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What’s in a Name?Dawkins’s Selfish Gene is not, as its name might suggest, a theory about a gene for human selfishness.  It is not a theory of human selfishness.Instead it is about the [metaphorical] “selfishness” of genes—the genes, not us, are [metaphorically] “selfish”.The theory emerged in the 1960s as a dissenting view to current thoughts on the underlying mechanism of Darwinian evolutionary selection—the dynamic process of speciation through the differential survival and reproduction of heritable characteristics.Since genes express themselves as [heritable] characteristics, Dawkins decided to give genes their prominent due as the fundamental selection units of the grand process of speciation, instead of, as before, the gross biological organisms themselves. [The scientific merit of Dawkins’s move is not under consideration here.]Such an outlook, termed “selfish”, was preordained to offend social sensibilities.  But that was nothing new in Darwinian theory, which from the start affronted social sensibilities.  Darwin, like his contemporary Marx, confidently went his “own way, and let people say what they will!”***Further to understand Dawkins’s motivation…Darwin had drawn attention to the self-sacrificing behaviour of certain species, in particular, the eu-social insects [ants, termites, bees].  Evolutionary scientist W. D. Hamilton coined the equally affronting biological term ‘Altruism’ to describe self-sacrificing behaviour in the animal kingdom.The idea seems to have been spawned by evolutionist J. B. S. Haldane, who did the biological-kinship mathematics, and apparently joked he would lay down [self-sacrifice] his life for “two brothers, but not one; or eight cousins, but not seven.”To make sense of Haldane’s answer, recall that organisms share heritable characteristics with their nearest kin, and that evolutionary selection is entirely a process of the differential survival of heritable characteristics that confer advantage under changing environmental constraints — hence the survival of genetically close kin that share spots, stripes, long necks, etc.***ALB, who has studied its history, points out that Dawkins’s biological co-opting of the word ‘Selfish’ and promoting the phrase ‘Selfish Gene’ was very much in line with the temper of the time [Ardrey, Lorentz, Eysenck, …].  Dawkins added fuel to the battles that ensued, such as that against Sociobiology, which consciously extended genetical explanation precisely to human social behaviour. However, my current focus is much narrower and relates to scientific terminology.All scientific theories adapt everyday terminology, and migrate it from its familiar social environment into a quasi-unfamiliar technical environment, thereby giving common words a peculiar twist when they are re-employed in their unfamiliar scientific context.Literary art lives and dies by co-opting familiar words to unfamiliar contexts, implicitly relying on our ability to appreciate common words transported to uncommon contexts.  Just so, scientific contexts are non-literary, socially uncommon, contexts for most of us.Scientists, for want of a ready-made terminology, regularly describe uncommon phenomena in common everyday words.  Take force, tension, potential, energy, power, work, creation, annihilation, attraction, affinity, imaginary, rational, irrational, transcendental, labour, value, exploitation…Yet, when scientists break the mould, and deign to coin new terms, like entropy or enthalpy, they face the accusation of deliberate obfuscation by complainants who neither comprehend the novel concept nor exhibit competence to propose adequate synonyms.To all of the above carping over scientific terminology, the scientist can only reply with Hamlet “There are more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.***Science does not deal in Definitions—mere words like “Selfish”.Science deals exclusively with dynamical processes.  It only considers static things—stasis—as (1) moments in a dynamical process or as (2) invariants that persist throughout these moments, and so characterise that changing dynamical process conceptually as a persistent conceptual “thing”.Science subsumes definitions—mere words—under the process they feature in.  Its terminology is subservient to process.  Definitions—words—remain stillborn without a process theory to vivify them.My point is a minor one, yet it merits minor consideration.

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A decade after Engels’s Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844, Jevons (still in his late teens) travelled to Australia.Though far from Engels’s working-class standpoint, an outraged William Stanley Jevons nevertheless reported in ascerbic disgust, in his social map of Sydney, the grim plight of those unfortunates dwelling in the Sydney Rocks (formerly Gallows Hill).

Quote:

Standing in many parts of Sydney, noting the bright sky above, the clear blue waters below … one is compelled to acknowledge how much Nature has done for us; how little we have done for ourselves….It was once my fate to enter [one of the many dwellings in the Rocks he visited] but I know not how to describe to others its filthy appearance—the wooden partitions covered by rotten, torn canvas, the uneven blackened floor, not free from human exuviae, the dark miserable rooms let out to different occupants.One small room was the only abode of a family, including several children….[Nether drainage nor sewerage; instead stagnant pools, runoff, and rejectamenta of a solid nature.]The rents of such a place are indeed filthy lucre….If Dr Aaron is really a city officer of health at all, why do ‘The Rocks’ find no mention in his reports?What are we to think of aldermen, who meet opposite the Supreme Court to talk, vote other people’s money away, and sometimes to quarrel, yet always neglect the social plague spots and cesspools of the city?

Here we glimpse Jevons as incensed railer against the disastrous social effects of capitalism, comparable in passion to, though perhaps not as deep nor sustained as, the criticisms of Charles Dickens, Jack London of the Abyss or Orwell of Wigan Pier.  Surely this side of the multi-faceted scientist William Stanley Jevons is astonishingly unexpected by socialists.  For we acknowledge him to be, as Dave quite correctly points out, the father of modern marginalism.We may pause to consider.  All of us support the system, by default, until we recognise how to change it.

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Dave wrote:

Actually marginalism and utility theory … was invented by a British bod [William Stanley Jevons] in the 1860’s, a bit before Walras I think.

 Actually, a thought as powerful as marginalism was anticipated long before Jevons, e.g., in the 18th century by Swiss mathematical physicist Daniel Bernoulli, and earlier in the 19th century by Italian engineer Jules Dupuit and German economist Heinrich Gossen.I mentioned Léon Walras because he is widely credited with founding so-called general equilibrium theory by simultaneous equations which describe conditions for equilibrating a capitalist market based on subjective utility.Walras’s significant achievement led the economic historian [and student of Bohm Bawerk] Joseph Schumpeter to consider “Walras … the greatest of economists”.The point I am making is that the simultaneity of [Walrasian-style] general equilibrium theory—independent of that theory’s basis in subjective utility—is its Achilles heel for application to actual capitalist conditions.Marginalist economics, like Sraffian economics, is inescapably and ineluctably riven with physicalism.  It too predicts positive profits for zero labour values.On Robbo’s issue — Hic Rhodus!

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YMS, yes zero value in gives [of itself] zero value out, superbly explained by Marx in your Grundrisse quotes above.They underpin Robbo’s pristine raw material case, and they make a clear and definite Marxian prediction.

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Robbo, unfortunately the latter.Sweezy had spent his considerable working life operating within the confines of his Bortkiewicz approach to Marx.  Of course, his Bortkiewicz approach was in later years becoming increasingly problemmatic following the anti-Marxian implications of Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities.  Almost no mathematical Marxian economist could find a way out of the mounting and apparently insurmountable incoherences that beset Marxian value theory based on such an approach.The question was:  is the simultaneist approach wrong or Marx's value theory wrong.  And the vast majority slowly, but surely, sided with Marx is wrong.It was two years after the old man died that Andrew Kliman published his proof, in Reclaiming Marx’s Capital [2006], that simultaneanism is incompatible with the Marxian labour theory of value.In so doing, Kliman collaterally pinpointed Sweezy’s Bortkiewicz approach as a source of the apparently insurmountable incoherence in simultaneist Marxian value theory.Perhaps a thorough, but popular, explanatory seminar by Andrew Kliman on his Reclaiming Marx’s Capital is called for?

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Firstly, I should have spelled his name correctly as “Dmitriev”.Secondly, it was Sweezy who ‘re-discovered’ for the West the (1) consciously anti-Marxian and (2) consciously simultaneist, Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz [1906–07].

Kliman, on p. 46, wrote:

In his famous 1942 work, The Theory of Capitalist Development, Sweezy went so far as to call Bortkiewicz’s model “the final vindication of the labor theory of value, the solid foundation of [Marx’s] theoretical structure”.

Sweezy's falling for [anti-value] simultaneous physicalism demonstrates just how deceptively insidious the simultaneous trap is. Sweezy was taken in by it, along with tutti frutti, despite his own loud contrary protestations and despite his genuine inner belief.That's precisely why Kliman is so important. And that’s precisely why your pristine raw materials example is so crucial to comprehending Marx's Capital, and as a challenge to all opposing theories of capital.

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Bortkiewicz's simultaneity forces Marx’s output prices to simultaneously equal Marx’s input prices, and so severs them from Marx’s input values and output values.Consequently Bortkiewicz forces dual-system accounting upon Marx—(1) one system accounting in values and (2) another system accounting in prices.Bortkiewicz recognised that Marx didn’t do this, and yet Sweezy accepts Bortkiewicz’s dual-system correction of Marx, thereby “improving” Marx against Marx, but in the name of Marx [Kliman p. 46].

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Dave — Thanks for introducing us to Delville.  Never knew.  And from 1883!  Doubtless Aveling’s Students Marx is somewhat in its debt.***For the two topics currently under discussion in this thread, see Chapter 3 of Andrew Kliman’s Reclaiming Marx’s Capital.1.  Sraffian Simultaneist Reading of Marx’s CapitalKliman [Chapter 3] recounts the origin and history of the simultaneist/physicalist hijacking of Marx’s Capital.  It emanates from the Russian economist Dmitriev: Economic Essays on Value, Competition and Utility [1897].2.  Valueless Raw MaterialsKliman [Section 3.2] examines Dmitriev’s celebrated treatment of zero-value inputs, analogous to Robbo’s pristine raw materials.Dimitriev considers the case of machines [robots] producing machines, without human labour, and ‘proves’, to the complete and utter satisfaction of a celebrated lineage of [incautiously superior-to-Marx] mathematical economists, that value-less inputs generate profit!Herein lies the kernel of all subsequent charges of incoherence in Marxian value theory—such as Keen’s—because for Marx a zero-value input production process must always generate zero-value outputs.  It cannot, of itself, generate profit.It is instructive to follow carefully as Kliman analyses the entrails of Dimtriev’s argument, and by extension subsequent physicalist [anti-value] “improvements” by Bortkiewicz, Sweezy, Sraffia, Samuelson, Steedman, Okishio, et tutti frutti.  Keen, as commentator, languishes in the salad bowl.Oh-so simple, premature, solution of simultaneous equations unconsciously set a deceptively fatal trap for the whole tribe of them!And Kliman goes on to show that marginalism, which highly prides itself in its Walrasian mathematical simultaneity [helped out by that truly great mathematical physicist Poincaré], is likewise riven from its inception, through lineage and descent, by the fatal flaw of physicalism. Physicalism [anti-value theory] subverts rational comprehension of capitalist markets and reproduction. Marxian value is the indispensable theoretical category for comprehending them!***Kliman then points out that Dimitriev, when he comes to treat an economy based solely on animals, forgets his earlier physicalist ‘proof’ that zero values produce profit, and flips 180° to agree with Robbo.Dimitriev, in this instance, lets rational anti-physicalism get the better of him, and he flatly states “[there is] no foundation for any of the references to ‘natural’ processes’ [i.e. pristine raw materials] being independent sources of ‘profit on capital’”.  Hoist by his own petard.Oh well, Dimitriev, nothing if not inconsistent!

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Keen, of course, is wrong.Marx saw depreciation of the machine as piecemeal transfer of existing value from the machine to the product, and not as creation of value in the product.  Only living labour creates Marxian value in its product.On the other issue—pristine raw inputs—I haven’t found anything explicit in Debunking Economics.However, here’s Keen’s definitive statement on the source of profit in his conclusion to Chapter 17 (on Marx) “Nothing to Lose but their Minds”…

Steve Keen wrote:

Instead, mathematics and Marx’s philosophy confirm that surplus value —and hence profit—can be generated from any input to production.  There is no one source of surplus:  Adam Smith’s apparently vague musings that animals and machines both contribute to the creation of new value were correct….Marxist economics is analytically far stronger once it is shorn of the labor theory of value.

The answer to the Sraffian input–output economists who claim to have demonstrated mathematically and logically that Marx’s value theory is incoherent is to be found in Andrew Kliman “Reclaiming Marx’s Capital”.

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robbo203 wrote:

How does [Keen] classify pristine raw materials? 

Pristine inputs, like air, have no Marxian value.  They are not products of human labour, i.e. they are freely consumed in production but they are not produced by production.  Recall that Marxian production is the production of surplus value.Consequently, pristine inputs are rationally ignored as value-less ingredients, even though they are physically necessary ingredients for production to proceed.  They do not enter Marxian input–output value equations.You’d have to check Debunking Economics to see if Keen also [rationally] ignores pristine inputs in his Sraffian economy.On the other hand, it is remotely possible that his Sraffian economy may treat pristine inputs in the same way as it treats all other inputs—as variable capital.Variable-capital inputs may continue to be productively consumed/used [even long] after they have reproduced their own maintenance cost.  Consequently, pristine raw materials (considered as variable capital) will always contribute toward profit since they take absolutely no time to reproduce their own [zero] maintenance.Again, you’d have to check if he treats them as such, i.e. as actual inputs, on equal par with machinery and possibly working animals.If he doesn’t you’d consider asking him why not, since these homeopathic inputs contribute miraculously to profit?

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Yes, Keen abandons value and sticks with price.Sraffa developed his ‘Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities’ [1960] as a stick to beat marginalism, but it backfired against Marx, as was soon widely discovered, e.g., by Samuelson to his glee, and by Meek (celebrated author of ‘Studies in the Labour Theory of Value’) to his chagrin.Sraffa wrote perceptibly enough in 1927…“The labour theory of value was devised by Ricardo as a stick to beat the [class of] landlords.”“But later, having been adopted by Marx to beat the [class of] capitalists, it was necessary for the defenders of the present system to devise a new theory, the [marginal] utility theory of value.”…“As to Marx, the fact that the [marginal] utility theory of value had been found several times before (by Dupuit, Gossen) and had fallen flat, while when it was again almost simultaneously published by Jevons, Menger and Walras in the years immediately following the publication of Vol. I of Capital, found suddenly a large body of opinion prepared to accept it, is significant enough.”

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YMS’s two premises are the foundation of Capital.They find their summary in the equality formula for the exchange of value for equal value, with money as a medium of exchange          C — M — C′The fundamental problem that Capital Vol. 1 addresses is how to explain surplus value upon this foundation of equality of exchange.Marx’s solution is that, in a social system [capitalism] in which exchange of commodities by C — M — C′ already obtained and in which the means of social production are now privately owned and privately controlled, this foundation of equality of exchange becomes the foundation for its opposite—inequality of exchange—exploitation.Inequality of exchange finds its gloss in the formula for capital          M — C — M′That is the foundation of the rest of Capital.

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Premature, if you haven’t read him…***On value theory, Keen is a Sraffian [named after the Italian-born Cambridge economist Piero Sraffa] who holds that Marxian value theory is incoherent.Sraffian economics (or neo-Ricardian economics) treat value and price as independent variables in a market-wide system of input–output equations, with actual physical quantities as numerical coefficients.  The input–output equations encapsulate Sraffa’s physical standpoint:  the production of commodities by commodities.The Sraffian physical market is cleared simultaneously—i.e. by solving its simultaneous equations to determine value and price.  Because value and price are independent variables, solutions for value and exploitation also turn out to be independent of price and profit—Sraffian solutions can produce surplus value that is negative while profit is positive—i.e. Marxian value theory is proven to be incoherent.In the Sraffian context, Keen raises the issue of machinery and animal labour as variable capital rather than constant capital.  Read Keen’s Debunking Economics.The Marxian answer to Sraffa’s simultaneous dual-system “demolition of Marx” is supplied by Kliman’s temporal single-system.  Read Kliman’s Reclaiming Marx’s Capital.***Although Keen scorns and mercilessly mocks Marx’s value theory, he esteems Marx’s dynamic reproduction schemas.In modeling capitalist circulation, Keen is a Minskyan.  He has developed, with technical assistance, powerful dynamic cyclic reproduction modelling software.***These are technical issues that beg technical demolition.

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Mike Ballard wrote:

we … are left with nothing overwhelmingly endorsing greater freedom.

 Prithee, why so pale and wan?ConsideringThat human society must reproduce itself continually, because its constituents—we life forms—are compelled to replenish life continually.That this compulsion for society to reproduce itself imposes temporal persistence upon the social modes of its reproduction.That these social modes of reproduction are constrained by the historically developed means available for society to reproduce itself.That these social modes of reproduction manifest themselves historically—in their pure form—as persistent moments in an evolving dialectical process.That these persistent moments are grounded in persistent forms of social-class relations of ownership and control of the means available for society to reproduce itself.That when persistent social-class relations of ownership and control of the means available for reproducing social existence are overturned then the entire social formation, which has been raised upon these persistent social-class relations, is transformed into a new mode for reproducing social existence that is raised upon, and appropriate to, the changed social relations of ownership and control.That a social process that is grounded in persistent social-class relations is not grounded in our will, but rather grounds our will.That ownership and control of the means of social reproduction by a class of society—the ruling class—is the foundation upon which the ruling class exploits the dispossessed social class—the working class.That the capitalist ruling class has transformed the social reproduction process into the reproduction of capital, and has simultaneously transformed the working class from a producer of goods into a producer of capital, independent of its will, but determining its will; independent of each worker’s conceptions, but transforming those conceptions into misconceptions.That so long as the necessity of the process of social reproduction is not comprehended by the dispossessed class, the current social form prevails.That Marx and Engels gave their working lives to comprehending the necessity of the social process as a deterministic science, with the practical aim of ending the persistence of the current mode of production and establishing social relations of common ownership and democratic control of the means of social reproduction to ensure the persistence of a socialist mode of production.That the capitalist ruling class has hijacked the necessary process of social reproduction and converted it into a socially parasitic private process that subverts necessary social production into a universal mechanism for generating nothing at all social, but private crass unfree return on investment.That the capitalist social process has converted working life into a mere moment in the expansion of capital, and has produced the producer as a witless non-producer of goods, i.e. as no more than the essential agent of the ruling class’s capital, being the unwitting producer of the very capital that productively enslaves him/her.That a persistent social system driven by private return on investment is not driven by social freedom, but is necessarily driven by the negation of freedom—un-freedom—for those compelled to labour persistently at producing commercial proxies for the capitalist class’s return on investment.That the delusion that producers actually produce goods is the sustaining illusion of an unfree working class—a captive class that is productive only when it is ‘lucky’ to be employed, i.e. when it is ‘fortunate’ to be productive of private capital.That the persistently prevailing motive force of private return on investment overrides consideration of sex, colour, health, disability, intellect, security, love, community—in short, humanity.That the persistently prevailing motive force of private return on investment generates obfuscation, lying, brutality, cheating, swindling, war—in short, anti-humanity.On considerationCapitalist society gives us zero freedom to control it.  Mere human willpower is powerless to intervene successfully in a process it fails to comprehend.  Society remains, as before the act of will, at the mercy of its uncomprehended process.Gravity likewise acts independently of our will.  We no longer engage in merely willing freedom from a gravity that is totally indifferent to us.  We have learnt through long and bitter historical experience to unleash gravity’s inexorable necessity for our ends.  The modern motor car relies on gravity’s necessity, comprehended in the form of general relativity, to help it navigate by GPS.This is precisely what Engels (following Hegel) means by his deep enigmatic gloss “Freedom is the recognition of necessity”.  Think it through.  Engels, like Marx, assumes a reader willing to think for him/her-self.Necessity must be comprehended for us to be able to bridle her, for us to gain freedom through her.  There is no freedom independent of riding its concomitant necessity.  The illusion that we can ignore necessity is blind ignorance—anti-human utopian dreaming.Willed ‘freedom’ is zero freedom, so long as prevalent necessity remains uncomprehended.  That’s precisely why humanity needs science—the genuine powerful science of dynamic processes driven by persistent necessity, not the imaginary pseudoscience of things, objects, stasis.Then be of good cheerConsider the ignominious inhumanities we will free ourselves from as soon as we free ourselves from our currently persistent necessity to drive society as a social engine for generating, first-and-foremost, private return on investment—when we free ourselves from the insatiable necessity of capital to expand itself at the expense of the socially crippled working humans whose socially necessary task it is to perform this compulsion for the benefit of the capitalist class.  Those working humans are us, you and me!Freedom is the recognition of necessity!

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ALB wrote:

Here is an article from the Socialist Standard  in April 1970 (the centenary of his birth) which discusses Lenin's last articles including the one you quote from. It shows a different Lenin, or at least a more realistic one in the circumstances:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1970s/1970/no-788-april-1970/did-lenin-admit-defeat

Alan, a wonderful review indeed!

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