Rhys Williams
It would be easy to follow the model of others who have enthusiastically reviewed Francis Wheen’s study of Marx’s Capital. Well-written, it is to be supported insofar as it encourages people to read Marx’s texts. Wheen devotes his study to the idea that Marx revealed the ‘beast of capitalism’ – in terms of instability, alienation and exploitation. Indeed he rightly argues that Marx will remain meaningful as long as capitalism exists. However Wheen is not really the defender of Marx the opening sentences would suggest.
Wheen is clearly enthralled by Marx’s literary achievements, and keenly admits the impact that his ideas have had to multiple spheres of human experience. Yet, underlying his enthusiasm is a poorly concealed mission to undermine Marx’s position. Wheen crudely uses quotations ripped out of context to support his arguments and fails to offer any sources or references, making scrutiny difficult.1 This results in a study in which the praise seems to be employed as a sleight-of-hand attempt to turn Marx’s science of political economy into a work of literature. Wheen’s description on the period Marx spent preparing Capital (‘Gestation’) is the best part of the study. Wheen’s strength comes from his description of Marx’s life, co-operation with Engels and the general development of Marx’s major ideas. Wheen’s sections on the book itself (‘Birth’) however barely discloses the key ideas of Marxist political economy. He is dismissive of the chapters on commodities and exchange, and offers no satisfactory description of the core of Marx’s labour theory of value. Although Wheen is generally content to let Marx speak for himself, he does paraphrase and in places he is theoretically mistaken.
Wheen misuses a famous example that Marx used to expose the errors of economists concerning the difference between the value of a commodity that arises from its useful physical properties (use-value) and the quite different kind of value (exchange-value) that manifests itself in the social relation of exchange. Exchange-value is the form of the value of a commodity which derives solely from labour. Exchange-value makes exchange possible. ‘No chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond.2
‘This’ says Wheen ‘is a curious example to choose, since it exposes a limitation in Marx’s theory. If the exchange-value of pearls derives from the labour-time spent on retrieving and transforming them, why do people pay thousands for a single pearl necklace? Marx’s disciples deal with these problems by dismissing them as ‘irrelevant’ (44).
Here Wheen adopts the arguments of others who willfully misinterpret what Marx wrote. Equating exchange-value and price, Wheen tries to undermine Marx’s entire argument. The example quoted by Wheen is to be found at the end Section 4, Chapter 1, Commodity, Volume 1 of Capital. Wheen’s criticism introduces money and price, before Marx even arrives at them in succeeding chapters. In fact, in the preceding Section 3, Marx has already pre-empted such a challenge. Key passages make clear that Marx is tracing the historical emergence of the commodity, and the process by which value arose as the basis for exchange. ‘We perceive the deficiencies of the elementary form of value: it is a mere germ, which must undergo a series of metamorphoses before it can ripen into the Price-Form’.
Wheen’s challenge is therefore premature and devious. Marx is talking about earlier economic discussions of value and therefore has not yet introduced such elements that Wheen imposes. The concepts Wheen introduces include the increasing exchange-value of the quantity of paper money and credit hoarded vastly exceeding the value of commodities they purport to represent. Here the holders of increasingly worthless paper ‘capital’ are often searching for assets more likely to withstand the effects of inflation and debt. These are both the contributory causes and consequences of the crises which arise from the expansion of commodities beyond the capacity of the available market, all of which Marx described later.
Marx also knew that his labour theory of value did not mean that every commodity sold in the capitalist market would be priced according to the labour time needed to produce them. Competition under capitalism ensured profitability would tend to be averaged out across the economy. If a company had a higher rate of profit, capital investment would move towards that sector in order to exploit that extra profit. This would lead to an averaging out of profit generated from the labour employed in all sectors. The labour value embodied in each commodity would be transformed into a price of production that was based on the average profit across all sectors. This would differ from the labour value in the commodity, which was based on the labour time involved. Some of the surplus value generated from workers in one sector would then be transferred to other sectors.
However, Marx argued, this did not mean that the labour theory of value no longer provided an explanation of capitalist production because, across the whole economy, the total value of all commodities would still equal the total prices of production. Total surplus-value would equal total average profit and the rate of profit (in value terms) would equal the rate of profit in price terms for the whole economy. Thus, the labour time appropriated by the capitalist into the value of production of commodities explains the prices of all commodities.
Wheen is rightly critical of commentators who read into Capital things which are not there (absolute impoverishment of the proletariat rather than relative), but that has not stopped him falling into related traps (56-57).
As Wheen fails to understand the economic ideas of Marx he quickly moves on to spending more time reviewing Capital as a work of literature – ‘a Gothic novel’ (75). He acclaims Marx’s satire in defining the capitalist system, while denouncing his support of revolution. Wheen also states to have written this study to make the economists of the ‘post modern’ world reconsider Marx not as a revolutionary theorist, but one who would now advocate reform. For Wheen ‘Marx is simply someone who wrote a good anti-trust law’.3
In trying to achieve such an audience Wheen fails to understand Marx and his ideas. Capital was not designed for bourgeois academics ‘to unsuspectingly absorb’ (119). For Marx, the sole perspective of his work that he considered important was the audience of the working class and its supporters. Marx wrote Capital in order to define the implications of the economic exploitation of the working class – the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Wheen dismisses these examples of Marx’s politics, scorning Marx for ‘wasting’ his time on dialectics and working class revolt (ignoring countless revolutionary struggles which verify Marx’s position).
The final chapter (‘Afterlife’) is spent denouncing any contribution to Marxism after 1883. Wheen amalgamates Lenin with Stalin (as both tyrant and mechanical theorist), walking a similar line to the Stalinists who deemed everything non Marx and non Lenin as ‘non-Marxist’ (except in Wheen’s case Lenin too is cast out).4
Wheen’s attacks are based primarily around Lenin’s so-called doctrinal views on economic conditions and worker organisation. This analysis, however, ignores the reality that Lenin constantly changed his views in relation to the requirements of the revolutionary struggle. Lenin argued for a working class capable of developing itself within material circumstances – not outside of them as Wheen states.5
Lenin wrote many times that the vanguard of a revolution would be made up of an alliance between the most radical elements of the working class and intelligentsia - not an isolated elite that Wheen seems to believe Lenin spoke of.6 Wheen also states that Lenin dismissed trade unions as ‘unproductive’. This statement ignores the fact that Lenin changed his position on unions on multiple occasions. Lenin did not dismiss unions as they were valid in the formation of class conscious, but he criticized them if they remained outside of the revolutionary movement.7 ‘The unions inevitably began to reveal certain reactionary features. However, the development of the proletariat could not proceed anywhere in the world otherwise than through the trade unions’.8
Wheen then defends the bourgeois economists who seek to ‘save’ Marx and make him ‘relevant’ in the modern world.9 Wheen fails to realise that the result of such ‘evaluation’ will depend greatly on who attempts it or even if such a revaluation is needed if Marx is already ‘validated’ (120).
Wheen’s study of Marx’s work is an entertaining biography but his attempts at making a theoretical discussion on Marx are half-hearted and incomplete. The book is therefore over weighted in biography but insignificant in actual theoretical debate. Any one who is aware of Marx’s work will, at best, not gain any real insight from this incomplete discussion and, at worst, accept the persistent misunderstandings surrounding Marx. Where Wheen has been correct in his commentary he has said nothing that other Marxists have not already and nothing others have not modernised.10
Wheen’s conclusions of the need to create a Marxism devoid of revolutionary ideals and subjugated to simply criticizing bourgeois excesses in a world in which ‘reform’ is the only (supposed) way to create a better world is the typical position one would expect from a ‘libertarian Marxist Reformist’ (119-121). Wheen forgets that Marxism is already a theory that rejects such gradualist illusions in the face of revolution. Such a position is a pathetic conclusion to make of Marx’s work and completely misses the point behind Capital.11
Wheen should remember: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it’.
Notes
1. The lack of a bibliography or any references especially makes it difficult to trace a number of unsourced Lenin and Trotsky quotes which appear in Chapter 3 ('Afterlife'). Karl Marx Capital volume 1, Penguin, London 1999, p. 177.
2. ibid. p. 154
3. John Reed 'A new appeal' Revolutionary age 1 (18) 18 January 1919, p 8.
4. Wheen denounces Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Connolly, Zinoviev, Gramsci, Bukharin, and other key Marxist writers of the 20th century.
5. V. I. Lenin, ‘What Is To Be Done?’ Oxford University Press, London 1970, pp. 78-101.
6. cf. ibid. pp. 142-201.
7. ibid. pp. 101-142.
8. V. I Lenin., ‘Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder’, V. I. Lenin Lenin Collected Works Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Moscow 1964, p. 196.
9. Bourgeois economists such as John Cassidy (Revisiting Capital’) and John Micklethwait, and Adrian Wooldridge (The challenge and hidden promise of globalisation) have stated in multiple works. that Marxist economics need to be updated into a form that advocates simple reform and denounces the Leninist paradigm of organisation and violent revolution.
10. Note the economic work of Mandel, Ilyenkov, Camatte, Grossman, Pilling and other Marxist economists. Kuruma’s work on Marx’s theories on capitalist crisis, money and the phenomenon of inflation is also of particular note.
11. Karl Marx ‘Theses on Feuerbach’in Karl Marx Early writings of Karl Marx Penguin, London 1993.
Bibliography
Marx-Engels Archive www.marxists.archive.org
Lenin Archive– www.marxists.archive/lenin/works/index.htm
Lenin, V. I. What is to be done?, Oxford University Press, London 1970 [1902]
Lenin, V.I. Left-Wing communism: an infantile disorder in V. I. Lenin Lenin Collected Works Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Moscow 1964 [1920]
Marx, Karl Capital Volume 1, Penguin, London 1999 [1867]
Marx, Karl, Capital Volume 2, Penguin, London 1999 [1885]
Marx, Karl ‘Theses on Feuerbach’in Karl Marx Early writings of Karl Marx Penguin, London 1993 [1845]
Reed, John ‘A New Appeal’ Revolutionary age 1 (18) 18 January 1919, p. 8