The Vulgar (in) Marxism: Vacillating between Exchange and Production

Abstract

This essay’s exploration of the adjective “vulgar” and its function in the Marxian field begins with a debate between Abba Lerner (1903–82) and Maurice Dobb (1900–76), which foregrounded the vulgar in Marxism as a problem of economic method. The signifier thus functions as a portal to associated questions: the status of the adjective “vulgar” in Marx and Engels’s discourse; value theory’s role in the constitution of division and difference in the economics discipline; analytical Marxism’s place as a response to the crisis of Marxism in the twentieth century; the politics of market socialism or the role of markets (if any) in socialism; the necessity of mediation under any form of division of labor and the implications for Marx’s notion of associated production; and the possibility and promise of an affirmative take on the vulgar in the context of a postcapitalist pragmatics of participatory and democratic planning.

Key Words:

• Analytical Marxism
• Market Socialism
• Value Form
• Maurice H. Dobb
• Abba Lerner

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank all the participants of the Vulgar Marxism Symposium held (virtually) at Drew University, on 17 April 2021. Some of them decided not to turn their papers into a contribution to this special issue, but all their comments contributed to my revisions. I also would like to thank Fikret Adaman and Antonio Callari, who generously read various iterations of this paper, for their comments and criticisms. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

1 As will be argued below, the theoretical engagement between Dobb and Lerner is not limited to this episode. There is a prehistory and an afterlife to this “skirmish.” Once viewed from a broader history of the engagement between these two economists and the theoretical and ideological positions they represent, this particular staging of the problem of the vulgar and how it can function as a portal for this cascade of associated question will hopefully make more sense to the reader.

2 See Marx’s ([1867] 1990, 94–103) postface to the 1873 second edition of Capital. I was initially reminded of this point by David Ruccio’s (2020) prepared remarks for the Vulgar Marxism workshop, which was to take place in April 2020 but was postponed due to the pandemic.

3 Anjan Chakrabarti (2020, 3), in a recent reassessment of Marx’s critique of the trinity formula, highlighted Marx’s “methodological critique,” which emphasized “the need to view social relations as interconnected processes of mutual constitution which from today’s vantage point can be designated as overdetermination.” He further argued against the mystification of the trinity formula, that “the social content of the interconnection can only be explicated by examining the connection of the distributive flow of income/revenue to the creation of value and surplus value, i.e., to the production process itself” (3–4). Note: A published version of this essay appeared in 2021 in Marxism 21, vol. 18, no. 4, 258–85.

4 For discussions of political economy as a “reaction formation” that deploys a psychoanalytically inflected discourse analysis, see Madra (2021; 2023).

5 For an intellectual biography of Dobb, see Shenk (2013). However, J. E. King’s (2015) essay on the biography is a contribution in its own right, giving a robust intellectual portrait of Dobb.

6 For a theoretical account of how Dobb’s formative Marshallianism was transformed through his encounters with Marx and Sraffa, see Bharadwaj (1978).

7 Later in the twentieth century, a well-known analytical Marxist, John Roemer (1982), produced a general theory of exploitation and class based on the formal framework of general equilibrium analysis.

8 The year 1944 is rather important in terms of epoch-defining books. Both Karl Polanyi’s (1944) The Great Transformation and Friedrich Hayek’s (1944) The Road to Serfdom were published then. Arguably, Lerner’s book, while largely neglected and barely mentioned as a protoneoliberal text, is as important as Hayek’s in defining a certain form of postmarket left neoliberalism. Here, I define neoliberalism somewhat minimally, as the governance of the population through economic incentives, through the interface of Homo economicus (see Madra and Adaman 2014). To the extent that neoliberal governmentality and its governmental devices and mechanisms are performative machines, whether the figure of Homo economicus is an adequate representation of human subjectivity does not matter, for it is the interface through which human beings are expected to interact with one another, with markets, with institutions, and with bureaucracies. Behavioral economics flourishes in the cracks of the governmental interface of Homo economicus.

9 Dobb (1969, 125) would later define a socialist economy “as one in which the non-human factors of production (or means of production, including land) are in social or collective ownership in some form.”

10 For a clear statement of the centrality of Lerner’s functional finance for modern monetary theory, see Wray (2015). For a policy critique from a leftist new-Keynesian position, see Epstein (2019).

11 Lerner was one of the first managing editors of the Review of Economic Studies, along with Walter Rudlin and Paul Sweezy; for the other contributions of this earlier debate see Lerner (1934; 1935) and Dobb (1935).

12 Note that at this point Lerner had yet to formulate his notion of controlled economy. For Oskar Lange’s market-socialist model, see Lange and Taylor ([1938] 1948); for the details of the Lange-Lerner mechanism, see Kowalik (1990); for the original debate, see Lerner (1936; 1937) and Lange (1937); for an essay that compares the views of “market socialist” Oskar Lange and “centralist” Maurice Dobb, see Kowalik (1978).

13 Lerner’s attack on institutionalists is a nod toward another frontier of theoretical struggle in the discipline of economics. A counter denigrative locution, “psychologism,” was mobilized by American institutionalists against the early neoclassical marginalists: psycholog-ism, not proper psychology, because premised upon a pseudopsychological utilitarian psychology (Lewin 1996).

14 “But such barefaced apologetics was rather rare among competent economists” (Lerner 1939, 558).

15 And see Oskar Lange and Fred Taylor’s ([1938] 1948) On the Economic Theory of Socialism as a classic statement of the value-neutrality of modern marginal analysis. For a history of the socialist calculation debate, see Włodzimierz Brus and Kazimierz Laski’s (1989) assessment of the theoretical and historical performance of market socialism. Fikret Adaman and Pat Devine (1996; 1997) retraced the same history by centering on the “tacit knowledge” problem (the Austrian challenge against the neoclassical socialists) from a participatory-planning perspective.

16 For a discussion of theoretical humanism as the dominant form of philosophical orientation in the discipline of economics while cutting across different and conflicting schools of thought, see Madra (2017).

17 See, for instance, Aronson (1994) for an early mention of this designation in print.

18 Consider, for instance, the proposal of a universal basic income. Under the name of “social dividend,” this policy was widely debated in Fabian (G. D. H. Cole) and Keynesian (Joan Robinson, James Meade) circles, and Lerner (1944, 266) discussed the scheme as a means to adjust consumption, along with the interest rate to adjust investment “so as to prevent inflation and unemployment”—for an extended discussion that excavates this prehistory of “social dividend,” see Van Trier (1989). Before Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) revitalized the concept (coming from a different genealogy) in Empire, the policy proposal was picked up by analytical Marxists such as Philippe Van Parijs as “a capitalist road to communism” (van der Veen and Van Parijs 1986), appearing as an integral component of various market-socialist schemes (e.g., Bardhan and Roemer 1992). Today, under pandemic conditions, a UBI has proponents across the political spectrum, including some libertarians who find support for it in Milton Friedman’s (1962) Capitalism and Freedom.

19 Notably, Bowles and Gintis (1990, 166) differentiate their theory of contested exchange from the Walrasian model of economic exchanges as solved political problems by attributing the latter view to Abba Lerner. While Lerner wrote of the possibility of a rules-governed controlled economy where all political problems are resolved through marginal analysis, as we saw in his marginalist concept of “surplus” from 1939, he was well aware of the role that power may play in economic exchanges.

20 In a short note on the Ricardo-Marx-Sraffa discussion, which he wrote toward the end of his life for Science and Society, Dobb (1975–6, 469–70) argued against those who used “the term ‘neo-Ricardian’ pejoratively in order to counterpose it to ‘true Marxism,’” saying that “they have apparently failed to appreciate the true center and crux of the present stage of the debate, at any rate in academic circles—something which has considerably more importance ideologically than many will allow, because via its influence on students who imbibe it through the spoken word, hearsay and assigned textbook, it percolates down to much wider circles who accept its implications even though lacking any interest in, or probably any acquaintance with, its technicalities. To my mind, this contest is still predominantly at the stage of criticism, and hence of undermining the century-old dominance of orthodox doctrine over economics teaching.”

21 The italicized formulation refers to Lacan’s structuralist formula: “A signifier represents the subject to other signifiers.” For a survey of Lacan’s relation to Marx through the trajectories of the polyvalent meanings of the signifier “economy,” see Madra and Özselçuk (2022).

22 Such reductionisms had implications for the so-called transformation problem. See, for an earlier articulation of the problem, Wolff, Roberts, and Callari (1982).

23 As discussed in a note above, toward the very end of his life, Dobb found himself once more embroiled in a controversy around the vulgar. Bob Rowthorn (1974, 75, 87) wrote an essay that criticized neo-Ricardians and the “many Marxists (an illustrious example is Dobb in his later writings) [who] regard Sraffa’s work as providing both the solution to a number of problems, whose treatment by Marx was unsatisfactory, and perhaps an alternative, more modern version of the labor theory of value”; he argued that by insisting “on reading Marx as though he were an English classical economist,” these economists fail to move beyond the “vulgar socialists,” such as Proudhon, who couldn’t recognize the specificity of industrial capital. Dobb’s (1975–6, 470) note on the Ricardo-Marx-Sraffa discussion, written partly in response to Rowthorn’s essay, ended by gently suggesting that “Marxists have more to gain by stressing what they have in common with their allies, in the shape of fellow-critics of prevailing bourgeois orthodoxy who would not perhaps go all the way with them in positive statements of what they believe; and that it is weakening and divisive (and in this sense sectarian) to focus primary attention on differences between Marxists, near-Marxists, and other (even if such differences are not to be ignored).” See also Meek (1979, 64; King 2015, 1476).

24 This section is reproduced from Madra and Özselçuk (2021).

25 For a more general and theoretical treatment of the impossibility of value under capitalist competition, see Stephen Resnick (2001).

26 For discussions of abilities and needs in the context of the communist axiom, see Madra and Özselçuk (2015), and in the context of history of the economics, see Madra (2023).

27 Particularly notable are Yves Duroux and Etienne Balibar. See the footnotes in Bettelheim (1975, 68, 105).

28 For a classic statement of this position, see Nove (1983).

29 See, for instance, Ellman (1990) and Grossman (1990). Dobb (1969, 136–7) himself differentiated between accounting prices for planning purposes, accounting prices for recording purposes, shadow prices as the “dual” of linear programming, notional prices used as a standard or term of comparison, prices as incentive payments, and the retail prices of consumer goods. For a class-analytical account of these experiments in administered prices in the Soviet Union, see Resnick and Wolff (2002).

30 For a recent reflection on the state of value theory in the Marxian critique of political economy, see the symposium edited by Eray Faruk Düzenli: listed in the sequence of their publication, the contributors are Düzenli (2011), Roberts (2011), Moseley (2011), Kristjanson-Gural (2011), and Dumenil and Levy (2011).

31 Fisher borrows the concept of “folk politics” from accelerationists Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek.

32 For a catalogue of the diverse and open set of forms of economic calculation, see Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy (2013).