The problem of scientific
abstraction in Marx
In his Theories
of value, 1973, when explaining the salient features of Marx's thought, M.
Dobb stresses its building process regarded as a part of a larger cultural
debate and as an intellectual work of an individual mind, still in search of
its way to the categories of the system. There are two interpretational
approach we can make use of, when we have to give an explanation of a system:
we can investigate into what relations stand between the concepts of the system
or we can go into the workshop and follow, step by step, the labour by which
the system is produced. In the first case, as we try to draw the map of the
thought, we presuppose the determinate existence and the empirical environment
the thought belongs to; in the second one, we focus on this same existence and
take it as a standpoint of our research. Since Dobb opts for the latter, there
must be a reason for him to prefer one route instead of the other, a reason
that his discourse reveals and that can be shown emphasizing the goals it
achieves: it sheds light on the starting moves of Marx’s theories; definitely
takes him out of that special enclosure, where Marxist tradition has often
secured him, and returns him to the real world. The logical and epistemological
status of Marx’s work, in Dobb’s Theories, appears not to be
substantially different from that of the other authors, whose ideas the book
explains. If drawing up a theory means bringing into relation what to the
ordinary consciousness may seem but unrelated things, the basic step will
consist in establishing the conceptual coordinates, by which these relations
can be detected, brought out and compared. We need conceptual coordinates to
understand the similarities or differences of what we take under exam, which
couldn’t even be noted otherwise. Consider - to resort to a short example in
order to clarify what we are trying to illustrate – these two quite different
situations: (a) Abraham was a son of Terah and Terah was a descendent of Sem (Genesis,
11, 27) ; (b) 11 is the immediate successor of 10 and 10 is more than 3. They
are picked out of contexts which appear to have nothing to do with each other
and belong to separated fields of our culture. Nonetheless, a logician would
observe that the pair “immediate successor of” and “son of”, just like the
other pair “more than” and “descendent of”, identify relations having the same
formal proprieties; that when I conclude: (a)’ therefore Abraham was a
descendent of Sem; (b)’ therefore 11 is more than 3, I give rise to inferences
which are two different instances of the same formal structure. Of course, the
logician can do so because of his adhering to a formal point of view, whose
background consists in the fundamental choice of regarding the objects he is
interested into as forms rather than contents. But the moral of the story is that we’ll
have to fix a tertium if we want to compare things. We have to make a
fundamental choice and select some aspect under which all the objects of the
field we are inquiring into, can be considered as analogous.
Marx focuses on the
question of appropriation in history and it is from this point of view
that he sees the analogy between the past and his present time; between the
social and economic forms of XIX century society and the other precedent forms
of class society. Appropriation has to be meant, here, as exploitation,
i.e. the acquisition of part
of what production yields by those who have never played any active and
productive role in it. The notion of exploitation, Dobb says, has to be
taken as a factual description of social and economic relationships, and it is
similar to Marc Bloch’s characterisation of feudalism as the system in which
landlords “live on the work of other men”. It is on the base of this notion,
via the above analogy, that Marx can
view history as a succession of modes of production, whose different periods
have in the appropriation/exploitation their distinctive feature,
and can assign, therefore, to his own research the task of investigating into
the political, military, juridical and economic means, by which the appropriation
is established. There are situations in which appropriation is enforced
by law or military power and situations in which appropriation is a
matter of a fact as it happens in the specific capitalistic form of exploitation.
In the economic theory, Marx is going to draw up, the existence of exploitation
is taken for granted; it is not an issue the theory is expected to provide
evidence for. What the theory is expected, Dobb says, is working out a theoretical
question which arises when this idea concerning the presence of exploitation
meets the analyses coming from the existing economic literature: is the
existence of exploitation in capitalistic society compatible with the
“law of value” ? How can it take place in the realm of competition and
“invisible hand”, where things are exchanged at their “natural values” ?
The economists Marx
criticises concentrate their attention on the sphere of circulation, where,
they claim, everything is regulated by free contractual relationships and it is
the same competition to guarantee that the subjects involved in transactions
are equivalents. According to the “law of value” goods are exchanged at their
“value” (proportionately to labour). But exploitation entails the idea
that there must be something of non-equivalent somewhere in the economic life
of society. As it is known, Marx assumes the “law of value”. Therefore, if exploitation
exists, it won’t be located in the same zone where circulation is. Having
embraced this perspective, Marx is led to take the next step: he analyses exploitation
going into what happens during the process of production and posits the
existence of a determinate exploitation or surplus value rate,
prior to the exchange values formation (pricing formation ) and not derived by
it. The problem now arises how this exploitation rate can be formulated
without any reference to the exchange process. Following Ricardo, Marx could
have developed the concept, by means of a single commodity, corn, as a ratio
not depending on changes in prices. He attains a similar result by expressing
the exploitation rate in terms of labour, as a ratio between the
actually employed labour and the labour corresponding to wages given in advance
by capitalists. There must be, therefore, a difference between the meaning of
the word “labour”, when it stands for what can be bought and sold on the
market, and the meaning of the word
“labour”, when it denotes the actually employed labour. Once the notion of exploitation
rate is defined, the source of surplus value is also revealed and
the problem to conciliate exploitation with the “law of value” can be
given an answer. The solution, it is known, consists in the qualitative
difference between labour power and labour, which holds the
central place in Marx’s theory. The capitalist
pays wages which are determined by the exchange value of the labour power.
This exchange value is, in turn, determined by the socially necessary labour
time required to `produce' the worker, that is, the labour inputs required
to rear, feed, clothe and educate him. However, in return the capitalist
receives the worker’s labour (the labourer's use value ). That
the value of labour is greater than the value paid in exchange for
labourer’s services, is the crucial principle of capitalistic system, which
couldn’t reproduce itself if it didn’t maintain such a difference. But to
maintain the difference it needs the existence of a historical and
institutional ground, that is, it needs the existence of a proletariat
having no land, no property at all and entirely dependent, for subsistence, on
selling their labour power in exchange for a wage. The notions of exploitation
rate, labour power and labour, surplus value
constitute the conceptual framework of Marx’s theory.
But a
new problem now arises, that is, a problem coming from Marx’s making use of the
conceptual pair phenomenal form/essence to stress the contrast
between the view resulting from his theory about capitalistic society and that
of the economists. Since the economists take up the sphere of circulation as
their standpoint, they end up sticking to what is but the phenomenal form
of an essence which remains beyond the reach of their understanding.
After the century and more that has elapsed since Marx’s death, it is to be
observed that this metaphor of “going beyond” has been very potent but
dramatically misleading. It has led to think that there was a logical weakness
in the work of the economists, whose rational procedures were insufficient to
account for the complexity of the object they were studying. On the contrary,
the superiority of Marx’s theory would be caused by his resorting to some
special kind of abstraction, which allowed him to pass the surface of
experience and go into the hidden depths, where the true essence
is supposed to be. As an attempt to give an explanation for what distinguishes
Marx from the economists, this is too strong a story - though a grain of truth
can be detected in it. It is true, in fact, that when the motives and the aims
of Marx’s work are considered, the contrast appear to be important and deep.
Marx intended to draw up a synoptic view of the development of the whole system
of human society. His economics was only a part, though a fundamental part, of
his all-embracing conceptions, which concerned the unhappiness of man in mass
society not less than the way it produces goods and services. But he also
thought that any inquiring into the ideas and the culture of a given historical
epoch should be backed by a scientific analysis into the empirical forms of its
determinate existence. As we have seen, in his Theories, Dobb explains
this last point. Marx’s conception of scientific abstraction is not
substantially different from that of the other authors of the Theories.
Bibliography.
M. Dobb, Theories of value and
distribution since Adam Smith – Ideology and economic theory, Cambridge
1973.
K. Marx, Teorie sul plusvalore, Roma 1973.
S. Koerner, Sistemi di riferimento categoriali, Feltrinelli.
F. Gil, Strategie conoscitive nella ricerca scientifica, in Scienza e Tecnica ’76, Milano.
L. Laudan, I modelli nella storia della scienza, in Scienza e Tecnica ’76, Milano.
L. Geymonat, Storia della scienza e filosofia, in Scienza e Tecnica ’76, Milano.
Dialegesthai – Philosophical themes