The problem with some authors is that students know too little about them. Often this is the problem I encounter with Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle. The very opposite holds true for K Marx. Even if we have not read Marx, we think we know quite a bit about his theory of history, his critique of capitalism, and his political solution. Nor should there be any mystery why this is true. For over a century, “Marxism” was locked in battle with “Capitalism.” Those who described themselves as “Marxists” had a vested interest in interpreting Marx in a specific way; capitalists likewise had a vested interest in interpreting Marx in other ways. And so we enter the theater, so to speak, feeling that we have already seen the movie over and over, even when we have never seen it.
My own reading of Marx is itself highly specific. The chair of my doctoral committee, Moishe Postone, was a student of Jurgen Habermas, who was the youngest member of the Frankfurtschule Sozialforschung, a school that included Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse (among others). The Frankfurt School, in turn, was critically shaped by G von Lukacs, M Weber, F Nietzsche, and S Freud. There is a history here.
What we perhaps need to know about this interpretation is that those who hold this interpretation are inclined to situate K Marx both within the critically idealistic tradition that includes I Kant and GWF Hegel, and within the political economic tradition that includes A Smith, J-B Say, D Ricardo, T Malthus, JS Mill. Anyone who takes the time to excavate the footnotes in K Marx’s Kapital cannot ignore these references. But nor can they ignore the overall Hegelian form and structure of the underlying argument.
We must therefore call attention at the outset that what is often mistaken for K Marx’s “labor theory of value” is, in fact, the legacy of classical political economy as a whole – a point that we will have to emphasize again when we look at Chapter V, Book I, of A Smith’s Wealth of Nations. K Marx, thus, shared this theory with A Smith and GWF Hegel. Unlike A Smith and GWF Hegel, however, K Marx viewed the constitution of value by labor as neither “natural” (A Smith) nor “necessary” (GWF Hegel). So, whereas some Marxist theorists unfamiliar with the history of classical economic theory focus all of their attention on “Marx’s labor theory of value,” this is actually the least interesting and least original dimension of Marx’s mature critique of political economy.
But it is not only their unfamiliarity with the history of classical economic theory that accounts for their focus. Many Marxist theorists feel that Marx’s real aim was to highlight the injustice of the capitalist system. Since workers create all value, justice would require that they also own all value. Since they do not in fact own all value, Marx’s primary focus (these Marxist theorists believe) is to show why and how workers should seize the private means of production, make them social, and thereby eliminate the central contradiction in capitalism – the contradiction between the privately owned means of production and the public character of the forces of production. And there is plenty of evidence that this is precisely the theory that Marx held up until the mid- to late-1850s.
During his exile in London, however, Marx experienced a significant change of mind. This change of mind revolves around how Marx was coming to view labor. Yes, under capitalism, labor does constitute all value. But, this abstract value then accounts for the social form by which labor comes to be dominated.
We can clearly see Marx’s own thinking in this regard by comparing Marx’s earlier statements – where freedom is realized through the universalization of labor – with his later statements in Grundrisse and Kapital – where freedom is realized by severing the connection between labor and value. It can also be seen in a fundamental shift in Marx’s outlook upon totality or the universal. Whereas in his earlier writings, from say 1844 to 1855, Marx had viewed the stage of social history following mature capitalism as the realization of the universal or the completion of the as yet incomplete capitalist form – where all that is necessary is for labor to seize the privately owned means of production and thereby supersede capitalism first by socialism and then by communism – after 1855 Marx had already come to view any universal or totality composed by abstract labor as suspect. In the next stage of social history, therefore, human being in all of its particularities would eliminate the totality composed by its own abstract labor.
Finally, however, this means that instead of simply restating the classical economists’ labor theory of value in the first three chapters of his Capital, Marx is actually laying the groundwork for a critique not of capital, but of labor under capitalism. In other words, he is showing how labor composes value, not so that he can later make an argument for justice, but so that he can make an argument about how labor is responsible for its own domination; labor composes the system by which it is dominated. Labor in the abstract composes the abstract value form of the commodity and isolates this form from its material form of appearance. But, insofar as this is true, then, Marx shows, simply socializing the means of production does not touch this unique form of social domination. To the contrary, socializing the means of production is only the completion of the dominant totality composed under capitalism. It does not move us along to freedom. To the contrary, it is an extension of capitalist social domination.