Immanuel Wallerstein on Karl Marx

[alanjjohnstone]

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43947-read-karl-marx-a-conversation-with-immanuel-wallerstein

An academic interviewed about the relevance of Marx

Quote:

The first thing I have to say to young people is that they have to read 

him. Do not read about him, but read Marx. Few people — in comparison with the many who talks about him — actually read Marx. That is also true of Adam Smith. Generally, one only reads about these classics. People learn about them through others people's summary. They want to save time but, actually, that is a waste of time! One must read interesting people and Marx is the most interesting scholar of the 19th and 20th centuries. There is no question about that. No one is equal to him in terms of the number of things he wrote about, nor for the quality of his analysis. So, my message to the new generation is that Marx is eminently worth discovering but you must read, read, read him. Read Karl Marx!

[twc]

Excellent advice.For starters, read and re-read…The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels to comprehend the significance of class struggle in human history.The Preface to Marx’s A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy to come to grips with Marx’s guiding principle of his studies.Marx’s Prefaces and Afterwords to his Capital Volume I before venturing into the work itself.These texts are available on-line:    (1) https://…Manifesto.pdf,    (2) https://…Critique_of_Political_Economy.pdf,    (3) https://…Capital-Volume-I.pdf.

[alanjjohnstone]

I usually recommend as an introduction to Marxian economics the shorter pieces by Marx such as Value, Price and ProfitI believe it is recognised as possessing short-comings but  Wage Labour and Capital is easily digested.https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/study-guides/guide-value-price-and-profithttps://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2004/no-1194-february-2004/marxs-wage-labour-and-capitalAnd i think i may well have transgressed the good advice by adding those links

[twc]

Fine, but the Party literature is not under immediate consideration in the context of your original post.In keeping with that context, I chose to amplify Wallerstein’s encouragement (in your quote) for us to read, and to re-read, Marx by recommending some of his most significant and accessible mature works that reveal how indispensable Marx is for comprehending capitalism and for supplanting it with the world socialism our Party literature advocates so well.Reading, and re-reading, both are indispensable.  But it is Marx’s literature that is under consideration and that laid the indispensable foundation for our own.Read, and re-read, it.

[ALB]

Immanuel Wallerstein has written some very useful stuff on the origin of capitalism and of how it has always been a world-system which can only be replaced by another world-system (socialism) and so socialism cannot exist in one country but only a form of state-capitalism can,  but I have my doubts whether he has followed his advice here and read Marx's Value, Price and Profit.I say this because on 20 March 1998 he was interviewed in the Belgian paper Le Soir.  In answer to one of the questions he said (my rough translation from French):

Quote:

You easily imagine that if one respected the presuppositions of economic textbooks — an infinity of sellers and an infinity of buyers, all perfectly informed — capitalists would be incapable of making the least profit: consumers would immediately find the lowest price which would not be a centime above the cost of production!

I wrote to him asking if he had been misreported:

Quote:

What surprised me was your answer to the first question in which you were reported as saying that under conditions of perfect competition capitalists would not make any profit. What surprised me is that this is at variance with Marx's view and having read many of your books assumed you regarded yourself as being in the Marxist tradition. Marx, however, set out to explain how profit could arise precisely in conditions of what was later to be called "perfect competition" where commodities exchanged at their values; profit arising out of the process of production (labour power creating a value greater than its own) not on the market by sellers raising their prices. I don't know whether you were misreported or whether in fact this is your view?

To which I received the following surprising — and disappointing — reply on 6 April (in English):

Quote:

No, I was not misquoted

and this:

Quote:

To make a profit, any producer of any item must have the rent of a partial monopoly, and the greater the degree of monopoly, the greater the rate of profit that can be obtained. Of course labor power produces a value greater than its own, but how much greater? It can be greater by a smidgen or greater by a multiple of hundreds. The degree greater has nothing to do with the relations of production but with the state of monopolization of the market.

Of course "monopoly profits" exist but he was saying here that this is the only form of profit, which is at variance with Marx's view expressed in Capital as well as in Value, Price and Profit that profits are made even in the absence of monopoly conditions. Here's what Marx said in the latter (note his specific mention of monopolies as an exception):

Quote:

if supply and demand equilibrate each other, the market prices of commodities will correspond with their natural prices, that is to say with their values, as determined by the respective quantities of labour required for their production. But supply and demand must constantly tend to equilibrate each other, although they do so only by compensating one fluctuation by another, a rise by a fall, and vice versa. If instead of considering only the daily fluctuations you analyze the movement of market prices for longer periods, as Mr. Tooke, for example, has done in his History of Prices, you will find that the fluctuations of market prices, their deviations from values, their ups and downs, paralyze and compensate each other; so that apart from the effect of monopolies and some other modifications I must now pass by, all descriptions of commodities are, on average, sold at their respective values or natural prices.

and

Quote:

If then, speaking broadly, and embracing somewhat longer periods, all descriptions of commodities sell at their respective values, it is nonsense to suppose that profit, not in individual cases; but that the constant and usual profits of different trades spring from the prices of commodities, or selling them at a price over and above their value. The absurdity of this notion becomes evident if it is generalized. What a man would constantly win as a seller he would constantly lose as a purchaser. It would not do to say that there are men who are buyers without being sellers, or consumers without being producers. What these people pay to the producers, they must first get from them for nothing. If a man first takes your money and afterwards returns that money in buying your commodities, you will never enrich yourselves by selling your commodities too dear to that same man. This sort of transaction might diminish a loss, but would never help in realizing a profit.

Yes, to understand the origin of profits, Read Karl Marx!

[twc]

Fascinating!  Wallerstein staked his economic reputation on opposing and improving Marx’s theory of value — just like Postone.

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