EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVES (continued)

The last argument in this passage is weak; Sørensen (and his neoclassical-economics progenitors) assume a perfect-information world in which owning and borrowing assets are interchangeable strategies. Moreover, one must question the assumption that workers have a "choice" whether or not to "work for earnings." As C. B. Macpherson showed in his devastating critique of Milton Friedman over 30 years ago, there is no such choice. The coercion that results in capitalist exploitation is grounded in the entire constellation of conditions that deprive workers of the opportunity to subsist without entering into the exchange of labor-power for wages, and these conditions have legal-ownership, authority-control, social-class ("life chances") and market-mystification moments. To drive his point against Sørensen home, Wright would need to move from the categorical preoccupations that are so deeply rooted in the Analytical tradition -- the effort to arrive at a consistent definition of exploitation that restores all of the intuitions long associated with the concept -- to a deeper concern with explanation: how does capitalist exploitation take place?⁴ How is systematic coercion applied in the extraction of surplus value (or, not to prejudge the central issue, surplus product), in a mode of production in which the productive forces involve skilled labor requiring significant individual incentive for the laborer, and in which no visible ("non-economic") force is involved? The argument of this essay is that full consideration of these questions would lead Wright to reconsider his programmatic rejection of the "labor theory of value."

A simple syllogism will get the ball rolling.

• Market relations are the outward expression of underlying social relations. (This is not an empirical proposition; it is a quasi- synthetic apriori, whose validation consists in its demonstrated fruitfulness.)
• Market relations are quantitative. (This is the result of massive observation, and should require no elaboration.)
• Ergo, social relations must contain an underlying quantitative dimension -- the notorious tertium comparationis.

Capitalist exploitation -- as opposed to earlier forms -- requires relations of domination and coercion to appear "elemental" (like the weather; beyond human intervention) to obviate the need for visible means of control external to the spontaneous interactions between capitalists and workers. There is a balance of power in the disposition of labor and extraction of surplus labor ("transfer of labor effort"), and it embodies the reciprocal dependence that Wright correctly insists upon as an aspect of exploitation. Workers are forced to alienate their labor (place it under capitalist domination and control); capitalists in turn are forced to return a portion of the labor product in the form of wages. All of this takes place in the guise of market exchange, in which a quantitative ratio -- the rate of exchange of labor for wages, or the "real" wage rate -- is determined, elementally. The overall balance of class forces becomes an external reality governing each individual sale/purchase of labor power. If, according to Wright's definition, exploitation involves labor transfer, then clearly the quantification of this -- the rate of labor transfer, or, more precisely, the rate of labor returned per unit of labor expended -- is the social reality underlying the formation of a known price of labor power, the wage rate.

This is -- the "labor theory of value," elaborated for capitalist conditions. It is not, contrary to what Sørensen and Wright appear to believe, a proposition about determination of relative exchange ratios. Marxists, beginning with Marx, have never believed that quantitative proportionality to direct-plus-indirect labor time is anything other than an extreme case, a theoretical benchmark. The concept of labor as the substance of value is, rather, a means of thinking clearly about capitalist exploitation, keeping it distinct from but part of exploitation in general, and distinguishing it from the many other forms of oppression and domination that occur in human evolution.

It is not clear to me why Erik Wright does not want to take this last step and embrace (or re-embrace) the entire concept armory first forged out of classical economics by Marx. I think this could be done without betraying the Analytical commitment to rigor and methodological clarity. In the meantime, I note that the conceptual and empirical-classificatory work of Sørensen, Goldthorpe & his collaborators, and others, as reflected in the AJS symposium, is an enormous advance over the particularistic empiricism and avoidance of structure and antagonism in class theory that were so common in sociology's past. What may be called the New Class Analysis has already incorporated many aspects of the Marxist enterprise, under different names. If attacking "Marx's labor theory of value" provides the fig leaf of academic respectability necessary to cover this development, against the wider political current, so be it. As for the larger Marxist community, of which S&S is a part, I can assure my colleague who raised the question that serious political economy, including value theory -- and this is something I can not quantify -- is alive and well.

---------------<>---------------

IN THIS ISSUE

Pursuant to our long-standing concern with the foundations of socialism (see esp. the two special issues, Spring 1992 and Spring 2002), we present an intriguing and learned paper by Euclid Tsakalotos ("Homo Economicus, Political Economy and Socialism"). Tsakalotos examines three areas of study within economics and political philosophy, whose participants do not in general have a socialist perspective and may not be conscious of the possibility that their concerns bear upon the critique of capitalist society or the prospects for a constructive socialism. These are: the ethical limitations of the market; the implications of making preferences endogenous (determined within and by social relations and experience), rather than existing primordially within pre-existing fully formed individuals; and the insight that measures of efficiency and superior economic performance are not neutral, but rather are socially determined. Socialists, Tsakalotos argues, must reach out to these non-socialist literatures and enrich their own vision; designing institutional change to enhance cooperation and solidarity may bring the critique of homo economicus onto practical terrain, and become part of laying foundations for socialism and of socialist construction.

In his paper, "Postmodernism, Historical Materialism and Chicana/o Cultural Studies," Marcial González provides S&S readers with two valuable inquiries. His review of Chicana/o creative works and the accompanying secondary literature opens up what -- to speak frankly -- may be a whole new territory for many of us, and reveals the continent of a rich and tension-ridden culture, in which the struggle for individual identity is bound up with the travails of a people emerging from one cultural home but not easily accommodating to another. The result is a literature of hope, tragedy and beauty; we are made to want to get to know it better, and are glad for the introduction. But González has more than this to say: since much Chicana/o literary criticism has been influenced by postmodernism, he is able to evaluate the postmodern framework as a vehicle for interpretation of that experience. His conclusion: historical materialism, by making truth claims about society and bringing concealed social contradictions to the fore, does a better job of revealing the profundity and diversity of the Chicana/o experience than is possible under the postmodern celebration of subjectivity and ambivalence.

Economist Andrew Trigg brings together two 20th-century thinkers -- the orthodox Marxist Henryk Grossmann and the neo-Marxist Michal Kalecki -- in a synthesis with which neither might be comfortable! Grossmann's model of capitalist breakdown has been widely criticized, resurrected, and re-criticized; see Rick Kuhn, "Capitalism's Collapse: Henryk Grossmann's Marxism," S&S, Summer 1995). Here Trigg introduces money and the "Kalecki principle" -- capitalists get what they spend -- into Grossmann's schema. The result: instead of inexorable breakdown (this rigid and unsatisfactory result derived from any number of arbitrary assumptions in Grossmann's original model), Trigg finds a much more subtle outcome, in which the mass of profit (surplus value) is associated with increasing difficulties of realization. This is Kalecki's main point, of course, and establishes the close relation of his thought to that of Keynes. Trigg, however, places this emphasis onto the terrain of models of accumulation derived from Grossmann. His study is conducted in terms of a numerical example, like Grossmann's, which should be accessible to all careful readers, even those who, like John Kenneth Galbraith, "hang onto n dimensions by the skin of their teeth."

Long-time contributing editor Sheila Delany delivered a keynote address at a Symposium in honor of Margaret Schlauch, held in Poznan, Poland in May 2002. The address was published in English in Studia Anglica Posnaniensa, but since we assume that most readers will not have access to this publication, we break our usual rule about not publishing papers that have previously appeared in English, and present it to our readers here.⁵ "Marxist Medievalists: A Tradition" is many things: a celebration of the work and life of long-time S&S editor Margaret Schlauch (for background, Delany's paper is followed by a biographical note on Schlauch by Jacek Fisiak, to whom we are indebted); a statement of the purpose and orientation of Marxist Medieval Studies; and a delightful autobiography, combining the personal with the political in any number of surprising ways.

And last but not least. We present two review articles that are nicely connected. First, Mark Solomon reviews Mark Naison's intriguing political autobiography, White Boy: A Memoir. Naison was deeply involved with the African American community as a child and youth, and this experience informed his development into a remarkable and controversial figure: a white teacher of black studies at Fordham University. He is somewhat akin to the white bluesman, John Hammond; in both cases, admiration mixes with skepticism, as the cross-cultural gauntlet is thrown. Solomon admirably sorts out Naison's own reflections on this.

His review is followed by Christopher Phelps' study of A Hubert Harrison Reader, edited by Jeffrey B. Perry. This recuperates the work of a little-known left intellectual of Afro-Caribbean descent, who struggled at the intersection of socialism and nationalism in the early decades of the 20th century. Harrison, "the most class conscious of the race radicals, and the most race conscious of the class radicals," in Perry's words, called for a Negro state within the United States, thus predating by decades movements such as the Republic of New Africa and other currents in the black radical community, as well as the "self-determination of the Black Belt" slogan -- a still-controversial application of Leninism in one period of the CPUSA's history.

D. L.

___________________
4. In this connection, one notices that in his concern to straighten out Sørensen's results by developing a sufficiently comprehensive definition of exploitation, Wright downplays the distinction between exploitation in general and capitalist exploitation -- as his North America-South Africa discussion shows.

5. The original publication carried the amusing title "Medieval Marxists." At first I assumed this was a pejorative; Marxists, after all, have been called just about everything else. Then I realized, of course, that this could not be the case, since the conference was in celebration of Medieval literary and historical studies from a Marxist perspective. The term "medieval," to be sure, is inherently flawed; no age can be uniquely defined as "in the middle" between two others, and Delany makes clear that the so-called "Middle Ages," contrary to classical bourgeois wisdom, were times of profound diversity and change.

Back to Prior Page