Dialectical economics: an introduction to Marxist political economy /

509 Pages·84.21 MB·English

by  Lyn Marcus [i.e. L. H. LaRouche].

DIALECTICAL
ECONOMICS

A “Genealogical” Diagram of Principal Currents of Modern Epistemology
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DIALECTICAL
ECONOMICS
An Introduction to
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Marxist Political Economy
Lyn Marcus
D. C. HEATH AND COMPANY
Lexington, Massachusetts Toronto London
To my opponents, who made this
book necessary
Copyright © 1975 by D. C. Heath and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, in­
cluding photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
Printed in the United States of America.
International Standard Book Number: 0-669-85308-9
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-2988
AUTHOR S FOREWORD
This text is the outcome of a one-semester course which the author has
conducted at various locations since 1966. Like the course, it is principally
designed to provide a working mastery of Marx's method and major
economic-theoretical ideas for graduate students or advanced undergradu­
ates in such specialized fields as political science, anthropology, and philos­
ophy. For other readers, it introduces the actual Karl Marx, whose method
and conceptions were fundamentally different than those offered in his
name by contemporary "official Communists," "Trotskyists," and most
other interpreters. ·
To minimize the book's polemical burdens, Chapter 1 states the gen­
eral arguments against the positions of the author's better-known critics,
and outlines points which may be of special usefulness to the instructor
using this work as a main or supplementary classroom text.
This book demands that the instructor assume responsibility for a
larger mass and variety of references than is customary for an elective course
of this type and duration. This is a circumstance for which there is no
remedy. To study any aspect of Marx's work, one must know the special
dialectical method which permeates all his efforts; without it no proper
sense can be made of a single one of his specialized terms, nor is it possible
to competently follow the very special procedures of argument and proof
on which he relies.
This necessity obliges authors and lecturers in this field to master an
unusually broad range of source materials; we identify the most essential
writings below. It also frequently compels the instructor to employ a style
of exposition, for certain topics, which tends to offend prevailing academic
tastes. Objections incurred on this account are not evidence of any actual
defect in such passages. For reasons we shall identify here, it is impossible
to competently elaborate any of the essential notions of Marxian political
economy employing ordinarily preferred forms of literary usage. However,
unless the possible objection on this account is anticipated, as we do here,
there is a danger that the student will mistake essential but apparently
egregious features of formulations for mere stylistic aberrations. If he dis­
counts those as aberrations, he will understand nothing of importance in
this field. The following paragraphs, therefore, are included as warning
against such misassessments.
It is useful to emphasize, before identifying the specific problems, that
our defense of a dialectical style is neither hypothetical nor a rationalization
for continuing usages which are customary in the literature. In fact, to a
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considerable extent, it is the exceptional efficiency of this dialectical mode
that has enabled the author and his former students to become, alterna­
tively, influential or bitterly vilified among most leading governmental and
labor circles in North America and Europe today. The significant question
is, therefore: what is the underlying reason for such egregious success?
It would be conceded and even emphasized by scholars that, for the
most part, we are obliged to conform to terminologies and special forms
of literary construction established during a century and a half of English
editions of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx. For that reason, a detailed
glossary of the most important specialized terms and usages has been
appended to this text. Yet, the importance of terminology acknowledged,
we must go still further.
It is even more essential for the student to understand that prevailing
usages of exposition include intellectually diseased habits of speech and
writing whose widespread acceptance is no evidence against such a diagno­
sis. Specifically, we contend that the capacity of language to communicate
important and profound conceptions has been undermined by acceptance
of pathological norms of rhetoric that are accommodations to the empiri­
cist's philosophical world-outlook. Such norms are accepted, not only by
persons who regard themselves as informed by that outlook, but also by
the broader masses who practice empiricism (as "horse sense") without
being aware of it. Since a systematic critique of empiricism is provided in
the text, we shall limit our attention here to a few most relevant features.
We shall identify the systematic flaw which absolutely precludes literary
forms agreeable to that outlook from representing either dialectical con­
ceptions or the empirical reality to which those conceptions correspond. We
shall situate that point, with an historical basis for its occurrence, in the
development of certain modern European languages and philosophical out­
looks.
In the informed epistemological outlook, occurrences in nature are
represented for human knowledge in two distinct forms: universals and
phenomena. Rigorous philosophy and fundamental specialist scientific in­
quiry have always considered the essential and only real knowledge of
existence to be that view in which occurrences are comprehended as a de­
termined outcome of necessity, or lawful occurrence. This depended upon
the notion of universal laws whose primary basis was considered to be
nothing less than the universe as a coherent totality. Kepler's approach to
establishing the basis for a comprehensive physics is an example of this.
At the same time, man had knowledge of particular occurrences whose
actual causes were usually unknown or imperfectly known. This inferior
and less reliable form of knowledge identified the domain of phenomena.
In mathematics, such inferior knowledge is associated with the analysis of
phenomena treated as self-evidently discrete events. In modern terms, we
may distinguish these two aspects of reality as the respective postulational
viewpoints of continuity and discreteness.
From its beginnings during the Renaissance, the general development
vi FOREWORD
of modern philosophy and the particular sciences was characterized by pre­
occupation with certain fundamental paradoxes of human knowledge in
general. These were, specifically, the seemingly insoluble and yet inescap­
able difficulties of reconciling totalities (universals) with particular expe­
rience (phenomena).1 As a consequence and correlative of this concern, at
some point in their respective evolutions the languages associated with the
Renaissance and Enlightenment acquired the capacity to express the rigor­
ous distinctions this holistic outlook subsumed. But with the rise of empiri­
cism in England, especially during the present century, the language facul­
ties so developed became attenuated, even among the educated strata. The
empiricist view, implicit in the works of Francis Bacon and elaborated by
Hume, rejected fundamental scientific inquiry and limited knowledge to the
interpretation of phenomena. (This is the view denounced by Kant as "in-
differentism.") Thus, with the hegemony of the empiricist view, the edu­
cated man's comprehension of the world was banalized. Norms of literary
usage were vulgarized to conform to the degradation of his mental powers
so that habitual forms of speech and writing lost much of their former
capacity for communicating rigorous conceptions.
By contrast, the German critical outlook—typified successively by
Kant, Hegel, and Marx—represented a resumption of the earlier outlook of a
Ficino, Kepler, Descartes, and Spinoza. It, also, of course, made some
advances beyond that world-view. These differing philosophical develop­
ments make rendering the ideas of Hegel or Marx in certain modern
languages extremely difficult; to do so requires the employment of certain
older features of the tongues that empiricist usages have either muddled or
entirely discarded. For the world-outlook in which the distinction between
reality and mere phenomena is the primary scientific concern demands ap­
propriate forms of usage, including generous employment of transitive
forms and varied connotations for the verb "to be." The conditional and
subjunctive tenses have special, rigorous importance in dealing with notions
of causation, and so forth and so on. Eliminate the notion of the real, elimi­
nate the effort to explore and solve the paradoxes of coherence of continuity
and discreteness, and all the forms of speech that are required for such dis­
tinctions become disused or banalized to describe a flat world of interpreta­
tion of phenomena. Fortunately, the possibility of resurrecting and develop­
ing disused capacities persisted in the heritage of language's development,
except where squads of grammarians and glossers have gained power to
legislate formalism and thus effectively outlaw exercise of a language's
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former potentialities.
The foregoing observations partly reflect recent work by teams of the
author's associates. The coordinated publication of journals in English, Ger­
man, Italian, Spanish, French, Greek, and Swedish, translating items origi­
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1 This same problem was later attacked in mathematics by G. Riemann, G. Cantor, and others.
The development of new concepts of mathematics by these outstanding scientists of the mid­
nineteenth century made possible the Einsteinian revolution of the twentieth.
FOREWORD vii
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nally written in one language into several others, confronted us with ex­
actly the kind of problem we are considering here. The texts of articles,
usually employing a generous number of dialectical formulations, presented
us with more profound difficulties than translators ordinarily experience.
Under the circumstances, it became urgent to standardize approaches to re­
curring problems. A few examples are sufficient for the point at hand.
It was demonstrated that dialectical conceptions readily expressed in
German or English could not be efficiently translated into standard kinds
of French, Spanish, or Greek. In many instances, a single English or Ger­
man sentence required several, in, for example, French. Even then, the
meaning of the original statement was partly lost in translation. This could
not be attributed to any special shortcomings of our teams' work, since
these included individuals of exceptional qualifications in education, mul­
tiple fluencies and effective comprehension of the subject matter. Compari­
son of our efforts with standard French and Spanish translations of major
works of Hegel, Marx, and Luxemburg demonstrated that our practice was
in fact better informed than most of those. We suspected and demonstrated
that the important difficulties originated in inadequacies of the language
itself. For example, in the standard French translation of Hegel's Phenom­
enology of Mind, there is a long footnote on the impossibility of directly
rendering Selbstbewusstsein (Hegel's self-consciousness) in modern French.
It is not immaterial to the general problems of both French and Spanish that
this and other dialectical conceptions cannot be rendered in those tongues
within the scope of accepted usages. Working backward from the present
literature, we studied leading models of French from various periods to find
suitable precedents for such expressions. It was not until the case of Ra­
belais that a remedy was found. By applying a modern vocabulary and
spelling to Rabelaisian literary French's freedom of usages we found the
basis for the needed richer language. Self-consciousness then could be
neatly rendered as soi-conscience and cognate forms of Spanish and Italian
adopted as standardized translations.
Investigation showed that there was nothing accidental—or specifi­
cally, "genetically" French, Spanish, etc.—in the difficulty. We would not
go so far as to blame modern French for the qualities of Louis Althusser's
Pour Marx, but it is clear that the usages certified by the Immortals of the
French Academy preclude the precise expression of profound scientific con­
ceptions. As empiricism represented a driving force for vulgarization of
educated use of English, formalism was the mode of stultification of French
from Richelieu onward.
There is nothing outrageous in the assertion that today Rabelais (and,
in Spanish, Cervantes) is a viable source for the enrichment of the expres­
sive powers of contemporary languages. The Renaissance in Spain, Italy,
France, the Low Countries, and England was distinguished by a revolution­
ary advance in the development of written languages. The most influential
writers of those revolutions received considerable assistance from ancient
Latin and Greek theological-philosophical and philosophical writings. De-
viii FOREWORD
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spite the first impression gained from a study of Erasmus, this emulation
was practiced not as affectation, but in an effort to enrich in a definite way
the conceptual powers of existing languages. What caused certain ancient
writers to be most influential was the Renaissance thinkers' intent to ren­
der the tongue capable of communicating efficiently Augustinian and Neo­
Platonic qualities of thought. It is assumed here that the impetus to this
activity was the energizing effects of Renaissance society and the appropri­
ate basis provided by social developments in that period—a point for which
we account within this text. The argument to be made here is that the re­
markable conceptual power of the best Renaissance and early Enlighten­
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ment literary models is the successful result of a largely deliberate effort
to make languages capable of communicating the most profound concepts.
The later banalization of educated usages is also provocative and fruit­
ful for consideration, because the degeneration occurred as a correlative of
a massive advance in the quality of human life and institutions. The key to
this irony is illustrated by certain uses of the transitive forms of the verb
"to be." The Renaissance and Enlightenment were justly preoccupied with
concepts of "becoming"; an excellent insight into this need is implicit in
a comparison of Ficino and Descartes on the ontological paradox of perfec­
tion. (The Cartesian argument is developed in the text.) Descartes implicitly
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solves the paradox by making the "becoming" that connects successive ad­
vances in human knowledge the primary form of real existence. That is,
rather than defining perfection and infinity as a succession of fixed oc­
currences, rather than conceiving of these as a succession of discrete events
which apocalyptically, asymptotically converge upon a predetermined max­
imal value, the infinite must be seen as the immediate aspect of current
development that expresses an energizing, determining principle of self­
development. Although the problem of rigorously conceptualizing self­
reflexive conceptions of this kind was not actually solved until Marx (and
implicitly by Riemann and Cantor), Descartes and Spinoza succeeded in
specifying some of the conditions such conceptions must satisfy. In contrast
to the rigorous epistemological current from Fincino through Marx, Hume's
approach degrades the verb "to be" to the banality of a simple equal sign
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and the limits of knowledge to the vulgarity of a mere interpretation of
phenomena. In other words, the establishment of the basic notion of
capitalist forms of heteronomic social equilibrium—as typified by Locke for
England and Rousseau's solidarist utopianism for France—corresponded
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to the discarding of the problem of fundamental social evolution in favor
of virtually exclusive emphasis upon the realization and development of
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social phenomena in their capitalist form.
It is not necessary to recapitulate here the explanation for the develop­
ment of German critical philosophy made classic by Hegel, Heine, Marx,
and Engels. It is sufficient for our present concern to note that Hegel,
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t Feuerbach, and Marx successively developed the notion of rigorously de­
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fined self-reflexive processes. Marx's notions of labor power, of capital in
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general, and of value are specifically self-reflexive. The most rudimentary
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FOREWORD ix