May Day review of "Marx 200" by Michael Roberts

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Marx 200 is a punchy, readable and succinct review of Marx’s economics at the 200th anniversary of his birth. A renowned Marxist economist, Roberts rapidly takes us to the core of Marx’s great theoretical innovations, his three ‘laws’, addressing the many arguments of his critics. He then assesses how well Marx’s ‘predictions’ have held up. This short book highlights the current resurgence of Marxist economics; it does, however, also exemplify this tradition’s weaknesses.

Roberts starts with a brief biography of Marx. After reviewing the development of Marx’s thinking he introduces his three ‘laws’: (i) the law of value: only labour creates value ; (ii) the law of accumulation: capitalists are forced to accumulate more and more capital through competition ; and (iii) the law of the tendency of the rate of profit  to decline. On the latter, Roberts presents his usual trenchant and compelling arguments in support.

Non-Marxists are amazed to discover that Marx left us with no fully developed theory of crisis. Such a theory would require the synthesis of all the dynamical tendencies within capitalism - and contemporary Marxists differ in ascribing central causation. For Roberts, the cycle of crises is fundamentally driven by the cycle of profitability. He assembles an impressive amount of data to show graphical correlations and the superposition of short- and long-term economic cycles. He then turns to Marx’s critics: his main targets are the Keynesians and the relatively new school of post-Keynesian ‘heterodox economists’ (he includes a discussion of the ‘transformation problem’).

In his final chapter he addresses Marx’s predictions: how well have they held up?  Marx held that as capitalism developed, inequality would increase (both within and between countries). Roberts has ample data, particular since the inception of neoliberalism in the 1980s, to confirm that. Second is Marx’s point that capitalism is focused exclusively on capital valorisation and cares not a jot for environmental and ecological issues. Roberts see climate change as contemporary evidence for that too, although he underestimates the extent to which capitalist states can successfully cooperate to deal with global ecological issues they find proximately threatening. Finally he addresses the rise of AI and robotics, presenting the orthodox view that machines cannot create value so that total automation is incompatible with capitalist relations of production. Here his presentation is marred by failing to discuss the proximate economic and political effects of overwhelming automation: simply appealing to lack of surplus value leaves the discussion at too high a level of abstraction.

Let us now turn to the weaknesses and lacunae which Roberts’ book shares with other Marxist accounts.

1.  Capitalism is consistently criticised as historically obsolete, irrational and destructive. A socialist replacement is demanded. It’s clear that capitalism’s contradictions drive its dynamics and that its cyclical behaviour creates negative human consequences. Yet where is the credible alternative? How would a socialist state handle the motivational and coordination problems which capitalism, in its tough-minded way, routinely deals with effectively? János Kornai in ‘The Socialist System’ presents a chilling account of the failures of ‘rational planning’ in post-capitalist economies which did not differ qualitatively in development from those in the West today. Simply incanting ‘bottom-up democracy’ as the solution doesn’t do it.

2.  The replacement of capitalism is a serious business, the outcome of a bloody civil war. In the absence of proletarian success retribution has historically been terrible. The working class today in the advanced capitalist countries is about as unprepared as it could possibly be to conduct such a struggle. Yet there is no discussion at all by writers such as Roberts as to the strategy for a successful transition. In the absence of theory and debate, isn’t it obvious that all such calls to ‘abolish capitalism’ are either premature (capitalism not yet ripe for supersession), ritualistic or simply irresponsible?

3. Marxists may be the last community of scholars on earth to cling to the ‘blank slate’ ideology, the idea that humans of all geographies, states and ethnicities exhibit the same social capabilities. In his more extreme formulations, Marx was just wrong about this. Even the impeccably liberal David Reich, in his recent book, ‘Who We Are and How We Got Here’, knows better than that.  La Griffe du Lion wrote on the Internet about ‘smart fractions’ and the bourgeois economist Garett Jones wrote bravely about differential cognitive capital in ‘Hive Mind’ yet no Marxist economist seems to have noticed. The capitalist mode of production may be constituted by social relationships between people, but those people are not global clones. This has consequences for developmental economics - it’s just false to lazily blame a reified ‘imperialism’.

In conclusion, Michael Roberts has written a solid contemporary defence of Marx’s economic and political thinking. I just wish that he and his colleagues would move beyond a defensive posture and absorb new research into human capabilities, then conceptualise more compelling models of socialism and of how the proletariat might accomplish a successful global transition.