POLITICAL ECONOMY

In this period of rapidlydeepening economic and political crisis it is more essential than ever that a systematic study be made of Marx's 'Capital.

But this study cannot be confined to Marx's conclusions on particular questions. It must centre upon a study of the method of this great work. Such a study represents a particular challenge to the revolutionary movement in Britain, where there has traditionally been an opposition to theoretical questions and particularly a hostility to the dialectical method which is at the heart of 'Capital'.

In any case such a study cannot be a mere academic exercise. For a real understanding of the revolutionary implications of Marx's theoretical study of the capitalist system can only be achieved as part of a struggle, both practical and theoretical, to defend the heritage of Marxism against reformism and revisionism.

In particular, this means a struggle against Stalinism. For it can be truly said that the Stalinists in Britain, aided by the revisionists, have been in the forefront in their efforts to destroy the revolutionary method of 'Capital'.

In these articles we intend to expose the nature of these distortions through an examination of the labour theory of value, its place in 'Capital' and the treatment it has received at the hands of Stalinist writers, in particular Maurice Dobb, for long considered their leading representative in this field in the Anglo-Saxon world.

But it would be a serious mistake to see Dobb's wrong method, which we shall presently examine, as arising merely from a series of 'mistakes'. For his aim, a reflection of the political camp which he has slavishly served for the last 50 years, is to tear the revolutionary heart out of Marx's work by reducing it to the level of Ricardian For him, this has the dual advantage of making Marx 'respectable' by suggesting that he was the last of the great schooi of classical political economy, while at the same time providing for himself a comfortable position in the academic world.

Ne shall show that Marx ar. from being the heir d political economy, was in fact its severest critic. As early as 1847 he attacked Proudhon for trying to 'criticize political economy from the standpoint of political economy' and 'Capital' for him, unlike the Stalinists, was a critique of In centring the discussion initially on the theory of value, we can best start with Marx's famous letter to Dr Kugelmann of July I1, 1868. It contains the following well-known but critical passage:

. Even if there were no chapter on "value" in my book ['Capital'] the analysis of the real relationships which I give would contain the proof of the real value relation. The nonsense about the necessity of proving the concept of value arises from complete ignorance both of the subject dealt with and of the method of science.

'Every child knows that a country which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but for a few weeks, would die. Every child knows too, that the mass of products corresponding to the different needs require different and quantitatively determined means of the total labour of society. That this necessity of distributing social labour in definite proportions cannot be done away with by the particular form of social production but can only change the form it assumes, is self evident.

Hegel 'No natural law can be done away with. What can change, in changing historical circumstances, is the form in which these laws operate. And the form which this proportional division of labour operates in a state of society where the interconnections of social labour is manifested in the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products. The science consists precisely in working out how the law of value operates. So that if one wanted at the very beginning to 'explain' all the phenomena which apparently contradicted the law, one would have to give the science before the science.' This is a particularly important pasage in that the aim of this article will be to reveal that Marx was able to show how the law of value operated only because he had completely assimilated Hegel's dialectical method But first some general points about the passage. Marx evidently wished stress one basic idea in writing to Kugelmann, namely the historical and relative nature of all the categories met with in political economy; none of these categories, such as 'production' 'division of labour', etc. can be understood except in their relations to the specific mode of production of which they formed a part.

'The categories of bourgeois economy' says Marx 'are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, his torically determined mode of production, viz the production of commodities' (I, p. 76.)

This recognition of the historical nature of political economy and its categories was a reflection of the theory of historical materialism. But it did not mean that there were not features common to many if not all societies. Every society, whatever its social relations of production, needs some mechanism for the allocation of social labour. However, the form which this mechanism takes differs widely from society to society. Marx, in 'Capital', shows that these differences can be explained only by an analysis of the structure of the relations of production and it was one of his major aims to demonstrate the dependence of the relations of 'distribution' on the relations of 'production'.

What were the specific features which distinguished capitalism from other forms of society? Marx Shows that capitalism involved the dominance of commodity production, and in particular, the transformation of the category of 'labour' into 'labour power or the ability to work, which itself is reduced to the status of a commodity Given that this was so, how was the allocation of labour to the various branches effected? It was effected, says Marx, through the exchange of commodities as equivalents, through their exchange values.

For Marx then the law value reflected the only possible, although indirect, form whereby social labour could be distributed in commodityproducing society. The law of value reflects the social relations of production specific to capitalism, and to capitalism alone.

Speaking of socialist economic organization Engels wrote ('Anti-During', p. 423.): "The people will arrange everything very simply, without the intervention of the much famed law? For the epigones of Stalin this statement has proved a considerable difficulty in that it has had to be squared with Stalin's assertions that in the USSR, which from 1936 onwards was a fully-developed socialist country he said, the law of value continued to operate.

In his letter to his friend Kugelmann, Marx was also drawing attention to another very important point-the fact that under capitalism the value relation (a social relation) appeared as a relation between things. Unless this is correctly understood, the opening chapter of 'Capital', and particularly the fourth section which deals with "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof' cannot be understood.

In exchanging commodities, men were engaged in both quantitative but also qualitative activities. Quantitative in that commodities exchanged in definite proportions according to the socially necessary labour-time which their production entailed, but also qualitative, in that behind these quantitative ratios stood social relations. In exchanging commodities men were also exchanging their labour.

For Marx this attachment of social relations to things was no illusion', as is commonly thought. For under capitalism the social relations between the individuals consisting society could only manifest themselves or appear as the relations between the objects of material wealth. These appearances were, as Marx puts it, 'necessary appearances'.

'A social relation of production' , says Marx ('Critique of Political Economy, p. 49) appears as something existing apart from individual human beings, and the distinctive relations into which they enter in the course cf production appear as the specific properties of a thing-it is this perverted appearance, this prosaically real, and by no means imaginary mystification that characteristic of all social forms posting exchange value'. Or again ('Capital' I, p. 73):

•. the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things'.

Une very important conclusion flowed from this insistence on the necessary nature of appearances—they could not be destroyed 'in the head' as the idealist opponent of Marxism thinks. They could be destroyed only by overthrowing their material basis —the social relations of capitalist production—which sustained them.

Immediately, Marx's debt to Hegel is clear. For Marx, in his analysis of value and the value form (which we shall examine in greater detail at a later stage) shows that the 'thing in itself' (in this case value) can only present itself through its contradictory opposite, its appearace (to continue with our illustration, 'exchange value' is the form of appearance of 'value').

In other words Marx rejected Kant's separation of 'thing in itself' from its 'appearance' 11 favour Hegel's method. Marx's task in 'Capital' was to establish the laws of mediation . through which the 'essence' of phenomena manifested themselves in. 'appearances'.

The whole of 'Capital' - its three volumes - is devoted to an analysis of the complex process of mediation which this transition involves. Marx is thus able to show how all the appearances of capitalism (which seem to consist of relations 'where equality and Mr Bentham reign supreme') have their origin in the ceaseless struggle between the development of the productive forces and the increasingly restrictive nature of capital social relations.

As Hegel ('Science of Logic', p. 133) notes: 'Hence law is not beyond appearance, but is immediately present in it; the realm of laws is the quiescent counterfeit of the existing or appearing world.' CONTINUED TOMORROW