heinrich's failing, on the other hand,
is his lack of economic analysis of those texts. Thus, in his recent
Monthly Review article on the 'law' of the tendency of the rate of
profit to fall, he stresses the post-1870s drafts of Marx as the basis
of his ultimate conclusion that Marx would have abandoned the 'law' [and
indeed did]. However, aside from the meaning of 'law' [which, as Lenin
understood, never leaves the sphere of appearance], the unique condition
necessary for the rate of profit to fall was already set out by Marx in
the Grundrisse, amplified extensively in the 1861-3 Mss and noted in
Vol.3 of Capital as constructed by Engels--- and the sensitivity of that
condition to relative rates of productivity increase can be demonstrated
analytically. Similarly (although less germane to the immediate issues),
Heinrich is prepared to conclude from the texts that there was no
missing book on 'wage-labour' but doesn't consider the implications of
removing the assumption of the given level of necessity upon the
economic results [including the basis for relative surplus value].
Through pure philology, we are left with a reproduced artifact but not
much to work with. It is an important starting point but if it is the
endpoint, it is a deadend.
michael
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Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
8888 University Drive
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Home: Phone 604-689-9510
Cell: 604-789-4803
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