Remembering Marx (2020)

Book Review from the August 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx 200. The Significance of Marxism in the 21st Century. Edited by Mary Davis. Praxis Press. 2020. 120 pages.

This is a collection of the talks given at an international conference organised by the Marx Memorial Library to mark the bicentenary in 2018 of the birth of Marx.

The Marx Memorial Library was set up in 1933 by the Communist Party and fellow travellers and is still controlled by successors of that party. The contributions are a mixed bag. There are some interesting contributions on technology and on ecology. The political ones reflect the views of the organisers.

There are a couple of claims that need challenging. John McDonnell in the opening article makes the dubious statement that ‘from the earliest days the ideas of Karl Marx’ were part of the Labour tradition. This is not so. The Labour Party was set up as a trade union pressure group in the House of Commons. Most of its leaders were Liberals known as ‘Lib-Labs’. Even Keir Hardie explicitly rejected the class struggle.

The editor, Mary Davis, says in her contribution that, because women’s wages are on average lower than those of ‘white males’, ‘Women are clearly super-exploited, thus the increased surplus value yielded by their labour power greatly enriches the owners of the means of production.’ This is based on the widespread but un-Marxian misconception that the degree of exploitation is measured by the level of the wage a worker gets – if you get low wages that means that you are ‘super-exploited’ compared with those who get paid more.

However, a high or higher wage does not necessarily mean that less surplus value goes to the employer. It will if the job is the same; in that case an increase in wages would reduce the employer’s profits. A higher wage in a different job, on the other hand, generally reflects a higher grade of labour power as one that is more productive, both in the sense of producing more in a given period of time and of more new value created. In fact, it could be that the higher-paid worker’s wage is a smaller proportion of the greater surplus value produced than that of a lower-paid worker in another job, ie, that the rate of exploitation is higher.

Women workers (not female capitalists and so not women in general), like all wage workers, are exploited and ‘equal pay for equal work’ is a sound trade union demand but this does not mean that those on low pay are more exploited in the Marxian sense than the rest of the working class.

Adam Buick