\nRichard Wolff calls himself a Marxist. And though he doesn’t \noffer any definitions, he focuses on the phenomenon which \nhe calls “exploitation.” And “exploitation” means that the employer gets a “profit” while the employee does not. There would be no \n“exploitation” if the employees shared equally in the “profit.” \nAnd he thinks this is possible only if the workers jointly \nowned the enterprise.\n<\/p>
\nIf this is “Marxism,” it is a severe truncation of what Marx \nwrote. Marx major work “Capitalism” is subtitled “A \nCritique of Capitalist Production.” It is, in the main, an \neconomic analysis of how capitalistic businesses work, and \nwhy if they run unregulated (laissez-faire), they will self-\ndestruct.\n<\/p>
\nAnd although Wolff is right about capitalist “exploitation” \nand the fact that the employer reaps a profit, Wolff does not \nseem to concern himself with how this kind of “exploitation” \nis possible, even though under capitalism worker-owned \nenterprises are possible. \n<\/p>
\nA fuller understanding of Marx, requires taking into account \nalso how capitalistic mode of production is possible and how \nhistorically it came about. This is explained by Marx in the \n8th part of Capital: “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” \nespecially Chapter 26: “The Secret of Primitive \nAccumulation,” where it is written: “In actual history it is \nnotorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, \nbriefly force, play the great part.” \n<\/p>
\nThe simple truth is that by the conqueror’s law (which \nmorphs into a centralized government) people are barred \nfrom a free access to subsistence land, and, following the \nperiod of the Black Death, there were instituted laws controlling employment and forbidding vagabondage, i.e., it was forbidden to be without work if you did not possess land. Sort of catch-22: you did \nnot have to work for someone if you had land, but you \ncouldn’t get land without working for someone. But even if \nyou did have land, you had to pay rent or taxes, or both.\n<\/p>
\nMarx believed that it was the technology which accounted \nfor the various forms of production, and gave rise to \ndifferent forms of political organizations (= the alleged thesis \nof historical materialism). But according to one critic, Rudolf \nStammler in his Wirtschaft und Recht nach der \nmaterialistischen Geschichtsausffassung<\/i> (1896), Marx \ninverted the reality: “the social relations of production cannot \nexist outside a definite system of legal rules.” [Karl Marx: \nSelected Writings in Sociology & Social Philosophy (1956), \nedited by T. B. Bottomore, in his “Introduction,” p. 33.] \n<\/p>
\nMy answer to Wolff striving for worker-controlled industries \nis that this can be achieved without resorting to a law such as that all factories are to be worker-controlled. If — by a different law — \neveryone is given a right to free subsistence land, then any \nentrepreneur will be able to secure workers only if he pays \nthem something equivalent or better than they would get \nfrom working on their subsistence land. In other words, the \nworker would have better bargaining power resulting in a \nminimization or even a disappearance of profits.\n\n<\/p>
Remember what \nFranz Oppenheimer wrote in, The State<\/a>: \n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t see the point of using any nominalization such as is done by using the suffix “-ism,” unless one is also willing to offer a definition by stating a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Without a definition, any “-ism” breeds ambiguity and vagueness. Richard Wolff calls himself a Marxist. And though he doesn’t … Continue reading “Myopia of Richard Wolff’s Marxism”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economic-bullshit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2757"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2760,"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2757\/revisions\/2760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}“For as long as man \nhas ample opportunity to take up unoccupied land, “no one,” \nsays Turgot, “would think of entering the service of another;” \nwe may add, “at least for wages, which are not apt to be \nhigher than the earnings of an independent peasant working \nan unmortgaged and sufficiently large property;” while \nmortgaging is not possible as long as land is yet free for the \nworking or taking, as free as air and water.” p. 9-10<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n