Vulgar economy

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Vulgar economics (from “ vulgar ” and “ economics ”), in the parlance of Marxism, denotes an economic approach that is based on the everyday knowledge of economic actors. It thus corresponds to their point of view and a limited perspective and remains in the consideration of the economic processes on their surface and on a low scientific level. The term is thus traced back to Karl Marx .

“The vulgar economy, which 'really has not learned anything either,' insists here, as everywhere, on appearances against the law of appearance. In contrast to Spinoza , she believes that ignorance is a sufficient reason. "

According to the methodology of Marxism, the essence and appearance of a thing do not coincide; otherwise a scientific explanation would not be necessary. The vulgar economic view misunderstood what was obviously given at that time as a natural necessity and overlooks the historical condition of the given social formation .

With the term "vulgar economy", Marx combined the assessment that from a certain point in the development of capitalist society the ruling class was no longer interested in the advancement of economic knowledge, but instead only in the spread of effective ideology to conceal and / or justify the political and social status quo.

"To the extent that it is bourgeois, that is, conceives the capitalist order as an absolute and ultimate form of social production instead of a historically temporary stage of development, political economy can only remain a science as long as the class struggle remains latent or manifests itself in only isolated phenomena."

For Marx, the emergence of classical economics , with the crowning glory of David Ricardo still bluntly expressing the opposition of class interests in his distribution theory, falls in the period of the as yet undeveloped class struggle between wage labor and capital. Afterwards, after the economic crisis of 1830 and the escalation of the class struggle between the bourgeoisie who had come to power and the growing proletariat , the vulgar economic literature almost only fulfills the function of the “ apologetics ” of the prevailing conditions. According to Marx's ideology theory , the - near - future always belongs to a revolutionary, aspiring class. For Theodor Geiger , Marx is therefore not a "panideologist" (like Karl Mannheim , for example ); because the thinking of this class was always "relatively correct", i. H. in line with history. In other words, the relative correctness is simply a temporal location adequacy of thinking.

In the work of John Stuart Mill , Marx sees a "mindless syncretism" at work that seeks to balance the claims of the proletariat, which can no longer be ignored, with those of the bourgeoisie, that is, an "attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable". In the case of Germany, economic science initially lacked a direct view of capitalist production relations, after which the escalation of the class struggles made a theoretically superior science impossible, so that the Germans imported the scientific dogmas mainly from abroad. Enterprising businesspeople gathered around the flag of Bastiat , the "flattest and therefore most successful representative of vulgar economic apologetics".

Marx's Critique of Vulgar Economy

Unlike later neoclassical economics , for classical economics the "natural price" is equal to the costs (including profit) at which the goods can be brought to market in the long term, due to the monetary demand arising at this price is determined. Marx's economic analysis basically follows the same methodological approach.

According to Marx, vulgar economics lacks a theoretically developed concept of value . If supply and supply coincide, their effect is theoretically hidden at all. "So if both exchangers can gain in terms of use-value, they cannot both gain in exchange-value." However, there was no lack of attempts, for example by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac , to demonstrate the play of supply and demand, or the sphere of commodity circulation, as a place where surplus value is created . According to Marx, this is mostly based on a confusion of use value and exchange value. Wilhelm Roscher is still making the same mistake . The illusion that surplus value arises from a nominal price premium made it necessary, according to Marx, to assume a class that consumes without producing. In the model of the simple circulation of goods, however, this assumption is not permissible.

With its expression value of labor, classical economics fails to distinguish between the value of labor and the sum of values that the same labor produces. This entangled them in contradictions and afterwards offered vulgar economics a welcome base of operations for all kinds of flatness. The transformation of the value of labor into corresponding legal forms of money wages is not only the basis for illusions of (contractual) freedom, but also the starting point for corresponding fallacies in vulgar economics.

The criticism of Jean-Baptiste Say

The production factor theory of Jean-Baptiste Say is an expression of the compromise between the industrial bourgeoisie and feudal land ownership, in that rent on land was no longer treated as a deduction from profit but as part of applied capital. On the other hand, it removed Ricardo's theory of labor values ​​from the theory, since it composed the value of commodities from the “equivalent” production factors capital, land and labor. According to this, profit appears as the result of the "productivity" of capital, similarly to land rent as the result of the productivity of the land. Both are apparently equivalent to wages and the class relationship is thus covered up. However, it cannot satisfy, because it moves in a logical circle: it wants to explain the value creation process, but reduces the value of the goods to the value of the factors involved in their production: so value is explained by value. According to Marx's theory of labor value, on the other hand, the ability to produce values ​​is a property of the use value of a single commodity, namely labor power.

The so-called. Say's Law is for Marx the question of whether overproduction is possible, or in other words, whether the recovery process of capital is its utilization in the production immediately. Marx rejects the theorem as a flimsy justification because it abstracts from essential conditions of economic reality.

The criticism of the abstinence theory

The abstinence theory of capital explains profit as compensation for postponing consumption.

Nassau W. Senior replaces the word "capital", viewed as an instrument of production, with the word "abstinence".

"The capitalist who knows about vulgar economics may say that he advanced his money with the intention of making more money out of it." But the capitalist's good intentions are irrelevant to the process of capital appreciation. "Whatever the merits of his renunciation, there is nothing to pay extra for, since the value of the products that come out of the process is only equal to the sum of the goods values ​​thrown in." This is the principle on which the physiocratic doctrine of the unproductivity of all non-agricultural labor is based.

Marx explains that the capital employed can be utilized, that is, can achieve surplus value, from the fact that the commodity labor power bought by him has the particular use value property of producing a greater sum than its own value.

Criticism of Vulgar Views of Types of Income

Theories of Added Value , 1956

As a supplement to the third part of the theories on surplus value , a treatise following Marx's disposition is brought: Revenue and its sources. The vulgar economy . Here Marx takes a detailed look at the vulgar notions about the interest on capital and the origins of the various types of income:

"So the earth becomes the source of rent , capital the source of profit, and labor the source of wages ."

While common sense remains clear enough with wage labor that the work itself creates its wages, with the land rent the productive power of nature is personified in the landowner. "On the other hand, in interest-bearing capital the fetish is complete": "the self-utilizing value, money-making money".

According to Marx, profit is divided into "industrial profit" and the interest that the industrial capitalist has to pay for the capital he has borrowed. Because capital can also be bought in the form of goods or money.

“Money or goods are not sold as money or goods, but rather in the second power, as capital, as increasing money or the value of goods. It not only multiplies, but is maintained in the overall process of production. It therefore remains with the seller as capital and returns to him. The sale consists in the fact that a third party who uses it as productive capital [has] to pay the owner of the capital a certain part of the profit he makes with this capital. "

Further use of the term

In the Marxian sense, the term was used by Marxists and economists critical of capitalism such as Franz Oppenheimer .

According to Oskar Lange , some representatives of vulgar economics were also supporters of utility theory .

The economic encyclopedia , published in the GDR in the 1970s, retains the Marxian term, but excludes certain current developments in individual scientific research directions.

Concepts such as vulgar Marxism or vulgar materialism refer in a similar way to the processes of vulgarization of scientific theories or the approximation of these to common everyday theories.

literature

  • Karl Marx : " Das Kapital " Volume I (MEW 23), Dietz Verlag Berlin 1975.
  • Karl Marx: “ Theories about surplus value .” Volume III (MEW 26.3), Dietz Verlag Berlin 1972.
  • Henryk Grossmann : Marx, classical economics and the problem of dynamics. European Publishing House Frankfurt a. M. 1969.
  • Economic lexicon . Publishing house Die Wirtschaft Berlin 1971
  • DM Nuti: Vulgar Economy in the Theory of Income Distribution . In: The Economist, Vol. IV (1970); Reprinted in: JG Schwartz, EK Hunt, (Ed.): A Critique of Economic Theory . Harmondsworth 1972.

Remarks

  1. ^ Karl Marx: The capital. Critique of Political Economy. First volume. Dietz Verlag Berlin 1969. MEW 23:95, note 32
  2. MEW 23: 325
  3. Marx to Engels, June 27, 1867, MEW 31: 313; Das Kapital , Vol. I, pp. 567f; Vol. III, p. 870; see. Karel Kosik: The Dialectic of the Concrete. A study on the problems of man and the world. Translated from the Czech by Marianne Hoffmann. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 632. 1st edition Frankfurt / Main 1986. P. 12
  4. ^ Epilogue to the second edition ( 1873 ). MEW 23: 19f
  5. MEW 23: 20f
  6. Theodor Geiger: Ideology and Truth. A Sociological Critique of Thought. Luchterhand: Neuwied and Berlin, 2nd ed. 1968. P. 36f
  7. MEW 23:21
  8. MEW 23:21
  9. MEW 23:21
  10. "With the terms 'supply' and 'demand' one thinks immediately and involuntarily of the Marshallian construction of two curves, the intersection of which specifies the equilibrium price and equilibrium quantity. The classics got by without this idea; they have in common that in the terminology of Adam Smith 'natural' price is equal to the costs (including profit) at which a commodity can be brought to market in the long term in the quantity that is determined by the monetarily effective ('effective) demand arising at that price. " (Bertram Schefold: Demand and Supply in the Classical Economy In: Bertram Schefold, Hrsg .: Ökonomische Klassik im Umbruch. Theoretical essays by David Ricardo, Alfred Marshall, Vladimir K. Dmitriev and Piero Sraffa . Suhrkamp taschenbuchwissenschaft 627. Frankfurt am Main 1986 . ISBN 3-518-28227-1 . Pp. 195f.)
  11. MEW 23: 173
  12. MEW 23: 174; see. Wilhelm Roscher: The basics of political economy . 3rd ed. 1858
  13. MEW 23: 561
  14. MEW 23: 562
  15. ^ Karl Marx: Grundrisse for the Critique of Political Economy (rough draft) 1857-1858. Berlin 1974, p. 314. / Karl Georg Zinn: Marx and Keynes - prognostic theories or just a history of dogma? In: Arne Heise, Werner Meißner, Hartmut Tofaute, (eds.): Marx and Keynes and the crisis of the nineties. WSI Herbstforum 1993. Metropolis Verlag Marburg 1994. ISBN 3-89518-005-X . P. 73.
  16. MEW 23: 623
  17. MEW 23: 206
  18. MEW 23: 206
  19. MEW 23: 205, note 13
  20. MEW 23: 208
  21. MEW 26.3: 445
  22. MEW 26.3: 446
  23. MEW 26.3: 447
  24. MEW 26.3: 447f
  25. ^ Franz Oppenheimer: On the theory of socialization. First published in: Hermann Beck: Ways and goals of socialization. Published on behalf of the Federal New Fatherland, Berlin 1919, pp. 14-18.
  26. ^ Oskar Lange: Critique of Subjectivist Economics. In: Hans Albert, (Ed.): Theory and Reality. Selected essays on the science of the social sciences. JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck) Tübingen 1964. p. 288 (from: Oskar Lange: Économie Politique, Tome Premier. Paris-Warszawa 1962, chap. VI, p. 264–284. Translated by Gretl Albert)
  27. Economic Lexicon. LZ, p. 1034

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