MARX AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION

Much of Marx's sharpest polemical writing was directed against the classical tradition of economic thought. He attacked the analytical procedures employed by classical writers as well as the conclusions they had reached.

In Marx's hands the familiar classical questions were re-opened: in particular, what are the laws governing the distribution of income and how do they affect the economy's long- period prospects? He also appropriated classical insights on many points of detail. As had the mainstream of the classical tradition, he approached the problem of value in terms of labour and regarded only physical objects as embodiments of value. In addition, his scheme of income distribution was organized around a set of social class categories and his theory of accumulation was linked to the behaviour of profits.

Marx's philosophical presuppositions about history and his claim to have discovered its inner logic both gave established categories a different significance and supplied the springboard for fresh departures. His general modus operandi can be instructively observed in his critique of Malthus. This polemic, moreover, is of particular interest in its own right: Malthus's population principle, which had been interpreted as demonstrating that members of the working class had only themselves to blame for their misery, had to be demolished before Marx's alternative explanation of poverty could stand.2

The manner in which Marx invoked his view of historical stages to undercut Malthusian population doctrine can be seen in the following passage:

The labouring population...

In short, capitalism did, in fact, create the appearance of a redundant population. But, contrary to Malthusian teaching, such population pressures were not universal throughout time and space. A change in productive arrangements could readily convert an apparent surplus of population into a shortage.

Marx's reasoning on this point rested on his distinction between various 'modes of production', each with unique characteristics. In the pre-capitalistic mode private ownership of the means of production was far from universal and, to the extent that private property was recognized, it was qualified by a reciprocal pattern of rights and obligations along feudal lines. Moreover, production for exchange was far from ubiquitous. The emergence of capitalism led to the rapid breakdown of these patterns. Most importantly, the use of machine techniques created a sharp cleavage within society. Those who owned the means of production and those who worked with them were divided into distinct groups. No longer was it possible for the worker to possess the tools with which he gained a livelihood; instead he became dependent on others to supply them. Meanwhile the widening of the market called for higher and higher degrees of specialization which heightened the interdependence between various components of the economic system. Hence arose one of the ironies (‘contradictions' in Marx's terms) within the capitalist mode of production.

It might be thought that Marx's discussion of stages of economic evolution had been anticipated by some of the early classical writers. Smith, for example, had written about earlier types of economic arrangements in his consideration of an 'early and rude' stage of society. Marx's approach, however, was profoundly different. Classical writers had in mind a hypothetical state in which transactions were conducted by barter and which, in turn, could be used as a benchmark for analysing production and exchange under the simplest

conditions conceivable. Marx, on the other hand, was concerned with specific historical epochs, rather than hypothetical cases, and he looked at history as a succession of stages governed by immutable laws.

It was against this background that Marx accused the classical economists of propagating gross error. Their findings, he maintained, failed to take into account the full significance of the inner dynamics of the historical process. In addition, classical writers did not comprehend that each stage of history was governed by economic laws peculiar to itself. A universal law of population was thus out of the question. Each mode of production produced its own social conditioning in forms which affected all human behaviour, including man's reproductive activities.4

Apart from his quarrel with classicism on method, Marx's philosophical premises also called for an important amendment in a basic set of classical categories. To the classicists, the social groupings important to the analysis of income distribution involved three classes: capitalists, landlords, and labourers. Marx insisted, on the other hand, that under capitalism this scheme would be compressed into a two-fold division based on legally-recognized rights to property. In his analysis the essential class groupings of capitalism separated those who owned the means of production from those who did not. As owners, capitalists and landlords were thus a common genus. In Marx's view it was a ‘Physiocratic illusion' to hold that ‘rents grow out of the soil and not out of society'.5

3.