"J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." wrote:
> Carrol,
> How about "political economist"?
Certainly much better than "economist," though by "critique of
political economy" Marx meant, I believe, to show from inside
political economy that it was necessarily incoherent, and that
that incoherence flowed from the historical actuality of the
mode of production that political economy assumed was the
only natural mode of production.
However that may be, it seems to me that one of the absolutely
key passages in Marx's work is the following. Does the term
"political economy" fit it?
Carrol
****
Thus *Providence* is the locomotive which makes the whole of M.
Proudhon's economic baggage move better than his pure and
volatilised reason. He has devoted to Providence a whole chapter, which
follows the one on taxes.
Providence, providential aim, this is the great word used today to
explain the movement of history. In fact, this word explains nothing.
It is at most a rhetorical form, one of the various ways of paraphrasing
facts.
It is a fact that in Scotland landed property acquired a new value
by the development of English industry. This industry opened up new
outlets for wool. In order to produce wool on a large scale, arable
land had to be transformed into pasturage. To effect this
transformation, the estates had to be concentrated. To concentrate
the estates, small holdings had first to be abolished, thousands of
tenants had to be driven from their native soil and a few shepherds
in charge of millions of sheep to be installed in their place. Thus,
by successive transformations, landed property in Scotland has
resulted in the driving out of men by sheep.
Now say that the providential aim of the institution of landed property
in Scotland was to have men driven out by sheep, and you will have
made providential history.
Of course, the tendency towards equality belongs to our century. To
say now that all former centuries, with entirely different needs, means
of production, etc., worked providentially for the realisation of
equality is, firstly, to substitute the means and the men of our century
for the men and the means of earlier centuries and to misunderstand the
historical movement by which the successive generations transformed the
results acquired by the generations that preceded them. Economists know
very well that the very thing that was for the one a finished product
was for the other but the raw material for new production.
Suppose, as M. Proudhon does, that social genius produced, or
rather improvised, the feudal lords with the providential aim of
transforming the *settlers* into *responsible* and *equally-placed*
workers: and you will have effected a substitution of aims and of
persons worthy of the Providence that instituted landed property in
Scotland, in order to give itself the malicious pleasure of driving
out men by sheep.
But since M. Proudhon takes such a tender interest in Providence,
we refer him to the *Histoire de l'economie politique* of M. de
Villenneuve-Bargemont, who likewise goes in pursuit of a providential
aim. This aim, however, is not equality, but catholicism.
*Pov. Phil* (Moscow, 1973), pp. 104-105
