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What does it mean to be a left wing economist today? |
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Marx lets his readers know clearly enough that he has a low opinion of the morals of the so-called free market. He would have agreed with the British economist E.F. Schumacher who wrote a hundred years later that such a market is “institutionalized irresponsibility.” As to what morals would be better, Marx declines to say. The reader is left knowing more about what Marx is against than about what Marx is for.
The famous passage quoted follows an introductory account of the kind of society that Marx submits to scientific examination. A capitalist society. Marx initially defines a capitalist society as one whose wealth appears as a vast collection of commodities. That kind of society was not a good society. It was a society to be transformed by criticism, struggle, and reconstruction. Marx the scientist, Marx who had no sentimental love for pre-capitalist social formations, Marx who regarded capitalism as both the best thing and the worst thing that ever happened to humanity, clearly regarded the form of society where some people hire other people to produce commodities, and then the former sell what the latter produce, as a problem to be solved, not as a solution.
(The English term “commodities” translates the original German Waren, a cognate of “wares,” an ancient English word employed by Simple Simon when he asked the pieman to let him taste his. Waren could also have been translated as “merchandise,” i.e. things to sell. Spanish translations of Capital use “mercancias” for Waren.)
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