Søren Mau vs. Bruno Leipold on Analytical Marxism, Market Socialism, and Value
Søren Mau's critique of Bruno Leipold's "Citizen Marx" is interesting but it it misses the mark.
I’m a very big fan of Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx. If you haven’t read it, here’s how I described the book in a review essay for UnHerd (after an overview of some of Marx’s basic claims in Capital):
Many non-socialist 19th-century radicals shared much of Marx’s diagnosis of the problems with capitalism. But they disagreed sharply with his proposed cure. They dreamed of reversing the process by which the working class had lost access to its own means of production. Bruno Leipold gives us a fascinating look at these debates in Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought. The author, a political theorist at the London School of Economics, showcases the ways in which classical republican themes about freedom from arbitrary power influenced Marx’s own thought. Even so, Marx forged his own views in opposition to the leading “republicans” of his time (who played up the republican virtue of small farmers and small artisans and saw this as the basis of the society they wanted to bring about — or revive).
Despite these enduring disagreements:
[B]y the time he was doing his most mature work, Marx had absorbed much of the radical republicans’ point. In the historical sections of Capital, he praised England’s population of independent small farmers as “the proud yeomanry of which Shakespeare speaks,” who became the “backbone of Cromwell’s strength” during the short-lived British republic of the 17th century. But he argued that the only way to recover republican freedom under industrial conditions is for working people to collectively take over and democratically run the factories and large farms that were already becoming prevalent in his era.
More recently, I’ve been reading Søren Mau's Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital. Expect something here about that book sometime soon.
So, I was interested to see that Mau wrote a review of Citizen Marx for Spectre. In many ways, it’s glowing. Mau praises Leipold for crafting “a compelling, deeply researched, and elegantly written analysis of Marx’s relationship to republicanism” that “will no doubt become an important point of reference in future discussions about Marx’s thought.”
On that, we agree. But Mau also has a critique of what he sees as Leipold’s limitations, and that’s where things get interesting.
To begin with, Mau worries that Leipold’s “style of thought” shows an “affinity with analytical Marxism, and with analytical philosophy more broadly.” Any regular reader of Philosophy for the People will know that I regard this as high praise, but for Mau it’s definitely a negative.
I said my piece on that more general issue in my response to David Harvey on dialectics and analytical Marxism, but I want to drill down on the specific context in which Mau raises the issue. He writes:
Strikingly, the closest Leipold comes to addressing the theory of value is a footnote that repeats G. A. Cohen’s claim that the concept of exploitation does not necessarily depend on the labor theory of value. In my view, this is a remarkable omission. Not only is the theory of value one of the most fundamental elements of Marx’s critique of capitalism; it is also directly related to one of the central concerns of Citizen Marx, namely Marx’s critique of the arbitrary power of capital.
And he ties this into a broader critique of the analytical Marxist tradition that he takes to inform Leipold’s views:
Analytical Marxists have always been skeptical of Marx’s dialectical critique of the value form and the deeply speculative-Hegelian presentation of this theory in manuscripts such as the Grundrisse (1857–58), the so-called Urtext (1858) and the first edition of Capital (1867).
It’s true, Mau grants, that Leipold discusses not only the power of capitalists over workers but the power of “impersonal market forces” over both workers and capitalists (since they force workers to accept submission to capitalists, and force capitalists to tighten the screws on those workers to outcompete their brother-capitalists). But Mau isn’t satisfied with how Leipold handles this part of the picture.
Leipold discusses the latter (the domination of everyone by the market) in terms of competition among capitals as well as among workers, rather than on the more abstract and fundamental level of the theory of value, where Marx analyzes market transactions in terms of “relationships between private and independent producers”—that is, before the dialectical unfolding of concepts reveals these market agents to be capitalists and workers.
Leipold’s focus on competition rather than on the underlying social relations expressed in the value form inadvertently leaves the door open to Proudhonian market socialism—that is, to the idea that capitalist competition can be abolished while retaining the market as a coordination mechanism between noncapitalist producers.
Putting aside Mau’s suspicions of analytical Marxism in general, I have three issues with all of this. The first is that Marx himself emphasizes competition whenever he talks about impersonal market forces shaping the dynamics of capitalist exploitation in Capital. He talks a lot about the “coercive laws of competition” making capitalists tighten the screws on workers.
Second, I find the phrase “Proudhonian market socialism” pretty unhelpful. It’s true that Marx was quite optimistic about the prospects for a fully marketless form of socialism, and this was one of many differences between him and Proudhon (who had no objection to markets). Marx died several decades before the Socialist Calculation Debate began, and certainly before the harsh experience of the authoritarian state-socialist experiments of the 20th century vividly demonstrated the practical difficulties in trying to coordinate production with fine-grained consumer preferences in the absence of market mechanisms. But many of Marx’s disagreements with Proudhon weren’t about that difference, and I worry that saying “Proudhonian market socialism” when you mean “market socialism” confuses the issue.
Certainly, many socialists in the 2020s who are on Marx’s side of most of the points in dispute between him and Proudhon in the 1840s have absorbed the harsh lessons of the 20th century. They think that, even if it’s possible that future technological progress will one day deliver us totally marketless red plenty, we’re not there yet. Realistically, any economically viable form of socialism we know how to engineer right now would have to retain some markets to coordinate between noncapitalist producers in at least some sectors of the economy.
Cards on the table:
This is what I think, so whether or not Leipold is “inadvertently” leaving this door open, my own view is that it should be opened advertently. More on that below.
My last (and closely related) objection is that, as a reading of Capital, I just don’t see how the claim that the “dialectical unfolding of concepts” over the course of the book “reveals” the market agents discussed in the early chapters “to be capitalists and workers” can be made to fit the basic textual evidence. Of course, we shouldn’t dogmatically assume that Marx got everything right in 1867. But if we’re going to use his views as a jumping-off point for discussion, it’s important to get those views right.
In his preface to the first edition of Capital, Marx contrasts what’s possible in his critique of political economy with how things work in the hard sciences (which he treats as the epistemic gold standard). He says with some regret that literal laboratory experiments are impossible in his chosen subject, so his exploration of fundamental issues will often have to proceed by means of exploring hypothetical thought experiments:
[I]n the analysis of economic forms, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of any assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both.1
It is, by the way, one of the great virtues of Mau’s own book that in Mute Compulsion he fully absorbs this point and pushes back against those latter-day Marxists who (contrary to Marx himself) think that trying to clarify concepts by exploring fanciful hypotheticals is somehow bad or un-materialist. In fact, Mau often uses this method himself. Even so, I think he misses the boat on the first and most important thought experiment in Capital.
Part One of the book (“Commodities and Money”) very explicitly assumes the non-existence of anything like capitalism. In n. 15, Marx spells out that wage-labor and capital do not exist in the scenario he spends these first few chapters exploring. “At this stage of our presentation,” he says, “the category of wages does not exist at all.” Nor is there any hint in Part One of anyone engaging in the characteristic “circuit” of capitalist market activity (M-C-M’), turning money into commodities with the goal of turning those commodities into more money. Instead, everything being described is a matter of C-M-C, turning commodities you don’t want (or which you want less than available alternatives) into money in order to get different commodities you do want (or want more).
Marx is doing what he does throughout the book, making simplifying hypothetical assumptions so he can train his abstraction-microscope on just the issue he wants to focus on at any given time. (So, for example, in just about all of the non-historical parts of the book, he assumes that every commodity being produced is being sold and that everything sells at its exact value.) Engels famously commented that he thought the scenario of “simple commodity production” described in these first few chapters (where no one is working for anyone else and it’s all small independent producers C-M-C-ing) reflected a historical era of simple commodity production. That’s probably wrong. All societies in which production for exchange has occurred have included some segment of society whose market transactions were all C-M-C. (Think of small family farmers who might produce most of what they need for themselves but still take the excess to market to sell to buy things they need and can’t produce.) And you can find instances of de-feudalizing but not-quite-capitalist societies where this kind of thing is arguably “dominant,” but to the extent that we take Marx literally when he says he’s describing a scenario where wage labor doesn’t “exist,” this is still best read as a thought experiment about generalized simple commodity production rather than a historical description of widespread simple commodity production.
Either way, Engels was far closer to the mark than many latter-day Marxist academics who think Marx is describing capitalism in those first three chapters. Part One is about the general features of commodities, money, and markets as they’d exist in any mode of production where at least some chunk of production is geared toward exchange. Marx is fighting a two-front ideological war against, on the one hand, apologists for capitalism who insist that it’s not a class society based on exploitation (because capitalism is based on free and fair market exchanges) and on the other hand those critics of capitalism (like Proudhon) who think capitalism is a class society based on exploitation because workers are screwed over in market transactions (perhaps because capitalists tilt the playing field in their direction by using the power of the state left over from feudalism, or perhaps because workers are tricked into bad exchanges because they’re paid in money rather than labor-time chits). One of Marx’s major contentions in Capital is that capitalism would be a class society based on the systematic extraction of surplus labor from workers even if the law of exchange was scrupulously followed.2 This is, in fact, the main reason why he talks so much about “value.”
Marx starts the book by trying to understand the general features of markets (as they exist in any society where commodities are exchanged) because he sees these general features as a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. The other crucial condition is the existence of a propertyless labor force desperate enough to sell their working hours to capitalists. The existence of such a labor force is postulated in Part Two (“From Money to Capital”) to explain how M becomes M’. The multi-chapter argument culminating in a famous passage at the end of Ch. 6 about the money-owner and the labor-power-owner meeting in the market as equals and leaving as capitalist and proletarian. We have all the way to Part Eight, on “So-Called ‘Primitive Accumulation,” to find out how and why the propertyless labor force came into existence.
With this basic picture in place, we can loop back to Mau’s claim that the “dialectical unfolding” of categories over the course of the early chapters of Capital “reveals” that the buyers and sellers of Part One were really workers and capitalists all along. In reality, the derivation of labor-capital class relations from market transactions in Part Two has nothing to do with the C-M-C processes discusses in Part One.
In fact, in the first sentence of Ch. 4 (the first chapter of Part Two), Marx explicitly says that the existence of commodities and money is a “starting-point” for capital rather than being a sufficient condition for it. In the rest of the paragraph we’re told that even a world market and world trade are only “historical presuppositions” for it. He gestures at a larger story of capital’s emergence revolving around a struggle for dominance between the emerging power of capital and the older power of “landed property,” but he doesn’t fill out that story there. He has other fish to fry.
It is worth briefly recalling what Marx’s views are how and why modes of production fall over the course of history, though, if only as a reminder that Marx most definitely doesn’t see capitalism a function of the bare existence of money and markets, as if commodity-exchange per se were a demonic egg that took thousands of years to hatch into capital.
In different writings, Marx’s story about how modes of production succeed each other emphaizes (a) class struggle and (b) the development of the productive forces of society over the course of history. In the Communist Manifesto, he and Engels emphasize (a). In some iconic paragraphs in his 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, he focuses on (b). The theory sketched out in these paragraphs is brilliantly elaborated in G.A. Cohen’s book Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. There, Cohen focuses on (b) because that’s what Marx focuses in the 1859 preface, which leads some critics to accuse Cohen of de-emphasizing (a). In his review of Citizen Marx, Mau briefly accuses Cohen of “technological determinism,” which makes me suspect he would co-sign this critique. If so, that’s a serious mistake.
In Capital, Marx devotes a long and interesting footnote (Ch. 1 n. 35) to “seiz[ing] the opportunity” to “briefly refute” a criticism of his theory of history. He doesn’t name the critic he’s responding to, only alluding to a “German-American newspaper,” but what he’s responding to is a review of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy by the nonsocialist radical republican thinker Karl Heinzen. A good bit of Citizen Marx is devoted to covering Marx and Engels’s intellectual clash with Heinzen (and, in at least one case, a physical clash between Heinzen and Marx when Marx foolishly initiated a wrestling match with the much larger Heinzen). An under-praised aspect of Citizen Marx is Leipold’s discussion of these debates, and the light it can shed on how the two levels of analysis (class struggle and technological progress) interact in the way Marx thinks about history. Responding to Heinzen, Marx (and Engels) often talk about how, for example, a proletarian victory in the class war under conditions of insufficient industrial development would be very short-lived, since a high level of development of the productive forces is the necessary basis for a flourishing, abundant socialism.
This picture allows for the contingencies of class struggle to be decisive in particular time and places, while the development of the productive forces play the key role when we zoom out, as Marx does in 1859 and Cohen does in Karl Marx’s Theory of History, to the view from ten thousand feet. Either way, while capitalism certainly couldn’t exist without commodity exchange, seeing the former as nothing more than an unfolding of the latter is hard to square with the way Marx himself thinks about history.
In Part Two, the crucial thing from which Marx derives the existence of the capital-labor relation is the domination of society by the M-C-M’ circuit, which he contrasts as Ch. 4 unfolds to C-M-C by saying the latter is characteristic of “money as money,” the former of “money as capital.” Of course, money becoming commodities and in turn becoming more money is a phenomenon that can (and has) happened in many ways, long before the emergence of capitalism. Marx talks about the “antideluvian forms” of merchant capital and “usurer’s capital” (what we would now call finance capital). And as he concedes in Ch. 5, sometimes individuals are able to turn their initial M into a greater M’ purely by their trading connections or individual business savvy in buying low and selling high or just getting one over on their customers. But since the capitalist class of an entire society can’t “defraud itself,” Marx thinks all these mechanisms are insufficient to explain the degree to which M-C-M’ processes had come to fuel the explosive growth of economies like the one around him in industrial Britain. Instead, M must become M’ by virtue of one of the Cs the initial M is used to purchase being a commodity that has the magical property of generating more value than it itself is worth. This special commodity, he argues, is and can only be labor-power.
This argument from the existence of widespread M-C-M’-ing, and not anything derivable from the analysis of money and commodities in general in Part One, is where Marx derives the existence of a labor force forced by the mute compulsion of material necessity to sell themselves to capitalists.
Mau tries to bolster his reading of Marx by bringing in a line from the notebooks that were posthumously published as Grundrisse. “It is just as pious as it is stupid,” Marx says there, “to wish that exchange value would not develop into capital.”
Is this Marx endorsing the demonic egg view of money and capital after all? (Or at least endorsing it in these notebooks, even if he abandoned it by the time he finalized Capital?) I don’t think so. If you read what comes just before and what comes just after the line Mau quotes, Marx’s point in context is to prosecute that two-front war against defenders and bad critics of capitalism. The former, remember, think everything is fine because the law of exchange is being followed, and the latter think everything is not fine because capitalist class relations violate the law of exchange. The “as pious as it is stupid” line comes during Marx’s skewering of the bad critics, who want to “depict socialism as the realization of the ideals of bourgeois society articulated by the French revolution.”
Marx has no objection to the revolution’s political ideals, and in fact in some of his own writings—as documented in Citizen Marx—make quite explicit appeals to republican liberty as a basis for opposition to capitalism. The point in context is about the free-market ideals proclaimed by the revolutionaries, which misguided anti-capitalists like Proudhon took to be “either originally (in time) or essentially (in their adequate form)” a recipe for economic freedom and equality, but which had then been “perverted by money, capital, etc.” Against this, Marx says on the “originally” point that it would be a pious stupidity to think full-on capitalism wouldn’t come into its own in post-revolutionary France, and on the “essentially” point he argues at length in the paragraphs leading up to Mau’s quote that nothing about the complex market transactions characteristic of capitalism deviates from the basic principles of market exchange in general. In this sense, the specific possibility of a capitalist economy characterized by “the opposition of labor to capital, etc.” was always “latent” within the basics of exchange relations. But later in the same paragraph as “as pious as it is stupid,” we have him pouring scorn on bourgeois apologists like Bastiat for not acknowledging that there’s anything about capitalist labor markets that’s importantly different than, say, the kinds of transactions that happen in farmers’ markets. Here’s how he describes Bastiat’s “infantile abstraction” away from the specificities of capitalism to the universal features of markets in general.
According to this, all economic categories are only so many names for what is always the same relation, and this crude inability to grasp the real distinction is then supposed to represent pure common sense as such. […] For example, the wage for labor is payment for a service done by one individual for another. […] Profit is also payment for a service done by one individual for another. Hence wages and profits are identical…
Marx’s argument is precisely that capitalism is neither a distortion of market exchange (contra the bad critics like Proudhon) nor reducible to it (contra Bastiast). Rather, it’s a particular form of market exchange.
I don’t want to pick on Mau too much here. If I’m right in thinking he’s making a mistake about all this, he’s far from alone in making that mistake.
Michael Heinrich, for example, very confidently asserts that Marx’s analysis of commodities and their values is only supposed to be applicable to commodities within capitalism. At the beginning of his detailed breakdown of the early chapters of Capital in his book How to Read Marx’s Capital, he derives this claim from the opening sentence of Ch. 1, where Marx writes, “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an 'immense collection of commodities'; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form." On the basis of this sentence, at many points later in his breakdown, Heinrich “reminds” readers that Marx’s analysis of commodities in the early chapters is only supposed to apply to commodities-in-capitalism. But…that’s not what the sentence says. At all.
Here’s an analogy I find helpful:
Imagine that, at some point during future human exploration of space, we run into some terrifying new kind of aliens that are made of silicon, unlike all the other species we’d ever encountered, which were all carbon-based. Perhaps the silicon-based alien monsters kept sending our astronauts back with their faces melted off. An exobiologist writing a handbook on the aliens might well start by saying, “The first thing to know about the aliens is that they’re made out of silicon; that’s their elementary form…” and proceed to devote a few chapters to a long discussion of the general features of silicon and how it’s different from carbon. It very obviously wouldn’t follow that the claims made about how silicon worked in that part of the handbook would only apply to silicon when that silicon took the form of the aliens’ bodies.
Similarly, capitalism is similar to medieval feudalism and ancient slave societies in that it’s a class society based on extraction of surplus labor from immediate producers. (Indeed, Marx often says that only the “form” of this extraction changes when e.g. a serf becomes a proletarian.) But one of the most striking dissimilarities between capitalism and previous class societies is that, whatever else it is, capitalism is a form of market society. Like the terrifying new aliens made of silicon, this terrifying new form of class society is made out of markets. It doesn’t follow, though, that it’s the only thing that markets can be used to make.
The claim that Marx thinks that “value” only operates under capitalism just doesn’t work textually. In the same passage from the preface to the first edition I quoted above, Marx says that investigators have “sought in vain for more than 2,000 years to get to the bottom” of how commodities and value work. His explanation for that prolonged failure of analysis isn’t ontological at all. (It’s not, in other words, that Marx claims that the thing he’s now getting to the bottom of hasn’t existed for thousands of years.) It’s purely epistemic. He says it’s easier to understand the various bodies that have been formed out of the “economic cell form” of value than to understand the cells themselves. Similarly, in Ch. 1, he says that Aristotle came very close to figuring out value but didn’t quite make it to the bottom of the issue despite his great genius, and once again gives an explanation that’s 100% epistemic and 0% ontological. (I do a deep dive on that passage here.)
Another interesting piece of textual evidence comes in Marx’s posthumously published “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” sometimes called the Resultate. It was initially written for inclusion in Capital. Marx ultimately decided to leave it out, but it’s included as an appendix in the Penguin edition. There, Marx discusses the specific features of commodities that only appear under capitalism, which go beyond the features discussed in Part One. Under capitalism, part of the price of every commodity reflects the workers’ wages and part reflects the surplus extracted by capitalists. Even there, though, Marx repeats what he says in Ch. 4, that the existence of commodities with all the features discussed in Part One was the historical “prerequisite for the emergence” of capitalism.
As interesting as this may be, though, a fair-minded reader might be left wondering why it matters how exactly Marx conceptualized the relationship between capitalism and commodity-exchange in 1867, or for that matter why it matters what we think about this in 2025.
This brings us back to Mau’s original concern about Leipold leaving the door open to the “Proudhonian” heresy that, in a post-capitalist society, we might for the foreseeable future have to use markets at least in some sectors of the economy to coordinate between consumers and worker-controlled firms. My own view is that, given that we don’t know yet how to make a totally marketless model work, keeping that door open preserves radical optimism. If we close it, insisting as Mau does that “‘market socialism’ is a contradiction in terms,” then we’ve effectively closed the door on the possibility of any kind of socialism at all at this stage of history.
Certainly, Marx himself very far from being a market socialist. In fact, what little he says about how he imagines distribution working under socialism tends to be exuberantly utopian. Even when he’s describing the early phase of communism in the Critique of the Gotha Program, where consumption does have to be apportioned according to labor contributions (before we graduate to “from each according to his abilities, to each according to needs”), Marx speaks in terms of withdrawals from a “common store” of goods, which implies that markets have been entirely transcended. In Ch. 3 n. 1, he approvingly says that the labor-time notes envisioned by Robert Owen would “no more [be] ‘money’ than a theatre ticket is.”
But that doesn’t mean that Marx holds the view, often implicitly or even explicitly held by Marxists who think socialism is in its innermost essence about “overcoming the value form,” that socialism-with-some-market-mechanisms would merely be a disguised form of capitalism, since whoever owns units of production engaged in market exchange is a capitalist, whether it’s a sole proprietor or a bunch of shareholders or the workers themselves. In fact, Marx rejects this claim. In Ch. 11, he says that even “small masters” who employ a few people to help them out in their workshops aren’t capitalists yet until the operation grows to the point where they don’t have to do any of the labor themselves. And in a passage in Ch. 16 bashing John Stuart Mill, he quotes Mill saying that his economic analysis assumes a form of production where “the capitalist advances the whole expenses, including the entire renumeration of the labourer.”
Marx writes:
Mill is good enough to make this concession. ‘That he should do so is not a matter of inherent necessity.’ On the contrary, ‘the labourer might wait, until the production is complete, for all that part of his wages which exceeds mere necessaries; and even for the whole, if he has funds in hand sufficient for his temporary support. But in the latter case, the labourer is to that extent really a capitalist in the concern, by supplying a portion of the funds necessary for carrying it on.' Mill might just as well have said that the worker who advances to himself not only the means of subsistence but also the means of production is in reality his own wage-labourer, or, indeed, that the American peasant is his own slave, because he does forced labour for himself instead of doing it for someone who is his master.
On any fair reading of how to put all this together, Marx is neither a market socialist nor the kind of anti-market socialist who thinks market socialism is disguised capitalism. Given the second prong of that, though, why does Marx so clearly assume that the post-capitalist society instituted by the victorious proletariat will be fully marketless?
There could be a number of reasons. One is that socialism based on competing worker-owned firms would be considerably less egalitarian than wall-to-wall economic planning. Class division is the biggest and most important source of material inequality under capitalism, but it’s not the only source. Even with workers’ control of the means of production throughout the market sector of a socialist economy, some sub-sectors will be more remunerative than others, some firms within particular sectors will be more successful than others, and so on. There are things a market socialist society could to to off-set these remaining inequalities, and schemes for what market socialism will look like typically attend to this point, but when all is said and done, you’re probably left with a society vastly more egalitarian than capitalism but less egalitarian than the kind of socialism we might hope for in the long term. And, even in the French Revolution, the complement of equality and republican liberty was always supposed to be social solidarity. Marx may have worried about the ways that any market mechanisms at all persisting under socialism would undermine what G.A. Cohen would later call “the socialist value of community” by putting the citizens of that society in competition with one another.
My own view is that these are all reasonable concerns. Given that economic calculation problems with society-wide planning weren’t on Marx’s radar (because they weren’t on anyone’s radar in the 1860s), it makes perfect sense to me that those concerns were enough to get him to advocate a leap into a completely marketless form of socialism. And even in the 2020s, when we sadly do know all about both the abstract theory of calculation problems and the empirical demonstration of it in societies like the USSR, I think the same concerns give us good reason to at least move as close as we can to the north star of complete marketlessness, always looking for ways to decommodify new sectors of our future socialist economy whenever we can do so without unacceptable logistical tradeoffs.
But Mau urges a much more thoroughgoing rejection of “Proudhonian market socialism.” In a particularly interesting move, he appeals to the very value of republican freedom from domination emphasized by Leipold:
In a market economy, everyone is forced to obey the impersonal demands of the market, such as price movements, in order to reproduce themselves; the market is a mechanism for transforming social relations into economic movements of commodities and money that comes to dominate everyone. In other words, a market economy can never be free.
I have to say I’m fairly unmoved by this particular objection to markets, for two closely related reasons. First, while I might be wrong about this, my sense is that Leipold wouldn’t count this as a form of “domination” triggering republican concerns. When I interviewed him for my podcast, Leipold recommended Nicholas Vrousalis’s book Exploitation as Domination. And in that book, Vrousalis explains domination as “unilateral control” over the “purposiveness” of others. Illustrating this in the specific context of dominated labor, Vrousalis writes:
You possess unilateral control over my labour capacity if, in the description of our respective roles in the division of labour, you possess control over the content, intensity, or duration of my labour process which I do not possess over yours.
The control of what gets produced by the ebbs and flows of consumer demand wouldn’t seem to fit this bill, especially given even a very rough egalitarianism in the distribution of income. We’re all making decisions about what to buy (as consumers) and all responding to those demand pressures (as producers). But my second reason is much simpler. Even if we do accept for the sake of argument that “domination” of worker-owners by the preferences of consumers would count as real domination, on an intuitive gut-check level it just doesn’t sound like a terribly objectionable form of domination.
I’m all for Fully Automated Luxury Communism as a long-term goal, but to whatever extent that human beings do have to spend part of their days at work, making products (whether to be sold in a market or to be allocated by a planning committee), I want those products to be the ones that people want. I don’t want shelves (or stockpiles of goods waiting to be marketlessly allocated) to be overflowing with things people don’t want, or empty of the ones they do want a la Leningrad grocery stores in 1975. Surely, if you’re more optimistic than I am about the prospects for jumping directly to moneyless marketless Full Communism, it’s precisely because you’re more confident than I am that we can find ways of avoiding that outcome. Whoever’s right about that, the point remains. Whether it’s price signals or planning-assembly votes or whatever, I want us all to have some way of issuing binding “demands” to each other about what to produce during whatever hours we have to spend producing.
Otherwise, we’re wasting our time.
This and all subsequent quotes from Capital and the Grundrisse are from the Penguin editions.
Here’s the argument:
The value of a commodity is the average socially necessary labor time it takes to produce it. That means the value of labor-power must be the average socially necessary labor time it takes to produce it, or in other words the average socially necessary labor time it takes to “reproduce” the worker himself from one day to the next at some reasonable standard of subsistence. Well, how much labor time is that? However much it takes to produce the bundle of commodities that the worker needs to reproduce himself at that level of subsistence. Assuming everything including labor-power is being sold at its full value, the workers’ wages will have the same value as this bundle of commodities. But it only takes part of a day of labor for the worker to reproduce his wages. (If this weren’t true, what would the point of the capitalist hiring him?) So a worker can spend part of the day working to reproduce his own subsistence, and part of the day working to enrich the capitalist (and be forced to agree to do so by the mute compulsion of his economic circumstances), and hence be exploited, even if he’s getting paid the full value of his labor-power.
Marx is unclear about a lot of things, but I don’t see how he could be clearer about the distinction between simple commodity production ( C-M-C) and the cycle of capital (M-C-M’). The latter certainly presupposes the former, and the analysis of the value form and commodity fetishism applies to both, but there is a fundamental difference in that simple commodity production does not have an internal structure of exploitation and class struggle.
Clearly, you can have extraction of surplus value imposed from the outside on simple commodity producers, through tribute, taxes, interest and rent. But the simple commodity producers aren’t being exploited as such. (They may be exploiting their families.)
That is a bit distinct from whether Marx has objections to commodity production, as such, and also distinct from whether it is possible to do without it. Marx seemed to think that already in C-M-C, humans come to be ruled by a fetish of their own creation.