Free to Lose: An Introduction to Marxist Economic Philosophy (Civilization of the American Indian (Paperback))

Students who wish to learn Marxist economics must, for the most part, master a language that is a century old and not visibly compatible with what they read in contemporary social science. My aim in this book is to present the lasting ideas of Marxist economics in a way that makes them accessible to readers today. But it would be dishonest to say that only the language is new. Many classic Marxist arguments do not appear here, or have been drastically revised, because I believe they are wrong. The theory of the falling rate of profit is a case in point. And the labor theory of value, so important in the classic Marxist account, is unimportant here, for it contributes nothing to our understanding and, even when most charitably interpreted, is at best misleading. It is, indeed, a secondary purpose of this book to show that the conclusions of Marxist analysis do not depend at all on the labor theory of value. The revised Marxism I present is shaped by the insights that the tools of contemporary economics-that is, neoclassical economics-can bring to bear. In the century since Marx wrote, his ideas have been important in large part because they provide an argument for the immorality of the capitalist system; and my theme is, similarly, to trace the connections between the economic concepts of Marxism and the ethical ideas to which they are related. Whereas contemporary neoclassical economics advertises its moral neutrality, the task of Marxist economics is to challenge the defensibility, from a moral viewpoint, of an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production. The method of economic theory can provide only one kind of argument in this debate, but one that I hope reveals its usefulness, especially in connection with historical, sociological, and philosophical approaches. viii Preface The material I present can form the syllabus of an upper division or graduate course in Marxist economic philosophy. I hope the book will be useful to social science and philosophy students and to the social scientist or philosopher who wants an elementary and quite brief presentation of the links between political philosophy and the ideas of exploitation, class, and historical materialism. I wish to thank my students, whose enthusiasm encouraged me to write this book, and my friends in the September Group ("Marxismus sine stercore tauri"), who have met annually in London for the better part of a decade to argue about what Marxism has to offer to the social science of our day. This book reflects what I have taken from those discussions. I am especially grateful for the comradeship of G. A. Cohen and David Donaldson, who read the manuscript and commented on it in a degree of detail far beyond what duty required. Finally, I am indebted to Jodi Simpson of Harvard University Press for her incisive editorial work. ### 1.4 Historical Materialism Marxism does not take a myopic view of capitalist society; it recognizes that a capitalist system is only one phase of class societyperhaps the last one, but certainly not the first. Whereas Adam Smith considered it natural for men to "truck and barter," and for private property to emerge as an institution, the historical analysis associated with Marxism opposes this view. It claims that a system of production and exchange based on the private ownership of the means of pro- ### 1.6 Method My approach to Marxism is that of a contemporary student of economics and political philosophy. I wish to study the logic of the ideas and the internal coherence of the claims. Focusing on those aspects of Marxism that bear on the legitimacy of private property from the ethical point of view enables one to evaluate the cogency of the claim that capitalism is an exploitative and unfair system. It is of utmost importance to study this claim, for contemporary liberal capitalist thought makes the opposite claim. I do not take a historical approach or an empirical one. In one sense that is a shame, for abstract arguments are often less convincing than palpable evidence. Concrete cases of the genesis of private property in blood and slavery often do more to convince people of its moral illegitimacy than do the abstract and theoretical arguments given here. The revelation that Ferdinand Marcos accumulated billions of dollars in twenty years as the president of a country that paid him an annual salary of $4000 is a particularly lurid case of the kind of "primitive accumulation" of capital that Marxism claims characterizes the history of capital formation more generally in many parts of the world. If this is in fact the case, there is a strong argument for abolishing private property in the means of production simply so that people cannot amass vast economic and Attacking the usefulness of such central Marxian concepts as the labor theory of value and surplus value, John Roemer reconstructs Marxian economic philosophy from the concepts of exploitation and class, showing that exploitation can be derived from a system of property relations. He then looks at the causes of the unequal distribution of wealth, including robbery and plunder, willingness to take risks, differential rates of time preference, luck, and entrepreneurship. He further examines the evolution of property systems—slave, feudal, capitalist, socialist—from the perspective of the theory of historical materialism, and ends by analyzing the properties of a social system in which ownership of productive assets in the external world is public, while ownership of internal productive assets—skills and talents—is private. John Roemer challenges the morality of an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production. Unless you start with a certain amount of wealth in such a society, you are only "free to lose." This book addresses crucial questions of political philosophy and normative economics in terms understandable by readers with a minimal knowledge of economics John E. Roemer. Includes Index. Bibliography: P. [193]-197.