A Response to “sticking it to The Man”
I wanted to respond to the post someone made a couple weeks ago, about Marxist’s criticism of the class system and what that means for who’s really getting the short end of the deal.
It reminded me a little of a famous quote by Samuelson: “Remember that in a perfectly competitive market, it really does not matter who hires whom; so have labor hire capital”. In fact this statement was made by him in direct response to Marx’s claims. I think it’s from a paper he wrote on the labor theory of value. It was written in 1957, if you’re interested in looking it up.
I think you’re right that when we assume competitive markets, this is what occurs. The zero profit condition. Producers are paid their marginal product and so the market clears. Consumers consume at prices equal to their marginal utilities. A general equilibrium price and wage obtains and the result holds.
But where things get a little tricky is your shrugging off of class distinctions as just between producers and consumers (it should probably more accurately be workers and employers in a labor market). The employers have a specific role in the production process: they contract labor from the worker, who uses a set of means of production that is owned by the employer. So, there is more than just this relation between people that make things and people that don’t: there is a contract involved, where some information will nevertheless be unverifiable
(worker effort, for example) and that introduces a political dimension to things. Contracts are legal concepts. Politics inevitably lead to power relations, and soon enough we realize that the labor market is much more complicated than just a simple relationship between employer and worker.
Marx isn’t talking about producers and consumers: he would say capitalists (employers) do both, and so do workers. The main distinction between the two, he argues, is that capitalists own the means of production with which the workers work (how’s that for alliteration?).
I’m no Marxist, but when I say I’m “sticking it to The Man”, I mean to reject the current economic system of capitalist hierarchy in exchange for another system such as worker’s collectives or business practices that do something to attenuate the power relationship mentioned above. I don’t necessarily mean higher taxes on goods or things like that.
FYI, my original post was “Barriers in Discussion.”
I can see some of your points, but it really depends on the conversation. What Marx said and believed compared to what Marxist say and believe today are two different things. For example, Marx and Engels valued the price system.
“Only through the undervaluation or overvaluation of products is it forcibly brought home to the individual commodity producers what society requires or does not require and in what amounts. But it is precisely this sole regulator that the utopia advocated by Rodbertus among others wishes to abolish. And if we then ask what guarantee we have that necessary quantity and not more of each product will be produced, that we shall not go hungry in regard to corn and meat while we are choked in beet sugar and drowned in potato spirit, that we shall not lack trousers to cover our nakedness while trouser buttons flood us by the million…” (The Poverty of Philospohy, intro by Engels.
Thomas Sowell is very good at pointing out the differences between Marx and Marxists. But the whole point of this topic was that several people with whom I’ve chatted set up producers as the capitalists and consumers as the proletariat. So I’ll agree Marx didn’t mean this, but when dealing with Marxists, they often don’t know what he actually said.