Marxian Political Economy in 2016: “What is Left?”
Marx would have been both greatly surprised and deeply disappointed to find capitalism alive and kicking 130 years after his death; the same can be said of Lenin, whose description of capitalism (in 1916) as “moribund” proved to be very wide of the mark.
They would also have been saddened by the failure of all attempts to supersede the capitalist mode of production. They would not, perhaps, have been quite so surprised by the transformation of the global world economy in the course of the twentieth century, in both quantity and quality, since they regarded constant revolutionising of the means of production as part of the very essence of capitalism. Some of the challenges faced by Marxian political economists in the 2010s are thus, necessarily, very different from those faced by their predecessors in 1883 or 1917. They include pressing questions of race and gender; the prospect of imminent environmental catastrophe; and a continuing process of the financialisation of capital that was only temporarily slowed by the global financial crisis of 2008-09. Other issues are more familiar. Marx was wrong about very many things, but he was right to insist on the class nature of capitalist society, on the contradictory and unstable character of the capitalist economy, and on its essentially global reach. This gives Marxian political economy a head start over all its competitors in analysing the truly important problems of our age (Kotz 2015).Whether Marxian ideas can inspire a viable alternative to capitalism is another question altogether. Paul Sweezy (who died in 2004) ended up as a left social democrat, regarding the abolition of capitalism as impracticable for the foreseeable future and instead arguing for a large public sector and a substantial redistribution of income and wealth within the existing social order. This would not have satisfied Herbert Marcuse, whose critique of “one-dimensional man” hinged on the way in which capitalism was whittling away individuality, freedom and the ability to dissent (Marcuse 1964 [1991]).
It would certainly not have pleased Marx, whose own notion of “free individuality” (on which Marcuse drew heavily) pointed to a future society with no state (or there would be political oppression); no classes (or exploitation would continue); no markets (or alienation and fetishism would not be overcome); and no scarcity (or labour would still have to be compulsory). Marx denied that this vision was utopian, claiming instead that it was foreshadowed by developments within the capitalist mode of production itself, which would soon eliminate scarcity, greatly diminish the role of the market, and create a classconscious proletariat that would gladly replace capitalism with a state-free, class-free, market-free, scarcity-free communist society. This was, to put it mildly, very optimistic, and there are good reasons why twenty-first century communists tend to be very suspicious of Marxism (Albert 2006).As a political ideology Marxism is undoubtedly very much weaker than it used to be. In academia the influence of Marxian ideas remains substantial in social science departments, but among mainstream economists it is minimal - much less than it was in the early 1970s, when radical ideas could sometimes be published in the leading journals. Even among historians of economic thought there is less interest in Marx and Marxism(s) than was once the case. However, Marxian political economy is not a phenomenon of purely historical interest. It survives as one heterodox tradition among several, cooperating with and drawing upon the resources of other dissident schools in order to survive in what has again become a very cold intellectual climate. Every (roughly monthly) issue of the widely circulated Heterodox Economics Newsletter (www.heterodoxnews.com) advertises Marxian lectures, seminars, conferences, journal articles and books, revealing the continuing vitality of Marxism(s) in political economy.
John E. King
See also:
Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz (I); British classical political economy (II); Development economics (III); Vladimir Karpovich Dmitriev (I); Growth (III); Income distribution (III); Michal Kalecki (I); Oskar Ryszard Lange (I); Macroeconomics (III); Karl Heinrich Marx (I); Money and banking (III); Neo-Ricardian economics (II); Political philosophy and economics: freedom and labour (III); David Ricardo (I); Russian School of mathematical economics (II); Piero Sraffa (I); Mikhail Ivanovich Tugan-Baranovsky (I); Value and price (III).