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What does it mean to be a left wing economist today? |
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Page 4 of 38
But that is just what happens in selling in order to buy. Schematically:
M ---> → C ---> → M
The merchant buys the pig not because he intends to eat it, but because he intends to sell it later at a higher price. Money is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.
There are, of course, circumstances in which the merchant’s activity serves some useful purpose. For example, she or he might move the pig from a pig-surplus area to a pig-deficit area. But whatever the useful purpose may be, it must, by definition, ultimately be justified, measured, evaluated, and conscientiously revised, because it is useful. The proposition that properly regulated institutions for the exchange of goods and money can be socially useful does not refute Aristotle, Marx, Luxemburg, and the many others who have taken use to be the point and purpose of economic activity. It assumes their premise.
In the passage quoted above, Marx mocks the civil code. In the chapter following the passage quoted, he does not propose a better civil code. He sets out, ostensibly at least, not to solve a moral or juridical problem, but to solve a scientific problem. His problem was how to explain the existence of profit. He argued that on the principles of bourgeois economics the observed phenomena, businesses regularly making profits, could not be explained. Since his principles could explain the observed phenomena, and theirs could not, Marx’s economics was scientifically valid, while bourgeois economics was pseudo-science. By deliberately avoiding the path of proposing better institutions to replace those then prevailing in Europe, the path of the Proudhons, the Sismondis, the Robert Owens, the Saint-Simons, and their followers, Marx thought he was avoiding the trap of putting the case for socialism on a shaky ethical basis. He strove to put it on a solid scientific basis.
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