Marxist Political Economy - Essay Example

Marxist Political Economy Introduction This historical connection f Marxist theory with conflicttheory presents an interesting paradox f a Marxism reared in the womb f theoretical structures to which it was, and is, seemingly largely opposed. Marxist theory has in common with conflict theory an interest in explaining both law and criminal justice but rejects the multi- group conflict image f society and endorses a power- elite model f society, in which social, economic, and political power has been concentrated into the hands f a small ruling class in late-stage capitalism. The history f 'civilized' society, for Marx, has been the history f different forms f class exploitation and domination. It is the form f class domination present which determines the general character f the whole social structure. For example, the growing f wheat using traditional, non-mechanical techniques is compatible with a wide range f social relations f production. A Roman citizen often owned slaves who worked his land growing wheat; a feudal lord would seize the surplus wheat grown by the serf on the lands; the early capitalist farmers began to employ landless labourers to do their manual work for a wage that was less than the total value f the product that they created. In each case, wheat is grown on land by the labour f men and women, but the social arrangements are totally different. There are totally different class relationships, leading to totally different forms f society: ancient, feudal, and capitalist. The one thing that unites these three arrangements is that in each case a minority class rules and takes the surplus away from the producers. Each society, says Marx, embodies class exploitation based on the relationships f production, or rather, the modes f production. The key to understanding a given society is to discover which is the dominant mode f production within it. The basic pattern f social and political relationships can then be known. Since Marx concentrates his attention on the class structure f capitalist societies, it is only proper to follow him. As stated before, the key classes in the capitalist mode f production are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, or capitalists and landless wage labourers. While Marx recognizes that there are other classes, the fundamental class division is between this pairing f the exploiter and the exploited. The bourgeoisie derive their class position from the fact that they own productive wealth. It is not their high income that makes them capitalists, but the fact that they own the means f production. For example, the inputs necessary for production - factories, machines, etc. The ability f workers to work (labour power) is in itself a marketable commodity bought for the least cost to be used at will by the capitalist. In addition, the capitalist owns the product and will always pocket the difference between the value f the labour and the value f the product - referred to by Marx as 'surplus value' - purely by virtue f his ownership. His property rights also allow the capitalist the control f the process f production and the labour he buys. The proletariat in contrast, owns no means f production. Because f this exploitation, Marx viewed the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as locked in deep and unavoidable conflict. The criminal justice system, in the words or Marx, is used against, rather than for the people. Under capitalism, the system f law and punishment is inherently unjust, designed not to control crime for the good f the society but to subjugate the population. For instance, imprisonment is imposed less as a direct punishment for convicted felons than as a way to siphon off surplus labour from the population. Since a long cycle f growth and depression is inherent in capitalism, there will be times when there are too many workers that the economy cannot absorb. These surplus workers are a threat to capitalists, since they could organize into a revolutionary movement. Therefore, the theory explains the imprisonment f criminal offenders as simply another way to regulate the availability and cost f labour. Akers argues that much f Marxist theory is really an ideological condemnation f Western democracies and a call for revolutionary action to overthrow them. The evidence on the theory that the criminal justice system responses to crime are affected by the political economy has been tested and proved to be mixed. Marx wrote very little about criminal behaviour, and Marxist theorists have recognized that there can be no pure Marxist theory f crime. Marxists concentrate on criminal law and the criminal justice system. If the Marxist view f capitalist society as criminogenic is valid, then crime should be very low, if non existent, in all socialist societies. The theory explains differences in the crime rate across types f society, but it does not explain difference in individual or group behaviour within the same society. Therefore, any analysis f variations in crime solely within the same society cannot test the theory. American society during the Great Depression offered no end f stimuli to economic thought. Financial crash and industrial stagnation threw millions out f work, growth was anemic at best until the Second World War, and the consequent conviction that Karl Marx's economic anticipations had been proven correct led unprecedented numbers f intellectuals to embrace Marxism. Under such circumstances one might expect the American left to produce an outpouring f economic analysis, and that, indeed, is the presupposition f many accounts. Louis Adamic recalled "elaborate analyses and diagnoses f the rapidly disintegrating socio-economic structure f the United States" during the first years f the 1930s (1938,325). "In those days," Malcolm Cowley concurred, "everyone was trying to be an economist f sorts. Writers studied 'conditions,' as they called them, in various cities or industries and tried to publish their findings as pamphlets" (1981, 27). But what is most striking about the contours f American economic thought in the 1930s is less the volume f contributions from the left that one would expect to find than the paucity f sustained Marxist crisis theory and debate. Between 1929, when a precipitous fall in stock market values marked the end f the uneven prosperity f the twenties, and the early 1940s, when global war initiated the long boom, no torrent f Marxist analyses rushed toward an understanding f the causes f capitalist crises in general, or the character f the Great Depression in particular. In the opening years f the thirties, the most notable left-wing work on the collapse was Tragic America (1932) by the novelist Theodore Dreiser, who enumerated capitalism's faults but offered little explanation for the cause, timing or depth f the crisis. Americans fluent in Marxist political economy were also virtually absent from The Encyclopaedia f the Social Sciences (1930-1935). While open to radical perspectives, contributors, and editors, the Encyclopaedia relied exclusively upon European writers for its sections on "Capitalism," "Crises," "Karl Marx," "Socialist Economics," and "Overproduction." The sole American contributor to a category related to crisis theory or Marxist political economy was Wesley Mitchell, who was neither a Marxist nor a radical and whose entry, "Business Cycles," made not the slightest mention f Marxian crisis theories. Even by the close f the decade, the body f American Marxist economic theory was unimpressive. "There exists in English no reasonably comprehensive analytical study f Marxian political economy," wrote Paul Sweezy at the outset f his Theory f Capitalist Development (1942b, vii). Sweezy had spoken to the paradox f American Marxism in the 1930s. In the midst f capitalism's apparent ruin, during a period when radical intellectual life was dominated by a Communist Party with a self-professedly Marxist orientation, in a decade when militant union organizing at the point f production was the left's central purpose, not one radical intellectual in the United States had produced so much as a serious, thorough overview f Marxian political economy. Not until recovery was underway and the left discombobulated by war did a young scholar, Sweezy, step forward to produce a solid exposition f Marxist economic theory. The mystery f the 1930s, thus, is less the economic obsessions alleged in countless narratives than the paradox that a stunted, inadequate Marxist crisis theory was all that issued from such a moment. The Conservatism f Economics Why was there so little Marxist crisis theory in the United States during the 1930s Why was that which did exist so poor in quality If our expectations are betrayed, it is because ideas do not arise neatly in response to events. The capacity f theories to emerge and take shape is determined not just by their appropriateness or validity, though merit is a crucial factor, but by the strength and character f agents which might facilitate their maturation. Complex ideas, that is, require lengthy periods f development, cultivation, and preservation through cultural and social, which is to say material, institutions. This is particularly the case with economic theory. To attain sophistication, economic thought requires the rigor and technique that only years f education and training supply. The weakness f Marxist economic theory in the United States during the 1930s is explained in the first instance by the impediments to it within the two social groupings which might otherwise have generated the intellectual interest, sustained the motivation, and provided the support necessary to its development: the community f scholars and the radical movement, which in that moment meant the discipline f economics and the Communist Party. In 1929, when the great crisis struck, there was not a single Marxist teaching economics in a U. S. university. Economics more than any other academic discipline had been purged f radical voices by administrators and faculty acting under pressure from regional businessmen, conservative alumni, and governing boards. Even H. L. Mencken, who professed to "shrink from Socialists as I shrink from Methodists," pointed with disdain to the orthodox economic consensus f the twenties as the hired chorus f a trustee class "with its legs in the stock market and its eyes on the established order." Boards f trustees, Mencken alleged, kept their tightest grip on political economy since that discipline, "so to speak, hits the employers f the professors where they live" (1958,150-51,153). For all its bluntness, Mencken's account accurately described the academy f his day. The measure f professional autonomy secured by economists in the formative years f their profession involved a restricted scope f dissent, outside f which lay socialism and the cause f labour. Each f the four professors who drew national attention as a test case f academic freedom when his job was threatened between 1880 and 1900--Henry Caner Adams (Cornell), Richard T. Ely (Wisconsin), Edward W. Bernis (University f Chicago) and E. A. Ross (Stanford)--was an economist whose political activity or advocacy f social reform landed him in hot water with regents, moneyed alumni, or administrators. This, too, was the case in 1915 when Scott Nearing, an outspoken socialist, was dismissed from the University f Pennsylvania in one f the most important transgressions f academic freedom f the early twentieth century. The cumulative lesson f these cases was that economists should avoid controversial ideas and politics. In most cases, the admonition was unnecessary. The elite nature f higher education and the genteel culture f scholars in the first decades f the century insulated them from working-class radicalism. But the memory f sacrificial predecessors discouraged any undue experimentation, and the concentration f victims in the economics profession left little room for misinterpretation. That legacy, combined with the ferocious antiradicalism f the First World War and the Red Scare, sealed the timid fate f the American economic profession for the 1920s. "If there is a single professor in the United States who teaches political economy and admits himself a Socialist," wrote Upton Sinclair in his blistering appraisal f university life, The Goose-Step, "that professor is a needle which I have been unable to find in our academic hay-stack." When a discussion club at the University f Minnesota approached a professor and asked him to speak on Karl Marx, the professor smiled and told the students he wished to remain at the university (Sinclair 1923, 436, 211). Conventional economic doctrines also discouraged the emergence f Marxism as a credible theoretical perspective in the United States. From the end f the world war until the 1929 crisis, two major tendencies f thought wrestled for control f the discipline: neoclassicism and institutionalism. Neoclassicism--or orthodoxy or marginalism, as it was variously known--was older and stronger, having supplanted classical political economy as the dominant professional paradigm between 1890 and 1910. Its practitioners discarded the labour theory f value posited by their classical forebears, holding value to be determined by marginal utility, a doctrine that historian Dorothy Ross describes as "an abstraction from and reification f the liberal capitalist world on the positivist model f science" (1991,177). In the 1920s, neoclassicists celebrated laissez-faire, fancied the boom permanent, and endorsed Say's Law, the notion that economic activity tends toward a prosperous equilibrium regulated by the interaction f supply and demand (Stoneman 1979). Opposition to neoclassicism in the United States came primarily from institutionalism, more a range f thought than a definite school. Institutionalists fancied themselves the heirs f Thorstein Veblen, the incorrigible iconoclast who virtually alone among major economists f his generation held fast to dissent despite the repression f the 1890s. Veblen developed a uniquely anthropological economic method which, in contrast to the static, mechanistic mode f classical political economy, borrowed biological metaphors to describe economic activity as "evolutionary" or "genetic" and underscored the importance f institutions--"group habits f thought," such as private property or competition--in economic development. By the 1920s, institutionalism was less a coherent continuation f Veblen's project than a hodge-podge f scholarly endeavours: psychological criticism f hedonistic assumptions about human motivation; sociological, historical, and anthropological investigations into economic behaviour; descriptions f business cycles; statistical compilations on industries and phenomena. These projects were linked mainly insofar as they rejected the mechanical assumptions and models f neoclassical political economy. This looseness permitted widely different approaches to develop in joint cause, and, in that respect, it may have had the effect f inhibiting the development f Marxist theory. In Europe, Marxism was the most respected challenge to classical and neoclassical models, but in the United States institutionalism offered a many-sided alternative. Yet institutionalists tended to magnify Veblen's positivist features and to dull his radical insistence that industrial potential was continually frustrated by the waste, incompetence, and senselessness that prevail in class society. Veblen himself was cool to his would-be descendants, and few f them embraced his call for technical soviets after the Russian Revolution. Parts f institutionalism were, nonetheless, in harmony with Marxism. Both recognized the emergence f monopolies in defiance f classical assumptions about price and competition, rejected laissez-faire as an economic palliative, and emphasized historical and evolutionary transformation. Institutionalism thus did not preclude Marxism, though it may have gratified impulses that might otherwise have led to Marxist conclusions. A final factor in the resistance to Marxist ideas among economists was the profession's general disregard for theory, as manifested in the shift during this period from "political economy" to "economics." Narrow mathematical and statistical modes f inquiry, which carried theoretical assumptions but eschewed theory as such, gained increasing sway among both neoclassicists and institutionalists, fostering a professional culture resistant to explicitly interpretive perspectives such as Marxism. Although both institutionalism and neoclassicism were at a loss to explain the catastrophe, The American Economic Review did not publish a single Marxist article in the 1930s. In a roundtable discussion on "The Business Depression f 1930" at the 1931 meeting f the American Economic Association (A. E. A.), none f the seven panelists mentioned Marx's name, let alone gave consideration to the possibility that Marxist theory had been confirmed. Only in 1938, as the "second slump" made the depression appear immovable, did an A. E. A. conference panel take up the question f Marxian economics. Even then, not one f the four speakers and critics was himself a Marxist. "As an economic theorist," said John Ise f the University f Kansas in a comment typical f the glib tone f most f the conversation, "Marx seems generally faulty, or entirely wrong, or occasionally right for the wrong reason" (Ise and Spengler 1938, 17). The Conservatism f the Communist Party The legacies f political repression and conceptual conservatism within the economic profession, while significant, do not alone explain the thin results f Marxian economic theory in the 1930s. The bitter academic witch hunts and conservative-liberal consensus f the Cold War, for example, did not prevent radicals from gaining a toehold in economics in the 1960s and 1970s. While at the end f the 1950s, the only Marxist economist remaining at a major university was Paul Baran at Stanford, student radicalism and social upheavals led within roughly a dozen years to the formation f the Union for Radical Political Economics and The Review f Radical Political Economics. Why didn't left-wing organizing and upsurge win Marxist economists a similar, grudging acceptance in the university f the 1930s Evident dissimilarities provide partial explanation: the comparatively elite status f universities in the thirties made them less susceptible to challenge than sprawling postwar multiversities; the student movement f the thirties was peripheral to a larger left devoted to the world beyond the campus, especially to antifascist, African-American, unemployed, and working-class organizing; and few student radicals in the thirties sought to transform campus structures and challenge educational norms as the New Left did. Yet it is also f critical importance that no single party or organization in the sixties held sway in a manner comparable to the Communist Party f the thirties. The misfire f Marxist economic theory in the 1930s cannot wholly be understood apart from the culture and structure f the American Communist Party. At the beginning f the Great Depression, the Communist Party was small, but it had the great strategic advantage f calling the crisis a crisis. Herbert Hoover, by contrast, was convinced that the depression was more psychological than economic and kept predicting a turnaround. "The depression is over," he announced in June 1930. Hoover's blind boosterism was the norm for businessmen and economists bewildered by the disintegration f the New Era f the 1920s, which was supposed to have transcended labour strife and the business cycle. "To describe this situation is rather beyond my capacity," sighed one Montgomery Ward executive. "I am unfortunate in having no friends that seem to be able to explain it clearly to me." Not only did the Communist Party face the reality f the collapse, it offered, unlike disoriented academic economists, a confident assertion f its causes. William Z. Foster, the steel union leader who rose to lead the Party in the 1920s, had no doubt about the nature f the depression, which he took as confirmation f Marx's theory that capitalism consistently drove toward overproduction. "Millions f workers must go hungry because there is no wheat," Foster testified before a House committee in 1930. "Millions f workers must go without clothes because the warehouses are full to overflowing with every thing that is needed. Millions f workers must freeze because there is too much coal. This is the logic f the capitalist system" (quoted in Cowley 1981, 25, 98, 32-33). Conclusion In closing, the Marxist theory, the cause f crime is capitalism. The law and criminal justice system are used to protect the interests f the capitalist elite. In a capitalist system, the means f production are owned by a small elite (bourgeoisie) and are used to control the working-class labourers (proletariat). Crimes committed by the bourgeoisie are crimes f domination and repression, and are designed to keep the proletariat in place. Crimes committed by the proletariat are crimes f accommodation or resistance to the bourgeoisie. Critical criminology also believes that crime is caused by a power struggle in society. Various forms f this perspective suggest we re-examine the scientific method, rediscover the amount f pain and suffering in our society, and undertake a quest to discover more peaceful, and possibly religious-or humanistic-based reforms. Works Cited Adamic, Louis. 1938. My America, 1928-1938. New York: Harper. Adams, Arthur B. et al. 1931. "The Business Depression f 1930: Discussion," American Economic Review 21 (Suppl.): 182-201. Cowley, Malcolm. 1981. The Dream f the Golden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s. New York: Penguin. Dreiser, Theodore. 1932. Tragic America. New York: Liveright. Foster, John Bellamy, and Henryk Szlajfer. 1984. Introduction. The Faltering Economy. New York: Monthly Review. Mitchell, Wesley. 1970. Business Cycles. New York: Ben Franklin. Ross, Dorothy. 1991. The Origins f American Social Science. New York: Cambridge. Sinclair, Upton. 1923. The Goose-Step: A Study f American Education. Pasadena: Upton Sinclair. Stoneman, William A. 1979. A History f the Economic Analysis f the Great Depression in America. New York: Garland. Stoneman, William E. 1979. A History f the Economic Analysis f the Great Depression in America. New York: Garland. Sweezy, Paul. 1935. "Economics and the Crisis f Capitalism," Economic Forum 3 (Spring): 71-80. Sweezy, Paul. 1938. "Review f Socialism, by Ludwig von Mises," Science & Society 2: 265-70. Sweezy, Paul. 1942a. "The Illusion f the 'Managerial Revolution,'" Science or Society 6: 1-23. Sweezy, Paul. 1942b. The Theory f Capitalist Development. New York: Oxford. Sweezy, Paul. 1946. "John Maynard Keynes," Science & Society 10: 398-405. Sweezy, Paul. 1972. Modern Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review. Veblen, Thorstein. 1909. "The Limitations f Marginal Utility," Journal f Political Economy 17: 620-36. Read More