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The Marxism of Marx

  Exploitation

  The Marxian conception of "exploitation" is the central and enduring message of Marxism. As Edmund Wilson said:

  
    ...once we have read Das Kapital, the conventional works on economics never seem the same to us again: we can always see through their arguments and figures the realities of the crude human relations which it is their purpose or effect to mask.[853]
  

  Marx and Engels themselves likewise saw "surplus value"—the distillation of exploitation—as the major conceptual contribution of Marxism.[854] Yet this crucial concept in the Marxian theoretical framework was insinuated rather than explicitly established, either logically or empirically. As introduced in the first volume of Capital, surplus value was defined simply as an "increment or excess over the original value" invested in production.[855] From this definition, Marx glided quickly to the conclusion that labor was the factor responsible for this increment of value or of output. It was an assumption deeply imbedded in classical economics—implicit in literally the first sentence of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.[856] Still it was an assumption and one devastated by the new conceptions and analysis introduced by the neo-classical economics while Capital was in its decades-long process of being prepared for publication.

  As a theoretical system, Marxian economics begins the story of production in the middle—with firms, capital, and management already in existence somehow, and needing only the addition of labor to get production started. From that point on, output is a function of labor input, given all other factors somehow already assembled, coordinated, and directed towards a particular economic purpose. Output per unit of labor is then referred to as labor's output, as was traditional in classical economics long before Marx. But longevity is not logic. Where there are multiple inputs, the division of output by one particular input is wholly arbitrary. More generally, making one entity the numerator and another the denominator in a fraction does nothing to establish a casual relationship between them (though one may exist), much less a special or exclusive causal relationship. Yet this procedure is often successful as insinuation—in many contexts[857]—especially when it transforms a plausible relationship into a scientific-looking quotient, suggesting precision or certainty.

  Vulnerable as Marx's exploitation theory was, part of the marginalist economists' criticism of it missed the mark, for the marginalists argued in terms of the respective contributions and rewards of factor inputs, rather than of people as such. Land may be productive without landlords being productive. Landlords may be growing richer in their sleep, as John Stuart Mill claimed, earning an income solely because of the institutional artifacts of property ownership. Marx made essentially the same argument regarding the capitalist. The contribution of capital equipment to economic progress was not really at issue, for a Marxian revolution was not intended to abolish capital equipment but rather to abolish capital ownership by private individuals. The importance of capital equipment was implicitly recognized when Marx made its public ownership a key feature of his projected new society.

  Identifying capital's contribution to the economy with capital owners' contributions is clearly invalid in an argument over the desirability of a system of private ownership of capital. However necessary and justified capitalists' revenue may be within the system of capitalism, that is hardly relevant when the issue is whether that whole system should continue or be superseded by a different system. A king may play a vital role in a system of monarchy, but that is irrelevant when debating the relative merits of monarchies versus republics.

  Marx argued that capital was not in fact a contribution of capitalists but of labor—past labor. It was a collective product,[858] even if individually owned under the capitalist system. According to Marx, there is "not one single atom of its value that does not owe its existence to unpaid labour."[859] When the capitalist advances part of this capital to the worker in exchange for his labor power, he is using "only the old dodge of every conqueror who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has robbed them of."[860] In other words, "the labourer himself creates the fund out of which the capitalist pays him."[861]

  Marx's analysis concerned the contributions and rewards of people—classes—not impersonal inputs. Yet even within this context, he did not succeed, either logically or empirically, in establishing that present capital is simply the result of past labor. All that he did was to push back into the past the key question of the source of capital. That way leads to infinite regress, not evidence or proof. Nor is the question of the origin of capital a purely historical question. It is an analytic question concerning the ongoing sources of capital.

  Once output is seen as a function of numerous inputs, and the inputs as supplied by more than one class of people, the notion that surplus value arises from labor becomes plainly arbitrary and unsupported. Factually, it is even worse off. The empirical implications of a special or exclusive productivity of labor would be that countries that work longer and harder would have higher outputs and higher standards of living. But the reality is more nearly the direct opposite—that countries whose inputs are less labor and more entrepreneurship tend to have vastly higher standards of living, including shorter hours for their workers.
Nor is this simply a matter of having more physical capital to work with. Larger transfers of physical capital to Third World countries, through nationalization and foreign aid, have often been only a prelude to the deterioration of that capital. Conversely, the apparently miraculous rise of the German and Japanese economics from the rubble after World War II demonstrated that physical capital is only a product of mental capital—organizational and scientific skills, discipline, experience, and habits of mutual cooperation. Despite the offhand assumption of Engels (and later, Lenin) that managing a business was only a trivial skill,[862] countries where that skill is rare are almost universally sunk in poverty, even in the midst of rich natural resources, while countries where such skills are more abundant are typically prosperous, even when lacking most natural resources—Japan being the classical example. Similarly, racial and ethnic groups possessing such skills have at various times in history been reduced to destitution by hostile political decisions, only to rise rapidly to prosperity again at some time or place—for example, the Jews in Europe and Chinese minorities scattered throughout Southeast Asia.[863]

  For all Marx's intricate and ingenious elaborations of the implications of "surplus value," the original postulate on which it is all based was only the common and crude impression that goods are "really" produced by those who physically handle production in a routine established by others. The early history of the Soviet Union provided the most dramatic empirical refutation of the Marxian assumption that management of economic enterprises is something to be taken for granted as occurring somehow. When economic incentives were drastically reduced or abolished in the heady egalitarian period following the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet economy ground to a halt. Widespread hunger and a half to vital services forced Lenin to resort to his "New Economic Policy" that restored the hated capitalistic practices. The later nationalizing of all industry under Stalin and his successors did not restore egalitarianism. Quite the contrary. There were highly unequal rewards to management, including today whole systems of special privilege stores to which ordinary Soviet workers have no access. Moreover, the managers of Soviet industry have been disproportionately the descendents of the managerial class of earlier Soviet and czarist times.[864]

  Many observers have seen these developments as mere betrayals of Marxist ideals, missing the more fundamental point that a crucial false assumption must be corrected in practice if people are to survive. Its continuing sacredness in theory can only produce hypocrisy. The betrayal may be real, but in Marxian terminology, "no accident." A similar process is occurring in China, to which many Western Marxists transferred their hopes after disillusionment with the Soviet Union. This too is seen as simply a betrayal of Mao by Deng, rather than a nation's painful learning from experience that a key assumption of Marxian economics is false.

  Managerial ability and entrepreneurial innovations are not the only forms of human capital. Workers' skills and experience are also major elements of a country's capital stock. The invisibility of this capital makes it difficult to determine how much of a capitalist nation's capital stock is in fact owned by the workers. However, the presence and importance of workers' human capital are manifested in various ways. Countries whose workers lack industrial skills and experience may have massive unemployment or underemployment, and yet be unable to fill jobs created by new industries—which industries even resort to expensive transportation of workers from distant lands, paying them premium salaries to compensate for the cultural change. Nor is this human capital merely a matter of skills, narrowly defined. Most job skills can be taught in a matter of months, or at most a few years, but national industrial backwardness can continue for generations or centuries on end. For what is not so easily taught are cultural habits and orientations toward work and toward life—punctuality, perseverance, attentiveness to detail, cooperation among workers and supervisors. Enormous disparities may exist in these regards, not only among nations but also among groups within a given nation.[865] The income advantages of experienced over inexperienced workers in a given country can exceed income differences among racial groups in that country,[866] even though the latter differences receive more ideological attention.

  In this context, Marx's ringing use of the term "capitalism" was something a verbal coup. It implied a system for the benefit of a small class of people with a unique monopoly of capital assets. But capitalists as thus defined receive only a small fraction of the total income received by labor; yet no one thinks of calling the economic system "laborism," even though that is where three-quarters or more of the income goes. The more fundamental fallacy, however, is in narrowly conceiving capital to mean physical equipment rather than the human capital which may be vastly more valuable and far more widely dispersed, so that much of that vast majority of national income that is statistically counted as a return to "labor" is in fact a return to human capital that is widely owned.

  Logically, Marxian economics did not need to assume that management or other non-labor inputs were of minor importance, even though historically this assumption was made and had serious practical consequences. It is the private ownership of capital that defines capitalism, and the capitalist investor rather than the manager who as deemed superfluous and a hindrance to production. Capital attempted to establish that capital owners had often acquired their wealth, historically, through force and fraud rather than through personal contributions to the economy's production.[867] An enumeration of lurid examples does not of course establish general causation. But more fundamentally, even if all capital were assumed to have had unproductive retrospective implications this would still leave untouched the prospective policy issue as to whether private or public ownership would be more efficient for an economy and its people.

  Whatever the past may have been, the policy question at any given juncture is what future results can be expected from current incentives and constraints, compared to other alternatives. The socialist tradition has long assumed that collectivized production "in the public interest" would in fact serve the masses of people ore effectively than private production motivated by a desire for private gain. But the Marxian part of the socialist tradition can less easily make this assumption, for Marxism emphasizes in many contexts that individual intention is not the crucial factor in causation.[868] Capital reminds us that the road to hell is paved with good intentions,[869] that everything that has been done wrong "has been done wrong for the very best of reasons,"[870] and Engels pointed out that "what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something no on willed."[871] In short, Marxian analysis is based on systematic interactions, not individual intentions, so the fact that socialists may have nobler intentions than capitalists provide neither a logical nor an empirical reason to expect better results under socialism.

  Reasoning systematically, Marx was one of the few socialists to understand that economic competition, motivated by "greed," was what rove prices down under capitalism, as capitalists ceaselessly searched for more profits by seeking cheaper ways of producing than those possessed by their fellow capitalist rivals.[872] Mutual competition ensured that capitalists were in no position simply to tack higher profits onto production costs. Therefore, as production costs were driven down throughout an industry, prices tended to be driven down as well, to the benefit of the consuming public. But Marx never faced the issue whether socialist managers and central planners would be equally zealous in weeding out inefficiency and seeking new technologies—whose economic benefits they could not personally reap.

  Marx understood that capitalists who introduced cost-saving innovations were motivated by the extra profits they could reap temporarily, until their rivals copied them, after which the production cost savings would accrue to the consumers, due to competition among the producers. But without even this temporary incentive of personal gain, would socialist planners be willing to put forth the same exertions and take on the same risks of disastrous failure that are inseparable from pioneering innovation? Historically, this has not been the case in the Soviet economy, where even the nation's political leaders have publicly complained of the enterprise managers' tendency to stick to "safe" established practices[873] and—in Brezhnev's words—to shy away from innovation "as the devil shies away from incense."[874]

  Marx pointed out that the original innovations under capitalism were often ruined financially, and only later would other capitalists finally develop an innovation into a paying proposition.[875] While this may have been meant as a commentary on the individual injustice of rewards and contributions under capitalism, it also showed what desperate gambles innovators were prepared to take, in hopes of a large profit. A collectivized economy that stifles such profits in the interests of individual justice may create an even greater injustice to the consuming public by inhibiting economic innovation.