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Toward the end of his life, Marx found his theory of value attacked along the lines of then-emerging marginalist theory.A new breed of economists saw Marx’s materialism as the Achilles heel of his political economy, and confidently chided Marx for deluding himself that value could be anything other than our subjective estimation of utility, one thing for you and another thing for me,In 1881, the ailing Marx penned a private response to the first direct attack upon the materialism of his Capital.  His antagonist was the belligerent economist Adolph Wagner who precipitated the dismissal from the University of Berlin of Capital’s first academic critic, Eugen Dühring.As it turned out, Marx’s “Notes on Adolph Wagner” became an economic testament to his life’s work.  Marx in his sixties calls upon the materialist Theses II and VIII that he penned in his twenties.Marx’s Defence of Capital’s MaterialismAdolph Wagner’s “general theory of value” [„allgemeine Werttheorie“] proclaimed “exchange-value” to be determined by “use-value” or, in vulgar terminology, price determined by utility.Marx tooth-combed his way through Wagner’s book, in the manner of his working life, simultaneously excerpting and critiquing it.In this post I consider a characteristic thread in his argument that exposes its predication upon Marx’s “materialist ontology”.I interpret “materialist ontology” to mean no more than what Marx says about it, in highly abstract form, in the Afterword to Capital Volume 1.

Marx wrote:

the ideal is nothing other than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.

I point out that no-one yet comprehends the biochemical–physiological processes involved in thinking.  Materialists, unlike idealists, merely commit to considering these processes to be natural processes, subject to continued scientific investigation.  No-one seriously considers that our current state of comprehension of these processes constitutes a “materialist ontology”.And now, to Marx…Notes on WagnerMarx:  Mr. Wagner forgets that, at the outset, neither “value” nor “exchange-value” are subjects for me, but the commodity.Marx:  It is from the value-concept, that “use-value” and “exchange-value” are supposed to be derived by Mr Wagner;  not as with me from a concretum, the commodity. Marx characterises any attempt to build a practical science upon a foundational abstraction, and not upon a concrete object, for what it really is, unadulterated scholasticism.  This necessarily characterises LBird’s anti-practical plan to constrain all human science to ideology, which LBird falsely dogmatises to be approved Marxian practice.Wagner:  At the outset, man finds himself in relation to the things of the outside world as means of satisfying his needs.Marx:  But men do not by any means begin by “finding themselves in a theoretical relationship to the things of the outside world”.  Of course, for a professorial schoolmaster, the relations between men and nature are, a priori, not practical, that is, they are not relations rooted in action, but are theoretical {relations rooted in human thought}.Here Marx asserts that man forms practical social relations because he must, not because he theorises them.  He is refuting LBird’s dogma of the diametrically opposite practice–theory relation.Marx:  Men begin, just like animals, by eating, drinking, etc.  Men begin by actively behaving, by availing themselves of certain things of the outside world through their action, and thus satisfying their needs.Marx grounds social practice in necessity.  Without the necessity of social practice, deterministic theory is impossible—which is why LBird’s anti-practical necessity-denying “science” is stillborn.Contrary to LBird’s dogma, Marx never hallucinated that theory was active and practice was passive.  Never.  Only a blinkered dogmatist could assert that practice was passive, i.e. that activity was inactive.  Marx made his great discovery by merely recognising that materialists up to Feuerbach had failed to comprehend the creative role of practice in determining theory [which is the essence of Marx’s materialism].Marx:  Men start, then, with production.Marx now embarks on the most materialistically abrasive part of his argument…Marx:  Through the repeated process of social production, the capacity of things to “satisfy men’s needs” becomes imprinted upon their brains;  men, like animals, learn “theoretically” to distinguish the outer things which serve to satisfy their needs.At a certain stage of social development, men linguistically christen entire classes of such things, because in their production process—i.e. the process of appropriating these things—men are continually engaging in active contact with their fellows and with these things, over which they and their fellows will soon have to struggle against other humans for possession.Social practice is the necessary ground of abstract thought, and is therefore the independent variable, while theory is the dependent.  Theory can only be the rational comprehension of practice.  This is the practical reason, and the sole reason, why theory is capable of serving as a guide to successful practice.  [Thesis VIII].Marx:  But [a] linguistic label purely and simply expresses, as a concept, what repeated activity has turned into an experience, namely that certain outer things serve to satisfy the needs of human beings already living in definite social context {this being an essential prerequisite because they have language}.Humans endow these things with the attribute of utility, as if the things actually possessed it, although it would hardly occur to a sheep that one of its “useful” qualities is that it can be eaten by human beings.Marx has lost patience with muddle-headed Wagner’s “linguistic drivel”, and finally points out—contrary to ideological dogmatists like LBird—that “the content is not altered by this change of linguistic expression.  It is still only the distinguishing or fixing in the mind of the things of the outside world which are means of satisfying human needs”.Marx:  From the outset, I do not proceed from “concepts”.This is devastating news for LBird, who lives and breathes in order to dragoon every last one of us into marching lockstep in ideological subservience to LBird’s “democratic communist” dogma, in parody of his mythologised Marx.Marx:  What I proceed from is the simplest social form in which the product of labour presents itself in contemporary society, and this is the “commodity”.To proceed, non-conceptually, from the way a social form “presents itself in contemporary society” [appearance] rubs against the grain of everything LBird confidently attributes to his fantasy Marx.  For LBird, the way social forms appear to us is irredeemably “conceptual” and ideologically relative.Here Marx is scathingly contemptuous of the skeptical anti-objective relativist that LBird wants to be, and of the illusory Marx he emotionally hankers after.Marx:  I analyse the commodity, initially in the form in which it appears. We remind LBird that the dogmatism of his supposedly active “ideology” has the unintended effect of immobilising himself—practically and theoretically—to the extent that he takes comatose refuge in abject passivity, beyond normal human comprehension, when asked how in practice he goes about determining whether his shoelaces in the form in which they appear to us are tied or loose.LBird’s paralytic impotence when confronted by practice (in the world as it presents itself to us in contemporary society) is explained by LBird modestly priding himself as being an exemplary “impractical communist” unlike us “practical socialists” of the SPGB.  He might reread Thesis VIII to learn what coruscating opinion his mythical Marx has of him.To proceed further is to venture into Marx’s defence of the first three chapters of Capital, which contains his materialist analysis of the concretum, the commodity.I halt here at a lost cause because the ideological LBird has pontificated that Marx’s materialist analysis is not to his taste and is, in any case, utter nonsense, and likewise incomprehensible to everyone else.However, I couldn’t close without letting the materialists savour the idealist absurdity of the following Wagnerian excerpt, presented just as it left Marx’s pen…Wagner:  “This acquisition” {of goods through commerce} “necessarily presupposes a definite legal system, on whose basis” (!) “commerce takes place,” etc.Finally, I ask LBird why, it was not a dereliction of soi disant “democratic communist” duty when Marx—who allegedly asserts the dogma that theory precedes practice—scoffed at Wagner, “I have never established a socialist system, this is a fantasy foisted upon me by Wagner” [or, as in most idealist fantasies, by LBird].

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The accounting profession serves no humanly necessary purpose.The accounting profession produces no humanly necessary use values in the sense of socially produced goods that service society in general—as distinct from socially produced goods that ensure the capitalist class amasses surplus value.The accounting profession’s social function is to compromise all human plans in the service of capital;  to kill off human aspiration;  to stand between human need and its realisation.All this, before we address the intellectual stupefaction that must arise from the moribund humdrum monotonous automatic mind-deadening unsatisfying life activity of accounting.  But I intend nothing personal.  Your profession, like many we are forced into, shares its attributes with the myriad anti-human professions that are absolutely necessary to amassing surplus value:  e.g., banking, advertising, retail trade, social coercion,…A world, implemented according to our Object and Declaration of Principles, will reveal your apprehensions about socialism as misconceptions necessarily clouded by our capitalist-limited anti-human view of the world.Join us.  We have a far better human world to win.

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robbo wrote:

So I take it you think socialism is inevitable then. Perhaps as a..er… "scientific socialist" you might care to furnish scientific proof of  this that goes a little further than what appears to be a matter of pure opinion on your part. Marx repudiated Hegelian teleological thinking as just speculation. You seem to have embraced it with a kind of religious fervour.

Apologies for the philosophical terminology, but I haven’t time to simplify and still do justice to the important issues you raise.No, Robbo, why should I?All explanatory science is deterministic.  If science lacks determinism it can’t explain anything.Determinism is how we grasp in our minds the necessity of processes in the external world—it’s our comprehension of how processes unfold in the external world.Now the world’s processes are themselves necessarily contingent—they are constrained by the circumstances they find themselves in.  This is the common condition of daily life.It is thus impossible for a purely theoretical grasping of a necessary process to reveal, in and of itself, the inevitability of the process.  In other words determinism is not inevitability.That’s why Marx, following Hegel, develops his science synthetically from abstraction increasingly towards concreteness, e.g., moving from abstract value to the concrete credit system and the world market; see e.g., Clause 9 of http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/marx's-scientific-method.Sorry, Robbo, but if science is only opinion we are talking past each other, with no meaningful contact.Perhaps read Plekhanov’s wonderful marxian account of the remarkable 18th century French materialists and their mantra “opinion governs the world”.True, but what an amazingly fertile teleology Hegel’s ideal subject, the unfolding Spirit (consciousness)—a blend Spinoza’s substance and Fiche’s ego—turned out to be for materialist Marx.Marx turned Hegel’s teleology on its feet, recognising Spirit’s apparent autonomy as the superstructural appearance of an unfolding social base.Idealist Hegel’s universal ideal subject (Spirit) cannot avoid being a teleological subject that dominates mankind because, for idealists, consciousness governs mankind.  On the other hand, Marx’s actual subject (mankind) is merely contingently determined like all actual subjects.However, Hegel’s teleology helped Marx clarify how mankind’s own social creations—within the divisive social system of capitalism—create autonomous ideal subjects value and capital that, like Hegel’s ideal Spirit, come to dominate him.So, the answer is both yes and no.  Deeper discussion of this central aspect is for another time.Ditto.  There’s no absolute teleology outside of idealist speculative philosophy.

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No, I made only the minimal modernising changes I outlined.The two words "opposed" and "hostile" remain excatly as adopted in 1904 (see  italics).  §7.  That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the capitalist class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party.  I have not forgotten your different request for a modern narrative.

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Alan, as requested, I have made a minimal change to the D of P to modernise it without altering its untouchable content.Here is a summary of my changes:I have changed the archaic term “master class” to the modern term “capitalist class” in §1, §2 and §7.I have updated the social production categories in §1.I have deleted outdated social categories in §6.All changes are shown in italics. Declaration of Principles The Companion Parties of the World Socialist Movement holdThat society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living (production, transportation, communications and power, both natural and social, together with their supporting infrastructure, etc.) by the capitalist class, and the consequent enslavement of the working class, by whose labor alone wealth is produced.That in society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess.That this antagonism can be abolished only by the emancipation of the working class from the domination of the capitalist class, by the conversion into the common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people.That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race or sex.That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organize consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of social privilege.That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the capitalist class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party.The Companion Parties of the World Socialist Movement, therefore, enter the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labor or avowedly capitalist, and call upon the members of the working class of each country to muster under its banner to the end that a speedy termination may be wrought to the system which deprives them of the fruits of their labor, and that poverty may give place to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.This falls way short of your request, and is merely for comment.

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jondwhite wrote:

World Socialist Party of the United StatesThe Socialist Party of CanadaWorld Socialist Party of IndiaWorld Socialist Party of New ZealandSocialist Studies (1991 to present)Socialist League (UK, 1885 until 1888)Proletarian Party?There's seven.

Amended your list to eightWorld Socialist Party of the United StatesThe Socialist Party of CanadaWorld Socialist Party of IndiaWorld Socialist Party of New ZealandSocialist Studies (1991 to present)Socialist League (UK, 1885 until 1888)Proletarian Party?[World] Socialist Party of Australia (1924 to 1990s)

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Alan, you ask why world socialism is in this mess?  Two significant reasons spring to mind:the practical calamity caused by Leninism,the theoretical calamity caused by neoRicardianism (see below).The first is the obvious calamity.  What, at least to me, was less obvious is the resulting collateral damage to the conviction in genuine socialism as a realisable possibility that was wrought by the demise of Leninism.The second is the less obvious calamity, and its retelling is bound to be misunderstood.  Nevertheless here goes.The neoRicardian economists clearly proved Marx to be theoretically wrong, thereby undermining the entire Marxian enterprise.  Theoretically this was far more significant than the trivial demolishing of the casuistic communist rationalisations of sovietism.The neoRicardian demolition of Marx was made more shattering because it was the unforeseen outcome of a wonderful (in its now historic way) economic book by respected pro-Marx economist, Piero Sraffa, editor of the collected works of David Ricardo, etc.This surprising anti-marxian result universally weakened the resolve of a generation of academic marxists from the mid ’70s onwards.  Not a single economist of any stripe and from any nation, no matter how determined or ingenious, could pinpoint the flaws in the neoRicardian argument against the central marxian economic category of value.None could rescue marxian value from total incoherence—the neoRicardians openly demonstrated that marxian values could be positive, negative, or zero, or all over the place, independently of profits.It now seemed convincing enough that marxian value was a totally meaningless category of the capitalist economy.  At best Marx’s theoretical ‘essence’ value was redundant, and economics lived solely by what Marx called a ‘form of appearance’, namely prices.How could marxism survive?  It had never faced an assault on its integrity like this before.  The entire body of marxian theory was now considered, charitably at best, to be terminal.  In practice, an entire formerly sympathetic generation had confidently consigned marxism to its grave!It was not until the first decade of the millennium that economist Andrew Kliman, and colleagues, exposed the deep flaw in the neoRicardian argument, thereby showing that the perceived errors in marxian value were hidden within the apparently transparent and open neoRicardian system.  Everyone had fallen for the blindspot that Marx employed the economic category value to expose.Suddenly the boot was on the other foot.  Not only had Marx been vindicated, he was found to be far more prescient than his successors.  This man is our theoretical guide before which all else is socialist illusion.Kliman clearly demonstrated that the universally perceived economic incoherence lay within neoRicardianism itself.  Marxism is stronger than ever, and better understood.However, the resolve of a generation had been severely weakened and conviction in socialism almost completely spent.  It’ll take a while for them to recover.But we take hope.  The capitalist economy is doing its very best to inspire conviction in world socialism as the only practical solution, and that will reinvigorate resolve.  In some ways, it has been thus for marxian socialism since its inception in the 1840s.

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Alan, like everyone here, I have unbounded respect for you.  Others may have done as much for socialism, but none could have done more.So in that spirit I am simply challenging your specific proposal that we must be prepared to lose our souls in order to save ours skins―we should make a faustian pact with the devil.Back in 1904 or thereabouts the party already saw the contemporary SPD (where Bernstein was repudiating scientific socialism) as nothing more than the fruit of reformist seeds sewn in the 1876 Gotha merger of convenience.  Today the SPD hails Bernstein as its spiritual founder. That is the crux of my concern.You know that I consider scientific socialism as the only rational scientific explanation of our position that carries conviction.  And I appreciate that you remain unconvinced.  I'm totally happy to live that.All I request is that you make a clear, direct and strong case for your proposal.

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ajj wrote:

I provided one individual and one political organisation which met your request.  The means to achieve that solution may not be the SPGB's but they seek the same society as we do as a solution to all the social ills. 

Before you get carried away, you might reread my challenge to provide an instance of someone or some organisation outside the party that actually advocates the same practical solution as we do. I worded the challenge carefully.Just because people or organisations imagine the same future world doesn’t mean they have the the same practical solution as we do.Imaginary worlds are cheap.  They all remain utopian dreams—in Marx’s and Engels’s sense—without the necessary means to achieve them, and then to convince their proponents that, once achieved, the system will maintain itself as socialism.And therein lies the crucial point of the challenge.Therein lies the necessity for the socialist party to ground its existence on its signature Declaration of Principles, which is the party’s practical solution to achieving socialism and, once achieved, of reproducing and maintaining it.The Declaration is based on the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels.  It is the party’s rational means of convincing people of the necessity and viability of socialism.As a succinct rational document it also serves to actuate class consciousness; to convince people that socialism can be achieved practically and, once achieved, that socialism will reproduce itself practically.  That is a powerful weapon.By comparison to scientific conviction, all else is socialist pipe dream.  No matter how immediately compelling the non-scientific alternative, conviction remains utopian, and practical socialism remains stillborn.Of course none of this means anything to you.  You flatly deny the predictive force of scientific socialism and you effectively repudiate its deterministic scientific status.  From your angle, the party’s socialist platform and rationale are decidedly not scientific.  They are fundamentally matters of pure opinion.To reduce socialism to mere opinion is to scuttle the party—to remove its rational scientific foundation.  Without its scientific platform the party has no convincing reason to exist at all.And that’s why your purely opinionated socialist stance fences you into the invidious political position of putting unbounded faith in the following priceless specimen of lamentable opinion “Can’t you accept that others may well be right and we wrong?”

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i.e. where was your sentence two when fellow members were being abused and you kept on encouraging the blood sport?

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ajj wrote:

On a personal level i found it hard to be on a picket line with a co-worker, united to stop the bosses, and then to treat him and on occasions her as a political enemy because they had a different understanding upon how to reach socialism from my own.Argument and discussion took place but they were conducted on the basis of comradely disagreement, and not based on accusations of being an accomplice of the capitalist class because opinions differed.  

This is the full two-sentence paragraph.No, Alan, they are political enemies.  And here you are advocating that we treat them as what they are not—political friends.Normal decency naturally demands that we treat them respectfully, without fear or favour, for exactly what they are—a political enemy.  That is not a moral statement like you want yours to be.  It merely recognises that moral imperatives aren’t promulgated by decree.By the way, you recently violated your second sentence when you condoned the un-comradely abuse of your political friends by a political enemy you were comradely desirous of befriending.

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I request moderator1 to move my post #512 (which was a reply to an earlier post) to become the start of a new topic, under General Discussion, called Socialists Outside the Socialist Party.

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So socialists outside the Socialist Party apparently comprise Derek Wall and the Anarchist Federation.Derek Wall is unknown to me.  I sought out his wikipedia entry, and assume its content enjoys as much of his blessing as he is able, within the constraints of wikipedia integrity, to bestow upon it.I ask you to read through the wikipedia section headed Propositions which outlines for calm objective consideration his solutions and measures, stripped of vehement rhetoric.Show me how Wall’s propositions are nothing but another shade of Paul Mason’s.Derek Wall’s obvious disagreement with us is over the identical issue that Eduard Bernstein disagreed with us.  Bernstein, like Wall, considered himself an authentic socialist.  We, alas, didn’t.Both take the same anti-scientific stance that Rosa Luxemburg anathemized as repudiating the necessity, the determinism, the predictive force of Marx’s scientific socialism.If there’s no necessity, determinism, and predictive force in Marx’s scientific socialism we’d all better pack up.This was Popper’s key line of attack.  If you demolish the deterministic essence of Marx’s scientific work his whole enterprise collapses and is exposed as thoroughly misguided.The point for all socialists is to comprehend the unfolding, working out, development of the base–superstructure determinism of Marx’s scientific socialism.Now one thing is obvious.  Wall and Bernstein along with the 50 or 50,000 shades either deny or fail to comprehend the unfolding, working out, development of the base-superstructure determinism of Marx’s scientific socialism.They raise themselves above scientific socialism, dismissing it out of hand as an oxymoron, unworthy of serious consideration, even though they unconsciously rely on the very same predictive mechanisms to negotiate every second of their waking lives without dismissing them out of hand.The intellectual instinctively defuses, annuls, renders impotent in his mind the power of deterministic science once it’s directed at society.Whenever the dynamics of society enters his mind as a thought, he imagines it in voluntaristic fashion.  But that is his illusion necessarily bred out of all he’s left himself to go on—the mere appearance of social things—since he has repudiated the dynamic essence of social things.That society will not let him do just what he wants to scarcely, if ever, crosses his voluntaristic mind.  Consequently the stream of supposedly ‘socialist’ subsystems desired to coexist and survive within an obligingly accommodating capitalism.The intellectual false consciousness that denies society is a necessarily self-generating system is the very philosophical mindset that Marx and Engels devoted their entire theoretical lives to demolishing.  It is not our stance.The noteworthy intellectuals who cling to such illusions stand in need of learning socialism from us, not we from them.Advocating democratic methods, making rational criticisms of capitalist society, or even advocating a moneyless future is not socialist if there’s no necessity, determinism, scientific force in getting there and, once there, in maintaining socialism as a self-reproducing social formation.This won’t happen by voluntarist chance in a social formation driven by necessity, if that social necessity to which all must submit, remains uncomprehended.Our Object and our Declaration of Principles remain to this day, after a century, the only practical scientific way of achieving just that.  The rest is anti-scientific day dreaming, i.e. utopian!No, Derek Wall is not a socialist outside of the Socialist Party, any more than Eduard Bernstein, Paul Mason, etc.I may continue on to the anarchists, if you are willing, but their position on the substantive issue is similarly tainted.

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No, not one of the 50 or 50,000 shades of capitalist criticism ― including those made by bourgeois critics, since they also carp bitterly over capitalism ― wants the same thing as we do.We distinguish ourselves from all of them by advocating the only practical solution to capitalism's problems ― a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments of production by and in the interest of the whole of society.On the other hand, these proponents of 50 or 50,000 shades of capitalism's woes interpret our workable solution as utterly unworkable.  It is they who openly disagree with us.  It is they who stand intellectually superior to us.  It is they who talk down to us.Don't turn two-sided disagreement one-sidely against us.  We and they genuinely do disagree with each other. We are at genuine political loggerheads.They advocate capitalism without its problems.  That is impossible.  That is genuinely not agreeing with us. They interpret capitalism according to their imaginary desires, and so genuinely crave the impossible, a fictitious fantasy.  We cannot genuinely agree with their grounds for genuinely disagreeing with us.Despite their delusory stance you claim that some among these 50 or 50,000 shades of capitalist critics actually agree with us ― genuinely agree with our solution ― and genuinely want the same thing as we do.I therefore challenge you to point out just one of the 50 or 50,000 shades of capitalist criticism ― just one of them will do ― that actually advocates the same practical solution as we do. Show us just one of them that genuinely wants the same Object that we want.

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So we must obliterate our only case because people are once more forced by circumstances into having grave misgivings about capitalism as a social system, which misgivings have for decades been suppressed by the wholescale victory in the battle of ideas by the capitalist class.These are such rare times to show a receptive working class our unswerving steadfastness to our sole justifiable case for socialism. To miss that is truly to take one’s eye off the ball, and play merely to the crowd like all the others.   

[Author]

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