Too much focus sometimes falls on the individual position of a moderator, in a way which is just not realistic. If Doug keeps debate moving along here, continues to publish LBO, and continues to authorise reprints of his detailed description of Wall Street, we will still have more than enough reason to thank him.
Marxist debate has to be a process which itself is dialectical. Not in a spirit of judgement therefore, my understanding of Doug's position is as follows. He is among the most conscientious followers of Marx's favourite maxim, "Doubt everything". This often leads to short, somewhat challenging, contributions which ask subscribers to prove the relevance of their contentions.
I do not think the charge of empiricism against "Wall Street" holds up, although it is packed with empirical detail. There are many pertinent references to Marx, and clearly Doug has thought seriously about volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, which many would be marxists do not get round to. Certainly I do not think he is dented at all by his crasser critics, whose criticism he has published on his own home page.
Among Doug's arguments in Wall Street are those of Marx about how certain forms of the development of capitalism lay the basis, in the most general sense, for the socialist future. But not of course without class struggle.
As I read the concluding section of Wall Street Doug's logical position is that a revolution is not imminent and there has to be a struggle for relevant reforms. But Doug tends to hold back about committing himself to the details of those struggles. Nevertheless there is no reason why other subscribers should hold back. I think it is implicit in Doug's approach that there are not simplistic answers and that any reforms are going to have to satisfy the difficult test that they are technically relevant as well as strategically in the interests of working people.
I have not read all the posts under this thread title but I understand Doug to have repeated his view that the marxian analysis of value argues effectively how hidden exploitation occurs under the apparent fair exchanges of capitalism. But he believes that it distorts Marx's method to get into detailed argument involving many figures totalling labour time as if it is identical with exchange value.
I agree with the criticism of reductionist calculations of labour time which get marxism bogged down in whether the "labour theory of value" has been proved or disproved. But I think what Doug and many other aspiring marxists (perhaps that is how we should describe ourselves) miss is the overall systems approach implicit in marxism.
The law of value (not the labour theory of value) presupposes that the total social labour time of a society is related to the total exchange value. There is then conflict about the distribution and reproduction of that total exchange value.
The apparently counter-intuitive narrow marxist definition of productive labour becomes relevant here: namely as labour which produces surplus value. The preceding comment therefore refers by definition only to the total social labour time which produces commodities. This is a subset of the total social life process of any society.
Many of the fluctuations in the struggle between the classes for the distribution of total exchange value, spill over into the non-commodity sphere of total social life process. Often the intensification of labour takes the form or stealing non-commodity producing socially relevant labour from ordinary people, and degrades the social environment just as capitalism degrades the ecological environment by devouring use values without having a system for replenishing them.
My view is therefore that we have to fight for the relevance of marxian categories at the highest level of generalisation - the law of value, dialectical materialism, the statistically inevitable probability of socialism - but that simplistic reductionist applications do not help and may confuse.
Chris Burford
London