Marxism

Richard Wolff, professor emeritus, is a celebrated Marxist.[1] Being a Marxist is not a crime, although it ought to be considering the suffering, death and destruction that Marxism causes wherever and whenever it is tried.

Prof. Wolff is a fine example of an educated man who is totally lacking common sense and critical reasoning faculties. I am not generally so blunt but I think he’s an idiot too stupid to even realize the extent of his idiocy. It’s painful to think of the thousands of young minds he has ruined with his nonsense.

Where’s the supporting evidence, one may ask. OK. Try this.

It all sounds so reasonable: workers produce goods and services. Their labor produces the value that is inherent in the goods. More labor, more value, higher price. Higher profits. The capitalists grab unearned profits. Labor gets a tiny bit — subsistence wages — and the lion’s share of the profits go to the capitalists who are basically parasites that suck the blood out of the workers.

It’s all very unfair and it leads to avoidable misery. Confiscating the wealth of the capitalists is the reasonable thing to do, though in a just world, the merciful thing to do would be to kill the capitalists. Peace and prosperity will inevitably result.

Sadly, though, socialism and communism (the end state of Marxism) has produced nothing but untold misery. An estimated 100 million people have been killed in an attempt to build the workers’ paradise.

But Prof Wolff continues to spew nonsense. Why is it nonsense? Because he does not know the basics of what value is and how it is produced. His understanding is that of a simple-minded but well-meaning child’s analysis of a primitive production process. It could apply to a very primitive hunter-gatherer society or even a basic agricultural economy. It definitely does not apply to a 19th century industrial economy, let alone a modern economy.

In a primitive economy, the production process is short, simple and straight forward. There’s nature-provided land. All you need are some simple tools, some seed corn, and your major input is labor. You plant stuff, you tend the crop, then you harvest. You keep what you grow. No one grows rich through exploiting you.

It doesn’t work that way in a modern economy, or any economy that’s not primitive. Not that I am prejudiced against the primitives — after all they were the ancestors of us all. But we are not them. What worked for them does not work for us.

First difference: the production process is complicated and it involves tens of thousands of steps, each of which require specialized tools and equipment that have to be produced (in turn using tens of thousands of steps.) Even the making of a pencil[2] is complicated beyond belief.

Second difference arises from  the first: production is round-about. To produce things, the required tools have to be produced. To do accounting, one needs to have a spreadsheet which runs on a computer, which requires electronic chips, which have to be fabricated using sophisticated machines, which need . . . the process is complicated.

Third difference arises from the previous two: production takes time. For example, from the initial idea to the final good (an iPhone) ready for customers could take years. During this time, there’s no revenue and only expenses. For years, the enterprise will lose money because people have to be paid. And in the end, the whole enterprise could end in failure and be a total loss. Remember, it’s a profit and loss system. Capitalists make money and they lose money. Bets have to be made and risks taken.

Anyway, Richard Wolff is a Marxist idiot (but I repeat myself.)

Brings to mind a bit from Joan Robinson.[3]

Voltaire remarked that it is possible to kill a flock of sheep by witchcraft if you give them plenty of arsenic at the same time. The sheep, in this figure, may well stand for the complacent apologists of capitalism; Marx’s penetrating insight and bitter hatred of oppression supply the arsenic, while the labour theory of value provides the incantations.

Wolff still believes in the labor theory of value.  The classical economists — Adam Smith included — professed it. It took a while but in the 1870s the neoclassical economists got the memo from Messrs. Menger, Jevons & Walras — the marginal revolutionaries. Now only very small children and ignoramuses think in terms of the labor theory of value.

Bonus quotes from Robinson:

• • • Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.
    • The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.
    • The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.

Thank you, good night and may your god go with you.

NOTES:

[1] The wiki says, “Richard David Wolff (born April 1, 1942) is an American Marxian economist known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New School. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, University of Utah, University of Paris I (Sorbonne), and The Brecht Forum in New York City.”

[2] See “I, Pencil” by Leonard Read.

[3] Joan Violet Robinson (1903 – 1983) was a British economist known for her wide-ranging contributions to economic theory. One of the most prominent economists of the century, Joan Robinson incarnated the “Cambridge School” in most of its guises in the 20th century. [Wiki]