Review: 'Philosophy and revolution': G Pilling, Marx's 'Capital'

PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION

Geoffrey Pilling, Marx's 'Capital': philosophy and political economy, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980, pp212, £10.

Pilling's book is a refreshing change from the usual rubbish presented under similar titles. Its discussion of Marx's method brings out both the strength of the Marxist approach, and the facile character of revisionist criticisms.

acknowledges his debts to Rosdolsky's The making of Marx's 'Capital' and Rubin's Essays on Marx's theory of value. But his work stands on its own as a useful contribution to debates in Marxist theory.

Marx's 'Capital' gives us a systematic treatment of Marx's differences with classical political economy. Pilling shows how Marx rejected not merely the conclusions of the classical theory, but more importantly, he transcended the method which led to these conclusions. For example, whereas Marx worked out how the law of value governed the various of the capitalist economy by phenomena which the law had to operate in a modified form, David Ricardo, the last and greatest of the classical economists, could only refer to a series of 'exceptions' to the law when confronted with reality.

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*Ricardo's false understanding of the relationship between value and price for instance (the transformation of values into prices) arose from the fact that the immediate, day to day expressions of bourgeois production relations (in this case prices) were allowed to stand in the way of his presentation of the law of value.' (p22) Pilling goes beyond the standard criticisms of the classical economists - that their understanding was 'ahistorical' - to examine the crucial philosophical differences with Marxism.

He deals with the shortcomings of empiricism and the relationship between dialectics and formal logic in an admirably lucid manner. At the same time he takes to task the modern day followers of Ricardo and Adam Smith.

In a chapter on the concepts employed by Marx, Pilling brings out how each one - use-value, value, capital and so on - has a definite historical character. Marx derived these concepts from a thorough inquiry into the mass of data available to him. After analysing the different forms of development and tracing their 'inner connection' Marx was able to grasp the laws of motion of capitalism. That is why, a century later, Marx's theory retains such force today.

Pilling does a useful job in explaining the significance of the opening chapters of volume one of Capital which many find so difficult. But the difficulties do not excuse theorists, like Stalinist revisionist Louis Althusser, who consider Marx a Hegelian obscurantist in the chapters on commodities and money. The elementary concepts Marx discussed here are vital for the later analysis which the vulgar commentators fasten upon. As Pilling puts it, Marx reveals throughout the whole of Capital how the contradiction of the commodity form unfolds, intensifies and dominates every aspect of bourgeois society. The contradictions of the commodity are never left behind....This basic contradiction (use-value, value) continually reappears in newer and higher forms which grow out of the lower forms as part of an uninterrupted process. It is through the development of these forms that development in the sphere of economy takes place.' (p137) Marx could never have gone on to develop the concept of labour-power, and hence capital, without his analysis of the commodity contained in chapter one. And the use-value/ value distinction pervades the rest of Capital, in Marx's discussion of productivity, the organic composition of capital, social reproduction, etc. In fact the very aim of the work, to reveal how the specific social form of organising production - capitalism - determines the development of society, would have been impossible without the first Marx's 'Capital' draws out similar points in a chapter on Marx's concept of commodity fetishism. This concept characterised the relations between commodity producers - relations that are not expressed directly, as social relations, but only indirectly through the exchange of their products on the market. Thus social relations between producers are expressed as relations between things: relations determined outside of the control of the producers, but controlled by Pilling demonstrates that Marx follows the law of value. through this basic feature of commodity production in his treatment of the more developed relations of capitalism. As the social power of capital grows, the means of production come to dominate their producers, the working class. In a crisis the resulting oppression of the working class becomes clear. Marxism shows that the overthrow of capitalist social relations is a precondition for overcoming the crisis in the These are the great strengths of Pilling's book, But it does deserve some criticism. Although its aim is to examine the underlying concepts of Marx's Capital, the book would have been strengthened by considering the development of Marx's theory in relation to today's crisis. Pilling himself recognises that Marxists have to go beyond Marx and analyse the development of contemporary capitalism.

But his failure to do this leads to certain theoretical problems An example is the question of 'finance capital', a concept developed by Hilferding and Lenin to denote the "coalescence' of banking and industrial capital in the imperialist epoch. Pilling misuses the term, confusing financial (or banking) capital with finance capital (pp95,185). The latter refers to the relationship between the two functions of capital, not just one-sidedly to the banks. Although Lenin emphasised the control of industry by the banks, it is clear that the development of the credit system has led industrial companies also to perform certain banking operations. This is an important reminder that we need to study capitalist development now to generate the concepts adequate for understanding it. Tony Allen 38

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