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Marx's Challenge to Classical Political Economy

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Моральные основы политики

Йельский университет

4.8 (оценок: 1,501) | Зарегистрировано учащихся: 65K

When do governments deserve our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? This course explores the main answers that have been given to this question in the modern West. We start with a survey of the major political theories of the Enlightenment: Utilitarianism, Marxism, and the social contract tradition. In each case, we begin with a look at classical formulations, locating them in historical context, but then shift to the contemporary debates as they relate to politics today. Next, we turn to the rejection of Enlightenment political thinking, again exploring both classical and contemporary formulations. The last part of the course deals with the nature of, and justifications for, democratic politics, and their relations to Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment political thinking. In addition to exploring theoretical differences among the various authors discussed, considerable attention is devoted to the practical implications of their competing arguments. To this end, we discuss a variety of concrete problems, including debates about economic inequality, affirmative action and the distribution of health care, the limits of state power in the regulation of speech and religion, and difficulties raised by the emerging threat of global environmental decay.

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SM

Dec 16, 2015

Excellent, thought-provoking course. I especially enjoyed the final week lectures that pulled it all together. Both should be required listening for both voters and politicians in democracies.

CW

Nov 01, 2015

This was a phenomenal course that really motivated me to understand the moral foundations of arguments and systems of politics. I look forward to retaining my course material and studying it.

Из урока

Marxism, Its Failures and Its Legacy

This module on Marx's Enlightenment theory focuses on the foundations of capitalism theory and its major weaknesses.

Marx Introduction8:49

Marx as an Enlightenment Thinker15:33

Marx's Challenge to Classical Political Economy20:44

Преподаватели

Ian Shapiro
Sterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director

Текст видео

But what we're going to do is, is going forward now.

We're going to have three lectures that explore the, the Marxist

intellectual revolution and its place in the enlightenment tradition.

And what, what we're going to do is start today with a, what

I'm going to call the project of classical political economy and his place in it.

Because you cannot understand Marxist theory or

his influence, unless you understand that he basically saw himself as,

as speaking to the great classical political economists of his day.

This is if course after he had shed his.

Young Hegelian enthusiasms for these young anti-Hegelia, Hegelian

enthusiasms and, was digging in seriously to the analysis of capitalism.

He saw himself as, trying to answer the basic question of political economy.

And the basic question fo political economy was, where does value come from?

What is it that produces value?

And the way he understood it is, he said, how is profit possible,

in a market economy when equivalence are exchanged for equivalence.

Things of equal value are swapped for one, for one another in market economies.

But so, how does just trading produce value?

It doesn't tell you where value comes from, right?

So, this is the big problem.

And the way I think is easiest to explain what,

what the classical, political economists thought they were doing is.

Imagine, imagine you arrive from outer space and looked at a market economy.

This is Marx's beginning of Das Kapital.

He says, what you, he doesn't say from outer space that's me.

But, but I'm just, taking some expositional license here.

What you would see is people running around exchanging things commodities.

People would produce a commodity, they would exchange it for money and

then they would use the money to go and buy another commodity.

That's what goes on in market systems, right?

You, you, we have a division of labor, you have a lot of shoes, you sell your

shoes to somebody for money, you then use the money to buy food and you eat it.

This is what goes on, people are exchanging things, but

then he'd say that if you looked a little closer, you would see that

some people in market systems are actually doing something a bit different.

They're starting out with money, they're going and buying commodities and

then selling the commodities and walking away with more money.

Okay, they take money, they buy commodities, and then they get money.

For the first, the first group, the point seems to be consumption.

You've got too many shoes and not enough food, because of the division of labor,

so you sell your shoes, get some money, use the money to buy food, right?

But the other people, they're clearly doing something different

because somehow it seems to be about money for them.

And indeed if you look even more closely what you'll see is,

not just that they exchange money for some commodity and

then get rid of sell the commodity on and get money.

The second time they actually get more money.

That they I've put it up there is m prime.

So that m prime is, is greater than m.

And so the question is, where does the prime come from?

Where does profit come from all right?

How is it that in the course of exchange, money seems to grow?

That if we can understand that, we will know where profit comes from.

We'll know where value comes from.

We'll know what creates value, right.

Yeah?

>> I have a question.

How about then, supply and demand?

Because we know that supply and

demand is regulating the prices in the market economy.

So this is confusing.

>> Okay, so that's a very good question, and

I'm going to I'll get to it in a minute.

So just hold it, hold it for a minute.

Marx's answer you might think is,

is actually in contradiction to what you just said.

Because he says, what produces value,

what produces profit, is in fact the lay, labor, the labor theory of value.

So I need here to make a couple of important conceptual distinctions.

One is that Marx distinguishes between what he calls, use value and

exchange value.

Use value, he thinks of,

is just, as we, in this course have already talked about as utility,

usefulness, makes you, satisfies you, makes you happy, Bentham would have said.

So that's what use value is.

For Marx exchange value is price.

Okay the price at which things exchange.

And he says the exchange value or the price of anything

is determined by the amount of labor necessary to produce it.

That's what we generally think of right?

But there's a puzzle there, and I'll get to your point about supply and

demand in a minute, but there's a puzzle right there in that,

let's suppose you guys are manufacturing typewriters.

And you can manufacture a typewriter in 40 hours.

He, on the other hand, is a perfectionist.

And so spends more time polishing every key to his own satisfaction.

So you produce the typewriter in 40 hours.

And he produces the same typewriter in 60 hours right.

You might think the labor theory of value would say well his typewriter would be

more valuable than your typewriter.

Marx says no, and that's his concept of socially necessary labor time, or SNLT.

He says here, the labor-time required to socially

necessary labor-time is the labor-time required to produce any use-value,

under the conditions of production normal for a given society.

With the average degree of skill and intensity that prevails in the society.

So if he is a slacker or a perfectionist that he wants to

make the typewriter just the way he wants it to be.

What Marx would end up saying is those extra 20 hours, are really,

it's really some, socially unnecessary labor.

He's wasting time by, if you can produce the,

what everybody would argue is the, the, the same typewriter.

What most people would perceive to be the same typewriter in 40 hours.

That's what's going to determine its price and the, the,

the 20 hours of additional love and,

and commitment that he puts into his typewriter is going to be wasted, okay?

So it's not the actual amount of work.

>> Are we supposing that the, the quality's exactly the same?

>> Yes.

>> And that the time becomes arbitrary after.

>> So we would have to say that people think the quality is the same.

You might, you might have that view but I, I put so much tender loving

care in to the creation of this P key on the typewriter, nobody cares.

>> Yeah. >> Right so its,

its unn, socially unnecessary labor what determines the price of

which things are going to exchange, the exchange value is, the amount of

socially necessary labor time to produce the typewriter key in question.

Okay, but, now let's come to your question about supply and demand.

Cause you could say, well, but if, if the demand for typewriters goes up the price

is going to go up, and if the demand for typewriters falls, you know, because

somebody comes out with computers, the price of typewriters is going to go down.

We all know that.

It's like a elementary, right, fact about market economies.

So how could it possibly be the case.

That the labor theory of value,

is going to tell you the price at which things exchange.

Just doesn't compute.

Doesn't make any sense.

I think that's right.

But Marx wasn't a fool.

He knew all about markets and he knew all about supply and demand and so

I think that the way to understand this is to say that Marx would have said.

Yes in the short run, supply and demand determine prices, but

in the long run supply and demand determine output.

Supply and demand determine what gets produced.

So, of course there'll be short,

there'll be fluctuations in the prices of all commodities in the market, but

in the long run, if the price goes up then more will get produced.

Another way to think about it is, I think if you,

if we wanted to translate this into the terminology of modern economics,

we would say for Marx the labor theory of value tells you.

What the price would be when supply and demand are in equilibrium.

So it, it's, or it's what a modern economist might call

the long run equilibrium price of something.

So, or, or another way to put is is the labor thera, theory of

value tells you what the point is around which supply and demand fluctuate.

Right.

And as I said that so

it, it sort of like the notion of a long rum equilibrium price.

So it's, it's not that supply and demand are irrelevant but

in the long run supply and demand determine what gets produced and

not the value the, the exchange value or the price.

Is going to be determined by, the amount of

socially necessary labor time, not the actual amount of work that people do,

but what they need to do in order to produce something of that quality.

Okay, so that's the first building block, but the really interesting and

important building block is the one we're going to get to now.

And that's the thing called the labor theory of surplus value,

because this is going to tell us, where value comes from.

You might say, well what is labor power?

For Marx, labor power is a commodity just like everything else.

What's the value of labor-power?

It's determined by the amount of ne,

labor necessary to produce the labor-power, right?

So, this would be why a nuclear physicist would be paid more than a day laborer.

Because, not because the nuclear physicist is doing something more important or for

which there's different demand, but

because it takes more to produce a nuclear physicist.

Got all that education,

all that training, goes into the production of the nuclear physicist.

And so that's why a nuclear physicist would be paid more than a day laborer.

So when we think about labor power,

it's just a commodity like any other thing that's produced in a market system.

Now you might say, well, if that was the case.

You know, how is it that Michelangelo exchange for millions of dollars,

why is it that sports stars get paid millions of dollars?

Could you imagine what Marx might say to that?

It's a hard question.

>> Are you, are you saying that Michelangelo is, had artistic gifts and

the athlete is blessed with natural athletic ability?

>> Certainly so, but, still, why would they,

why would their work be worth millions and millions?

I mean, how would Marx have to wrestle with that if he wants to say

their labor power is produced by the work of produced men.

>> Maybe that their is this big demand for them?

And then the price goes up?

>> Part is because of this big demand so

that tells you this, that tells you something about short run.

But in the, you know,

over the very long run these Michelangelos were, you know, they're priceless.

I think what Marx would have to say is well,

when you think about somebody like Michelangelo, you've also gotta think

about all the failed painters that all those Popes invested money in.

That didn't go anywhere, and

that's all part of the cost of producing a Michelangelo.

And so likewise when you think about a baseball player, you have to

think about the costs of the farm systems, all the triple A, the double A,

the A league, all the injured players that you know, all of that gets factored in.

To the cost of producing the baseball star or the Michelangelo.

That's what he would say, that at the end of the day,

it takes a huge investment to produce people like this.

Now, this is a debatable way of going about it, and we'll see that.

Part of what explains the huge acceleration in

sports hours has to do with things called winner takes all markets.

And we'll get into that later.

But certainly in Marx's conceptual scheme of things,

he would have to say that it really comes down to the cost of.

Producing a Michelangelo or or a baseball star includes all of these other costs.

That we don't see okay?

But and this is where this gets

I think we get to the core of the, the Marxist idea about how,

capitalism works is that labor power is a commodity just like shoes and

trees and books, but it has one difference, and that is

its consumption as a use value leads to the creation of fresh exchange value.

So this is the basic intuition.

Suppose I, I have 500 dollars and

that im considering two, two ways of spending my 500 dollars.

I could go out with some friends for

a fancy meal with good wine and spend the $500.

Or I could pay you to paint my house, with the $500.

If I pay you to paint my house, assuming you'd do a good job,

which I guess you would, at the end of it I have a more valuable house.

Because it's a freshly painted house.

But, I could sell it for more than if it hadn't been painted.

If I spend the $500 on the meal, at the end of it,

I've had a nice meal, that's it.

I've consumed it, it's gone.

Okay? So, this is the intuition about where

value comes from.

That the consumption of labor power as a commodity differs

from the consumption of any other commodity, in that in consuming it,

in consuming your time, I buy your time to paint that house.

I consume the time, just as I consume the meal.

But when I consume the meal, I have nothing of value.

When I've finished consuming your time, I have a more valuable house.

And that's why this, this phrase, it's,

what's unique about living human labor power is that its consumption as

a use value leads to the creation of fresh exchange value.

And that's where value comes from.

That's where profit ultimately comes from, as well.

For that reason I'm just putting this as explaining a little bit of jargon to you.

Marx makes a distinction between what he calls constant capital and

variable capital.

This won't make any sense to you now, but it will later.

And the, the basic point is he wants to divide up what the capitalist spends

in to, what the capitalist spends on wages, because wages

are this magical consumption that produces new fresh value,

versus what the capitalist spends on everything else, research and development,

rent, plant and equipment advertising that's what equals constant capital.

So big C stands for capital and its split in to

this constant capital which are everything other than his wage bill or

her wage bill and then variable capital which is going to be the wage bill.

We'll get in to why he uses these terms later, but its to capture this idea.

That, the consumption of labor power leads to the creation of fresh exchange value.

And now you can start to see why I'm characterizing Marx

as an enlightenment thinker.

Go back now, this conjures up Locke’s idea of workmanship, right?

God created us but he made us into miniature gods,

the capacity to create things, right?

This is all right there in chapter five of the Second Treatise.

That we, we talked about in connection with Locke.

that, that human beings have given this creative capacity.

So it's really a secular variant of

Locke's idea of human beings as miniature gods.

Huge changes come in for

politics because it's a secular variant and we'll talk about those later.

But what we'll do next time is dig into

Marx's understanding of the dynamics of capitalism.

>> Can I just ask one last question?

>> Yeah.

>> How then to explain if for Marx, the economy was based off everything.

How then to explain that all communist countries basically fail on

that principal?

And if we take this idea if, oh, it's economy, stupid,.

It seems like the communist system, they totally misunderstood Marx.

>> So, Marx would not have recognized that any of the so

called communist countries were communist countries.

Marx's view, for reasons that we'll go into next time.

His view was that communism could only, it can, could only come into come

into being at the very advanced stages of capitalism because the,

the historical task of capitalism was to massively increase productivity, through

the division of labor, through Adam Smith's pins factory that we talked about.

And in fact, the communist revolutions that we saw occurred in peasant

societies such as Russia and China, or, they were imposed, by, force.

By the Soviets after the second world war.

So Marx would have, wouldn't have.

It you know, why.

He would have said whatever these economies were,

they weren't communistic economies.

So we will dig into that next time.

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