There is a contradiction in popular Marxism which has remained unchanged since 100 years ago, when Italian Marxists were debating the conquest of Libya. This contradiction arises from the inconsistencies of Marx and Engels themselves regarding colonial matters, and their general inability to complete and integrate their own various divergent trains of thought (an inability which is apparent even in their economics).
On the one hand, socialism in the Marxian sense only becomes possible when industrial development has reached the level at which the productive apparatus is capable of producing everything that everyone basically needs with ever-decreasing quantities of human labour and ever-increasing automation. The development of capitalism within the geographical area controlled by each national economy required that regions within each where labour-intensive production was performed would have the surplus-value generated within them transferred to those in which capital-intensive production was performed. Thus, a certain degree of regional inequality was inevitable. Extended to an international scale, this meant that industrial countries would and should colonise unindustrialised ones, as captive markets, sources of cheap labour, and sources also of cheap raw materials both agricultural and mineral (from tea and coffee to oil and tin).
On the other hand, Marx and Engels supported the struggle of Germany against France, and that of the USA against Britain, and that of Japan against Russia and China. They sometimes argued as if the struggles of would-be-industrial nations against the already-industrialised ones were ‘progressive’, and sometimes as if they were ‘reactionary’. Now, after a hundred years of this ambiguity, we are seeing a global financial system which evidently makes such struggles almost impossible, and the emergence of a single integrated world market in which all but the existing industrial nations are evidently to be bombed back into barbarism if necessary to keep them at the level of obedient suppliers of raw materials and cheap labour. Is this, from a ‘Marxist’ point-of-view, ‘progressive’ or ‘reactionary’? Is there a consistent ‘Marxist’ point-of-view on this at all, and if so, does anyone have the courage to say what it is?
Niqnaq 
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This is precisely the problem that became my point of departure from Marxism. It is simply a more efficient (“scientific”) colonial-industrial economic paradigm than the orthodox liberal one, or the older feudal and despotic ones. It is a revolutionary methodology, in the sense of program for instrumentalizing the violent rupture of man and his dreams unto nature, which is nothing but a way of imposing theoretical abstracts on the world and the people inhabiting it, Marxism simply being a more deeply penetrating uprooting manipulation of the world such that it threatens those already oppressing and dominating the world to their zero-sum secular advantage. It says nothing of living peacefully and harmoniously in the world that really exists, it just offers a Utopia and a battle cry.
If Marxism is more efficient than liberalism, it is so for the same reasons that fascism is, plus the fact that unlike fascism it has a plausible internationalist strand to it, even though this is only relative and hence impossible to expand to a global level without self-contradiction. I refer to Leninist anti-imperialism. A global Marxian system would have to be anti-itself to maintain this justification, once the ‘capitalist’ opponent was gone.
I have a further problem, actually. It is only true up to a certain point in the geo-economic pyramid that surplus value is transferred from regions of labour-intensive production to those of capital-intensive production (which is what Marxian economics requires, to offset the lower rate of profit). Above a certain level, surplus value is transferred from the capital-intensive areas to the centres of administration and consumption, e.g. the capital cities, which produce very little. This has always been so. Rome produced nothing itself except rulers and proles. So ‘finance capital’ does not so much ‘float free of production,’ as I said a couple of days ago; it actually transcends it. Politics transcends economics. The production of money is a purely political act, undetermined by the requirements of physical production and determined entirely by political strategies. This may be a ‘delinquency’ of capital, as I called it, but it is an eternal feature of politics, even pre-capitalist ones.
Nitzan and Bichler abandoned Marxism for a reason related to this. I seem to recall that they also argue that power cannot be reduced to mere money, in any determinate economic sense, but is politically transcendent of it. Maybe I make them sound closer to what I am saying than they really are, but it’s definitely a related criticism. They explain their argument in this full-length, freely-downloable pdf book, ‘Capital as Power’, which I have not yet read and will read now:
http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/259/
There is an obvious way of saving the appearances for Marxian economics: define the ‘labour’ of rulers and administrators as enormously skilled and thus enormously valuable as ‘intellectual capital’. Then this invisible and imponderable form of ‘capital’ can be allowed to outweigh the various forms of ‘physical capital’ in the economic system, and thus it becomes possible to say that surplus-value naturally gravitates upward to these rulers and administrators because their ‘intellectual capital’ (i.e. political power and value) is the greatest ‘capital’ of all and their cogitations are the most ‘capital-intensive’ form of activity of all. With this circular reasoning, you can justify anything.
That’s very interesting, I’ll have to think about that a little bit before I respond.
Your comment on the production of money as a purely political act recalls a recent interview with David Graeber I read. (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/08/what-is-debt-%E2%80%93-an-interview-with-economic-anthropologist-david-graeber.html) I’m very curious to read his new book on the history of debt “Debt: The First 5000 Years”.
Once you introduce the idea that skilled labour is worth some multiple of unskilled labour, you upset the basic assumption on which the law of the falling rate of profit is based: a skilled process such as decision-making may use a microscopic amount of labour, but this labour may be so skilled that, no matter how great its wages, the profit from the process it oversees is decisive. I have never been able to apply the law of the falling rate of profit except by making what I call a ‘Pol Pot’ style assumption, that all labour is worth the same, whether skilled or unskilled. However, if you define the skill as ‘intellectual capital’, then the labour remains basic labour, but the amount of capital employed, though invisible, is obviously much greater: the intellectual skill itself is an invisible but presumably very valuable form of ‘capital’ located within the skilled worker’s brain. So the falling rate of profit might still apply, but with a much greater quantity of ‘capital’ employed than is visible to the physical senses.
By the way, there are some reviews of Nitzan and Bichler’s book, here:
http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/perl/latest
Nitzan and Bichler have their own discussion forum, here:
http://www.yorku.ca/cmass/forum/index.php
What Graeber is saying about ancient Mesopotamian temple economies is the same as what David Astle said in his eccentric but fascinating book, “The Babylonian Woe”. But Astle drew the attention of scholarly anti-Semites by implying that the ancient Israelites somehow gained control of the international trading system which introduced specie money (gold and silver) to the region. They were certainly well positioned geographically to do so. One could argue that they were the first to discover the possibilities of simply shuttling gold from India to Europe and silver from Europe to India, which Zarlenga regards as the mainspring of ancient global economics.
1. Every system, insofar as it seeks efficiency, contains the inner logic of its own obsolescence.
2. The production of money and political strategies may both be viewed as a form of physical production; the use of brains.
3. Power may indeed not be reduced merely to money; money’s essential value resides in its use as a political exchange mechanism.
4. Yes. The ultimate capital is the brain. Didn’t Marx say this somewhere?
5. Intellectual capital in the highly normative context of this discussion is ultimately the ability to gain power over others, to cheat, connive, manipulate and control.
6. That dividends accrue in one way or another may set aside the discussion of money.
7. Question: Is it the aim of Marx or any other -ism to justify things (itself, for example) or to produce analytically reliable models?
Marxism as an ‘ism’ is an ideology, with the entire range of goals characteristic of all ideologies, which include legitimation of a ruling hierachy, purported explanation of the world, and self-justification. Marx’s body of theories in itself is not an ‘ism’ but an attempt at an integrated basis for social science. Its arguments are partly deductive (and hence based on a priori axioms such as the labour theory of value) and partly inductive, based on examples (selectively) taken from history.
As a thought trend, then, with a ‘scientific’ penchant, and hence as a fortified ‘-ology’ with the need to formulate hypotheses and make predictions, the highest hope for this initiated study would indeed, as you suggest, be its ultimate integration with or dissolution in an ever evolving social science project.
David Graeber has an anthropological theory of value that is based on Marcel Mauss (and Marx, of course).
The Romans called this reciprocity principle that mauss is talking about “do ut des: “I give so that you might give.”
Jesus would not have approved of it. He insisted that the giver of charity should be totally anonymous and secretive, and one must assume he really meant it, too.
I think that is basically Graeber’s position regarding the religions of the world actually.
Here’s another Graeber article, on Mauss: http://www.freewords.org/biennial/graeber.html
Interesting discussion, but I haven’t really had the energy to focus on it yet, especially the Nitzler and Bichlan stuff. I’ll get back on this.
Meanwhile, sort of on topic, here’s an unusually accessible (but inevitably lengthy) piece from Bill Mitchell, inspired by ” …an interesting Bloomberg article (August 29, 2011) – Give Karl Marx a Chance to Save the World Economy – by one George Magnus, who is listed as a senior economic adviser at UBS Investment Bank.”
We need to read Karl Marx
http://tinyurl.com/3tqrof7
As usual, all they have grasped is the demand deficiency problem. Nobody ever grasps the proper falling rate of profit argument. I have been thinking about the question of skilled labour, since I mentioned it a day earlier in this thread. If the correct way to think about intellectual skills is to regard them as pieces of invisible ‘capital equipment’ stored in people’s heads, which I think it is, then this will not affect the general drift of the falling rate of profit argument, because the larger the notional value of this ‘intellectual capital’ becomes, the more it dwarfs the labour component involved in its possessor’s using of it.
According to my view, the skilled intellectual worker is a form of small capitalist who possesses his own capital within his brain, but commonly he rents himself out for a wage, complete with this capital, though he may subcontract his services, as other small capitalists do. If this is correct, then his skill is part of the capital employed by the overall entrepreneur, and is paid for at its full cost of replacement, like other capital components. Thus, trained possessors of skills should amortise the cost of their training over the course of their careers.
It would be more obvious, I know, to regard skilled labour as a more valuable form of labour, rather than as averagely valuable labour employing a valuable but invisible piece of ‘intellectual capital’, but I do not think this would lead anywhere theoretically.
Reg. David Graeber, I have never been a fan of Anthropology, which is a new fancy word to call it Social Darwinism. A good example is the Yanomami people. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,998073-1,00.html
Now, I do not buy the idea of “gift”. Even the animals show compassion to themselves.
Well, that’s not fair. Anthropology started as mere travellers’ tales, then began to develop the rudiments of science, in the form of attempted generalities and systems of classification. Grand explanatory theories came last, as they always should. ‘Social Darwinism’ is a misapplication of biological Darwinism because it fatally confuses two fundamentally different time-scales: the long run in which unsuccessful mutations die out, and the short run in which some individuals have more children which survive to adulthood and reproduce in turn than others do. There is no way within ‘social Darwinism’ to determine whether any apparent genetic differences between the more and the less successful actually contribute anything to biological or social survivability, or whether they are just convenient markers for caste or class divisions which have nothing to do with biology at all.
Structural anthropology is based on networks (of families, clans or tribes, usually) which are bonded to one another by exchange systems (fundamentally, of marriage partners), rather in the same way that the chemistry of compounds is based on the exchange of electrons between atoms to create molecules. Whether you think of these exchanges (which also include goods, both physical and symbolic) as ‘economic transactions’ or as ‘reciprocal gifts’ may be a reflection of your own temperament rather than of anything in the system you are looking at.
Sarte, Graeber is not your average anthropologist, nor is Mauss. I suggest you read their work before dismissing either of them. The usual criticisms levied at anthropologists are about as valid to them as the usual criticisms levied against economists are to Marx and Engels et al