Now it is apparent that this renders historical materialism consistent. Yet there is a question as to whether it is at too high a price. For we must ask whether functional explanation is a coherent methodological device. The problem is that we can ask what it is that makes it the case that an economic structure will only persist for as long as it develops the productive forces. Jon Elster has pressed this criticism against Cohen very hard Elster 27— If we were to argue that there is an agent guiding history who has the purpose that the productive forces should be developed as much as possible then it would make sense that such an agent would intervene in history to carry out this purpose by selecting the economic structures which do the best job.
However, it is clear that Marx makes no such metaphysical assumptions. We must remember the Hegelian origins of Marxist thought. Hegel believed in a hidden mind at work in the universe, and that the history of the world is simply the history of this world mind, which, as in the case of everything spiritual, tends indefinitely towards perfection. Weil [ 43]. Cohen is well aware of the difficulty of appealing to purposes in history, but defends the use of functional explanation by comparing its use in historical materialism with its use in evolutionary biology.
In contemporary biology it is commonplace to explain the existence of the stripes of a tiger, or the hollow bones of a bird, by pointing to the function of these features. Here we have apparent purposes which are not the purposes of anyone. The obvious counter, however, is that in evolutionary biology we can provide a causal story to underpin these functional explanations; a story involving chance variation and survival of the fittest.
Therefore these functional explanations are sustained by a complex causal feedback loop in which dysfunctional elements tend to be filtered out in competition with better functioning elements.
But he points out that standard causal explanations are equally in need of elaborations. We might, for example, be satisfied with the explanation that the vase broke because it was dropped on the floor, but a great deal of further information is needed to explain why this explanation works.
Consequently, Cohen claims that we can be justified in offering a functional explanation even when we are in ignorance of its elaboration. Indeed, even in biology detailed causal elaborations of functional explanations have been available only relatively recently.
Darwin outlined a very plausible mechanism, but having no genetic theory was not able to elaborate it into a detailed account. Our knowledge remains incomplete in some respects to this day. Nevertheless, it seems perfectly reasonable to say that birds have hollow bones in order to facilitate flight. Hence one can be justified in offering a functional explanation even in the absence of a candidate elaboration: if there is sufficient weight of inductive evidence.
At this point the issue, then, divides into a theoretical question and an empirical one. The empirical question is whether or not there is evidence that forms of society exist only for as long as they advance productive power, and are replaced by revolution when they fail. Here, one must admit, the empirical record is patchy at best, and there appear to have been long periods of stagnation, even regression, when dysfunctional economic structures were not revolutionised.
The theoretical issue is whether a plausible elaborating explanation is available to underpin Marxist functional explanations. Here there is something of a dilemma. In the first instance it is tempting to try to mimic the elaboration given in the Darwinian story, and appeal to chance variations and survival of the fittest.
Chance variation would be a matter of people trying out new types of economic relations. On this account new economic structures begin through experiment, but thrive and persist through their success in developing the productive forces. Within Darwinian theory there is no warrant for long-term predictions, for everything depends on the contingencies of particular situations.
A similar heavy element of contingency would be inherited by a form of historical materialism developed by analogy with evolutionary biology. The dilemma, then, is that the best model for developing the theory makes predictions based on the theory unsound, yet the whole point of the theory is predictive.
Hence one must either look for an alternative means of producing elaborating explanation, or give up the predictive ambitions of the theory. But what is it that drives such development? Human beings have the ingenuity to apply themselves to develop means to address the scarcity they find. This on the face of it seems very reasonable. Yet there are difficulties. As Cohen himself acknowledges, societies do not always do what would be rational for an individual to do. Co-ordination problems may stand in our way, and there may be structural barriers.
Furthermore, it is relatively rare for those who introduce new technologies to be motivated by the need to address scarcity. Rather, under capitalism, the profit motive is the key.
Of course it might be argued that this is the social form that the material need to address scarcity takes under capitalism. But still one may raise the question whether the need to address scarcity always has the influence that it appears to have taken on in modern times.
Alternatively, it might be thought that a society may put religion or the protection of traditional ways of life ahead of economic needs. Such a criticism chimes with a criticism from the previous section; that the historical record may not, in fact, display the tendency to growth in the productive forces assumed by the theory.
It is possible to argue, for example, that Marx did not have a general theory of history, but rather was a social scientist observing and encouraging the transformation of capitalism into communism as a singular event. On other views Marx did have a general theory of history but it is far more flexible and less determinate than Cohen insists Miller Hence William Clare Roberts , for example, argues that Capital Volume 1 is fundamentally a work of political theory, rather than economics.
Be that as it may, nevertheless, the work does contain substantial presentation of an economic analysis of capitalism, and it is on this that we will focus here. Capital Volume 1 begins with an analysis of the idea of commodity production.
A commodity is defined as a useful external object, produced for exchange on a market. Thus, two necessary conditions for commodity production are: the existence of a market, in which exchange can take place; and a social division of labour, in which different people produce different products, without which there would be no motivation for exchange.
Marx suggests that commodities have both use-value—a use, in other words—and an exchange-value—initially to be understood as their price. Use value can easily be understood, so Marx says, but he insists that exchange value is a puzzling phenomenon, and relative exchange values need to be explained. Why does a quantity of one commodity exchange for a given quantity of another commodity? His explanation is in terms of the labour input required to produce the commodity, or rather, the socially necessary labour, which is labour exerted at the average level of intensity and productivity for that branch of activity within the economy.
Thus the labour theory of value asserts that the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time required to produce it. Marx provides a two-stage argument for the labour theory of value. As commodities can be exchanged against each other, there must, Marx argues, be a third thing that they have in common.
Both steps of the argument are, of course, highly contestable. Capitalism can be distinguished from other forms of commodity exchange, Marx argues, in that it involves not merely the exchange of commodities, but the advancement of capital, in the form of money, with the purpose of generating profit through the purchase of commodities and their transformation into other commodities which can command a higher price, and thus yield a profit.
Marx claims that no previous theorist has been able adequately to explain how capitalism as a whole can make a profit. The cost of this commodity is determined in the same way as the cost of every other; that is, in terms of the amount of socially necessary labour power required to produce it. Suppose that such commodities take four hours to produce.
Accordingly the first four hours of the working day is spent on producing value equivalent to the value of the wages the worker will be paid. This is known as necessary labour. Any work the worker does above this is known as surplus labour, producing surplus value for the capitalist. Surplus value, according to Marx, is the source of all profit.
Other commodities simply pass their value on to the finished commodities, but do not create any extra value. They are known as constant capital. Profit, then, is the result of the labour performed by the worker beyond that necessary to create the value of his or her wages. This is the surplus value theory of profit. It appears to follow from this analysis that as industry becomes more mechanised, using more constant capital and less variable capital, the rate of profit ought to fall.
For as a proportion less capital will be advanced on labour, and only labour can create value. In Capital Volume 3 Marx does indeed make the prediction that the rate of profit will fall over time, and this is one of the factors which leads to the downfall of capitalism. A further consequence of this analysis is a difficulty for the theory that Marx did recognise, and tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to meet also in the manuscripts that make up Capital Volume 3. It follows from the analysis so far that labour-intensive industries ought to have a higher rate of profit than those which use less labour.
Not only is this empirically false, it is theoretically unacceptable. Accordingly, Marx argued that in real economic life prices vary in a systematic way from values. If it is thought that the labour theory of value was initially motivated as an intuitively plausible theory of price then when the connection between price and value is rendered as indirect as it is in the final theory, the intuitive motivation of the theory drains away.
Others consider this to be a superficial reading of Marx, and that his general approach allows us to see through the appearances of capitalism to understand its underlying basis, which need not coincide with appearances.
Any commodity can be picked to play a similar role. Consequently, with equal justification one could set out a corn theory of value, arguing that corn has the unique power of creating more value than it costs. Formally this would be identical to the labour theory of value Roemer Nevertheless, the claims that somehow labour is responsible for the creation of value, and that profit is the consequence of exploitation, remain intuitively powerful, even if they are difficult to establish in detail.
However, even if the labour theory of value is considered discredited, there are elements of his theory that remain of worth. Both provide a salutary corrective to aspects of orthodox economic theory. However, the question arises of whether the basic idea of exploitation should be so dependent on a particular theory of value.
Others have felt that it is possible to restore the intuitive core of a Marxist theory of exploitation independent of the labour theory of value cf. Cohen , Wolff , Vrousalis John Roemer, to take one leading case, states:. Marxian exploitation is defined as the unequal exchange of labor for goods: the exchange is unequal when the amount of labor embodied in the goods which the worker can purchase with his income … is less than the amount of labor he expended to earn that income.
Roemer Suppose I work eight hours to earn my wages. With this perhaps the best thing I can buy is a coat. But imagine that the coat took only a total of four hours to make. The definition requires some refinement. For example, if I am taxed for the benefit of those unable to work, I will be exploited by the above definition, but this is not what the definition of exploitation was intended to capture.
Worse still, if there is one person exploited much more gravely than anyone else in the economy, then it may turn out that no-one else is exploited. Nevertheless, it should not be difficult to adjust the definition to take account of these difficulties, and as noted several other accounts of Marx-inspired accounts of exploitation have been offered that are independent of the labour theory of value.
Many of these alternative definitions add a notion of unfreedom or domination to unequal exchange of labour and goods Vrousalis The exploited person is forced to accept a situation in which he or she just never gets back what they put into the labour process. Now there may be, in particular cases, a great deal to be said about why this is perfectly acceptable from a moral point of view. However, on the face of it such exploitation appears to be unjust. Nevertheless, we will see in the next section why attributing such a position to Marx himself is fraught with difficulty.
The issue of Marx and morality poses a conundrum. Yet the terms of this antipathy and endorsement are far from clear. Despite expectations, Marx never directly says that capitalism is unjust. Neither does he directly say that communism would be a just form of society. In fact he frequently takes pains to distance himself from those who engage in a discourse of justice, and makes a conscious attempt to exclude direct moral commentary in his own works.
The puzzle is why this should be, given the weight of indirect moral commentary one also finds in his writings. There are also separate questions concerning his attitude to ideas of justice, and to ideas of morality more broadly concerned. This, then, generates four questions: a Did Marx think capitalism unjust? These are some of the questions we consider in this section.
The initial argument that Marx must have thought that capitalism is unjust is based on the observation that Marx argued that all capitalist profit is ultimately derived from the exploitation of the worker. How could this fail to be unjust? Requisite: One course in philosophy or consent of the instructor. Limited to 25 students. Spring semester. Visiting Professor Koltonski. Marxism posits that the struggle between social classes—specifically between the bourgeoisie, or capitalists, and the proletariat, or workers—defines economic relations in a capitalist economy and will inevitably lead to revolutionary communism.
Marxism is both a social and political theory, which encompasses Marxist class conflict theory and Marxian economics. Marxism was first publicly formulated in in the pamphlet The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which lays out the theory of class struggle and revolution. Marxian economics focuses on the criticisms of capitalism, which Karl Marx wrote about in his book Das Kapital , published in They are driven, he posited, by vast impersonal forces of history that play out through the behavior and conflict among social classes.
According to Marx, every society is divided into social classes, whose members have more in common with one another than with members of other social classes. Thus Marx thought that the capitalist system inherently contained the seeds of its own destruction.
The alienation and exploitation of the proletariat that are fundamental to capitalist relations would inevitably drive the working class to rebel against the bourgeoisie and seize control of the means of production.
As a result of the revolution, Marx predicted that private ownership of the means of production would be replaced by collective ownership, first under socialism and then under communism. In the final stage of human development, social classes and class struggle would no longer exist. Marx and Engels' ideas laid the groundwork for the theory and practice of communism, which advocates for a classless system in which all property and wealth are communally rather than privately owned.
Socialism predates communism by several decades. Its early adherents called for a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, solidarity among workers, better working conditions, and common ownership of land and manufacturing equipment. Socialism is based on the idea of public ownership of the means of production , but individuals may still own property.
Rather than arising out of a class revolution, socialist reform takes place within the existing social and political structures, whether they're democratic, technocratic, oligarchic, or totalitarian. Both communism and socialism oppose capitalism, an economic system characterized by private ownership and a system of laws that protect the right to own or transfer private property.
In a capitalist economy, private individuals and enterprises own the means of production and the right to profit from them. These include worker exploitation and inequities between rich and poor. Although Marx inspired multitudes of followers, many of his predictions have not come to pass. Marx believed that increasing competition would not produce better goods for consumers; instead, it would lead to bankruptcy among capitalists and the rise of monopolies as fewer and fewer were left to control production.
Bankrupt former capitalists would join the proletariat, eventually creating an army of the unemployed. In addition, the market economy , which by its nature is unplanned, would experience huge supply-and-demand problems and cause severe depressions. Yet over the years, capitalism has not collapsed as a result of fierce competition. A more recent trend of Marxism in IR — historical sociology — returns to some of the more classical problems of IR.
Specifically, it looks at the development of the modern state system in relation to the transition s to capitalism and to the different moments of colonial and imperial expansion. It looks more closely at what happened inside Europe but also beyond Europe. More specifically, it contests the birth of the sovereign states system following the treaties of Westphalia in and instead focuses on more socio-economic processes in the nineteenth century to define key shifts in modern international relations.
This underlines how scholars are taking history beyond Europe in order to address the Eurocentric assumptions found in Marxism and in the wider discipline of IR itself. In sum, Marxism is characterised by interdependence.
The Marxist term for this is dialectics , which underpins the way in which all the previous concepts explored in this chapter relate to each other. For Marxism, all concepts reflect social relations, but categories take on a life of their own and often hide those social relations. It is easy to overcomplicate or abuse this concept. A Marxist IR approach to migration shows the importance of historical materialism as an approach to IR.
First, Marxists are critical of the fixed aspect of borders because they create relations of dependency and inequality between peoples by restricting and controlling their access to resources and labour. Some Marxists argue that we need a global concept of citizenship to counter how states exclude non-citizens from benefits and access to labour and resources. After all, from a Marxist point of view, peoples of all nations are united in their oppression by capitalism and the modern state system that separates them and sets them against each other, so people should be freed or emancipated from this status.
Consequently, Marxists see borders as fixtures that unfairly determine relations of dependency and inequality — or in other words, who has the right to what. Second, we need to think of who decides who is a migrant and what that category entails. For example, being a migrant who is fleeing a country because of persecution is a necessary condition according to international law for applying for asylum and becoming a refugee in a host state.
Most states have signed the Refugee Convention and have agreed to this definition. Hence, the reality of being this particular type of migrant is dependent on a specific treaty and the will of states to consent to it. In other words, the category of persecuted migrant or refugee is relative — it is not real in the sense that the colour of your eyes is real and cannot be decided differently by someone else.
People who flee from poverty related to conflict, climate change, or lack of jobs are often designated as economic migrants. Their status does not depend on a definition as clear as that of a refugee, and it also does not lead to the same rights and opportunities. Many people move towards Europe because it offers more economic opportunities and a relatively safer political environment.
However, decisions at the European and state level are increasingly resulting in the strengthening or closing of borders, because some feel that economic migration is not a sufficient reason to freely admit a person. In contrast, being an economic migrant who has a particular skill needed by the host country is considered legitimate. Marxism provides us with an original angle that makes us reconsider migration and shows why closing borders is a sociologically and politically blind policy in relation to the system we all live in.
In effect, capitalism started a simultaneous process of territorial bordering and of social change through wage-labour. Mainstream IR separates those processes historically and theoretically by taking the separation between the domestic and international as fixed and real. Marxism argues that this leads to obscuring the social relations and processes linking movements of people and the creation of borders.
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