Groucho Marxism

I have just finished slogging through Volume 1 of Das Kapital, Karl Marx’s magnum opus. I’ll be honest, I did not find it an easy read. Marx may have been a very clever chap who changed the course of history, but he was a dreadful writer. Or perhaps I’m being a bit harsh. It could be that the reason I found the book so difficult to get through is that writing styles have changed significantly in the past 150 years. Whereas today the preference is for short sentences, in Marx’s time the trend seemed to be for endless, rambling sentences, with multiple sub-clauses, which you invariably lose the thread of half way through and half to re-read multiple times to understand what the author is actually talking about. This makes reading books like Das Kapital a rather tedious process.

Another thing that makes reading Marx difficult is that he invented a whole new lexicon to describe the economy (although he wouldn’t have called it that himself – the word ‘economy’ was only given its modern meaning by Keynes, around 80 years after Marx wrote Volume 1 of Das Kapital). This is partly what made Marx such an original and insightful writer, but it also makes a lot of his arguments rather opaque and impenetrable. In this blog post I will attempt to cut through some of Marx’s jargon. Let us begin with labour, the physical act of working by human beings. This is probably the key term used in Marxian economics and most other terms are derived from it. This should not surprise us as Marx saw human labour as fundamental to the workings of capitalism.

Given our definition of labour (the physical act of working by human beings), we can define labour power as the capacity to do labour. The distinction between labour and labour power is a fine one: labour power refers to the ability to do work, whereas labour refers to the work itself. A physical analogy may be helpful here. Labour power can be thought of as analogous to the power of a car engine, whereas labour is analogous to the energy expended by the car when it moves. In other words, labour power is a measure of power, whereas labour is a measure of energy or work done. The distinction between the two is important because under capitalism, a worker sells their labour power to a capitalist for a wage, rather than selling the product of their labour

A worker is of course simply a member of the working class – that is, the set of people who do not own any means of production. In contrast, a capitalist is a member of the capitalist class – the set of people who own some means of production. The means of production is just the aggregate capital goods that society uses to produce things. And by capital goods, we simply mean commodities that are used as inputs for production. A commodity, in turn, is simply a good or service produced by (human) labour and offered as a product for general sale. Capitalism is a system based on the private ownership of the means of production; socialism, in contrast, is a system based on public (or social) ownership of the means of production.

Marx defines abstract labour as human labour as a generalized activity, in contrast with concrete labour, which is human labour as an activity which has a specific effect. The concept of abstract labour is central to Marxian economics, but is a little tricky to get your head around. I like to think of it like this. When capitalists hire workers they are effectively purchasing their abstract labour power, even if they are hiring them for a specific role. This is why your boss can tell you to do things that are not in your official job description, and in practice there is little you can do to say no. The difference between abstract and concrete labour is therefore somewhat analogous to the difference between labour power and labour itself.

Along with labour and labour power, Marx also defines the concept of labour time: the period of time that a worker spends doing (paid) labour. In mathematical terms, labour power can be thought of as the derivative or rate of change of labour – that is, the rate at which labour can be expended – and labour time can be thought of as the integral or sum of labour over time. In physical terms, labour has dimensions of energy, labour power has dimensions of energy / time, and labour time has dimensions of energy x time. Labour time therefore has the same dimensions as the action, a central concept in physics. The socially necessary labour time associated with a commodity is then defined by Marx as the labour time required under prevailing social conditions to produce that commodity.

We may define the labour value of a commodity as the socially necessary labour time associated with that commodity. This means that the labour value of a commodity has dimensions of energy x time, the same dimensions as the action from physics. In a previous blog post I argued that much as the evolution of a physical system is determined by the principle of stationary action, the evolution of a capitalist economy is determined by what might be called the principle of minimum labour values. If this is correct then we have uncovered a law of motion for capitalism – which was precisely what Marx set out to do when he wrote Das Kapital over 150 years ago.