A World to Win. The Life and Works of Karl Marx. By Sven-Eric Liedman. Verso. 2018.
Liedman is a retired professor of the history of ideas at the University of Gothenburg. This 700-page intellectual biography of Marx was first published in Swedish in 2015. As a description of the development of Marx’s ideas, linked to contemporaneous economic and political events and his changing personal circumstances, it is interesting and informative enough. When, however, it comes to discussing Marx’s economic theory it is far from reliable.
Liedman has Marx as a crude underconsumptionist who explained crises as resulting from the total market-price of what is produced inevitably exceeding, from time to time, total paying consumer demand, resulting in a glut which has to be cleared before production can resume, leading to the next glut. He also sometimes confuses ‘constant’ and ‘fixed’ capital and even ‘variable’ and ‘circulating’ capital.
As a historian of political philosophies Liedman is particularly interested in Marx’s theory of ‘the fetishism of commodities’ (his view that where there is widespread production of articles for sale — commodities — the producers come to be dominated by the movement of their own creation that commodities are) but a passing remark later shows that he hasn’t even understood that Marx envisaged the abolition of commodity-production:
‘Luxemburg can be said to have been correct on another point in relation to Lenin and his followers: in the future society Marx sketched out, there is a market for goods and not a completely regulated planned economy. But the market is equal, in contrast to the kind that characterised capitalist society’ (pp 426-7).
Marx as a ‘market socialist’! Incredible. In fact, the section of Capital on the fetishism of commodities appears before Marx introduces the concept of capital and capitalism; it assumes a market economy with no exploitation of the producers.
Luxemburg too envisaged future society as a ‘natural economy’ where there would be production directly for use and no longer for sale. He also has Rosa Luxemburg (p. 594) as a member of the Reichstag in 1914 when women in Germany didn’t even have the vote.
Adam Buick
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