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Marx's Radical Critique of Capitalist Society

N. Scott Arnold New York: Oxford University
Press, 1990, xi + 334 pp., \$49.00

John McMurtry

Dialogue / Volume 32 / Issue 02 / March 1993, pp 409 - 411

DOI: 10.1017/S001221730001458X, Published online: 13 April 2010

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John McMurtry (1993). Dialogue, 32, pp 409-411 doi:10.1017/
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 Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 409

Press, 1984; A. H. Coxon, The Fragments of Parmenides, ed. critique avec introd., trad.,
temoignages anciens et comment. (Phronesis, suppl. Ill), Assen, Van Gorcum, 1986;
P. Aubenque, dir., Etudes sur Parmenide, texte, trad., essai critique par Denis O'Brien
en collaboration avec J. Frere pour la trad, franchise (Bibliotheque d'histoire de la philo-
sophie), Paris, Vrin, 1987, t. I, 324 p.; tome II, 378 p.; G. Messina, Index Parmenideus,
Genes, Bozzi Editore, 1987.
2 K. Reinhardt, Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie, Francfort,
Klostermann, 1916; G. E. L. Owen, «Eleatic Questions», Classical Quarteley, vol. 10
(1960), p. 84-102, reedite dans R. E. Allen et D. J. Furley, dir., Studies in Presocratic
Philosophy, vol. 2, Londres, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, p. 48-81.
3 J. Frere, «Parmenide penseur du Cosmos», Deucalion, vol. 33-34 (1981), p. 77-86.
4 E. Panofsky, Essai d'iconologie, Paris, Gallimard, 1968; L'ceuvre d'art et ses significa-
tions, Paris, Gallimard, 1969.

WON LAFRANCE Universite d'Ottawa

Marx's Radical Critique of Capitalist Society

N. SCOTT ARNOLD
New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, xi + 334 pp., $49.00

On the whole, this is a good anti-Marx book, one of the better attempts at analytic
demolition since H. B. Acton's The Illusion of the Epoch. The author admits from
the outset his "truly malevolent feelings towards Marx" (p. xi). He then proceeds
in the syllogistic fashion, so influentially set in motion by G. A. Cohen's Karl
Marx's Theory of History: A Defense, to argue the irremediable gaps in reasoning
of Marx's "radical critique of capitalist society."

1.
Professor Arnold begins with what becomes the basic framework of judgment for
the rest of his book—the four "necessary conditions" which he claims a "success-
ful radical critique of a society must satisfy." These necessary conditions are
stated most succinctly near the beginning of Chapter 1 (pp. 5-6). (1) The theory
must identify "widespread and pervasive social ills or injustices characteristic of
the society in question" (the Critical Explanations Requirement). (2) It must pro-
pose "a normative theory" to explain the grounds of these negative judgments
(the Normative Theory Requirement). (3) It must "specify a set of alternative so-
cial institutions" (the Alternative Institutions Requirement). (4) It must provide a
"plausible story [of] . .. how existing institutions can be or will be destroyed or set
on a course of fundamental change" (the Transition Requirement).
Before considering Arnold's case against Marx, we need to ask whether these
requirements that Arnold claims any "radical critique" must fulfil do not play
against Marx with a stacked deck. I cannot think of any theorist who comes close
to satisfying all four. Arnold seems to have ruled out the possibility of any radical
critique succeeding by the demands he specifies it must fulfil. Think, for example,
of Rousseau, the American revolutionary thinkers, the anarchists since the Peasant
Rebellions, the Frankfurt School or any other theory or theory group which not
only successfully identifies pervasive ills of a social order, but also the normative
410 Dialogue

theory which grounds its judgments, the alternative institutions which will ensure
social betterment and the historical course through which this entire transition will
come about. This all seems to demand an impossible omniscience of a theory, and
to preclude in advance the plausibility of any radical critique of any established or-
der whatever. This may be Arnold's unstated purpose. It is not an unfamiliar one in
the history of philosophy.

2.
The overall argument of the book consists of two basic moments for assessing the
fulfilment of each of these four requirements—exposition of what Arnold claims
Marx's position is, followed by reasons why he thinks it does not hold up to criti-
cal scrutiny. In the case of Arnold's expositions, he tends to let recent English-
speaking analytic views of Marx speak for Marx, even when these views are not
argued by Marx (e.g., John Roemer's position that Marx's theory of exploitation is
to be understood by assessing whether workers or capitalists would be better or
worse off without each other). In the case of Arnold's criticisms, they are more in
the style of flagging gaps in Marx's argument and then moving on, without the
deep refutation that might put to rest Marx's critique of capitalist society
The first five chapters of Arnold's critical reconstruction examine two well-
known concepts of Marx's theory (pp. 30-134): alienation (what Marx means by it,
specifically alienation from one's products, activity, species-being and fellow hu-
mans), and exploitation (why economist Bohm-Bawerk's nineteenth-century ob-
jections to Marx's labour theory of value are right, why Marx's surplus-value the-
ory is wrong and how the capitalist makes a contribution to production). Four of
the five of these chapters are on the issue of exploitation. Arnold's next and re-
maining five chapters are on Marx's underdeveloped concept of a future post-capi-
talist society. He is surely right in arguing that there are immense gaps here, and he
exposes a number of them well. Two of his chapters set out central features of
Phases 1 and 2 of Marx's projected communist society, Marx's commitment to
central planning and rejection of the money-driven market, and his ideal of a non-
alienated and non-exploitative "good society."
Part II, entitled "Critique" (the final three chapters), argues that both the first
and second phases of Marx's communist vision are "unrealizable," and discusses
"The Market Socialist Alternative." While Arnold clearly rejects Marx's criti-
cisms of capitalism and his proposed alternatives, he seems unwittingly to reaffirm
Marx's all-or-nothing disjunctions between the market or central planning (p. 152)
and competition or no competition (p. 162). It may be that Marx's absolutist di-
chotomies here comprise the ultimate basic flaw of his theory of human and social
development. For we know now that the world's most successful economies—for
example, Scandinavia's, Germany's and Japan's—are variously mixed economies
of market and planning elements; and we should know that competition admits of
non-antagonistic as well as antagonistic forms (e.g., competition for cleaner pro-
duction processes as well as competition for private profits). But Marx's all-or-
nothing choice grid is presupposed by Arnold and the pro-capitalist theorists he ad-
mires, such as Friedrich Hayek, with the good-bad positions reversed. It is ironic
that Marx and his most hostile critics share the same dogmatic commitment to
these simplistic either-or concepts of historical possibility.
 Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 411

3.
Overall, the most sustained argument which Arnold pursues is on the issue of ex-
ploitation (pp. 61-134). In general, it assumes—as does the whole of this work, and
as do virtually all currently fashionable English-speaking analytic works on
Marx—that a social theory is to be evaluated in terms of its linear argument, its
identified string of premisses and inferences. The value a theory possesses by its
unifying overview, its polyvalent meanings, its pathways of new perspective are all
missed by this approach. It loses the forest for the trees, so to speak. By focussing
on the isolated, constitutive particulars of this or that perceived sequence of
premisses and inferences on this or that abstracted issue, such a method dissects
the heart out of the more fully evolved and interdependent totality. Syllogistic
analysis may be invaluably clarifying, but it may also leave in its wake only a
univocal parody of its subject, a strew of broken pieces. It is difficult to see how
continental philosophies such Hegel's, Nietzsche's or Marx's can be adequately
comprehended in this way.
Methodological presumption aside, Arnold's particular sequence of argument on
Marx's theory of exploitation suffers from a series of reductive and misleading
moves. Marx's idea of exploitation is immediately reduced to the narrow base of
Capital's, labour theory of value (in which case the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts can have no idea of exploitation, since they do not contain this the-
ory!). Then, without references, it is stated that in Capital Marx holds (which he
explicitly does not) ' 'that the more labour-intensive an industry is . . . the more
surplus value it should produce" (p. 72). Next it is argued that since the labour the-
ory of value fails, the theory of surplus-value extraction from labour fails (p. 91),
and therefore Marx's claim of exploitation of workers by capital fails (p. 95). Yet
the unmentioned but obtrusive problem remains of why an owner of capital can get
money profit for doing absolutely nothing but letting his owned capital be invested
for him by others. This Arnold explains eventually by his own theory of "the time
preference theory of interest" (pp. 102ff). The essential argument here is that
since people prefer present goods to future goods, and since the capitalist foregoes
present consumption of his capital, the capitalist contributes "time" (p. 106). This
may seem to be a reiteration of the theory of Marx's contemporary, Nassau Senior,
who argued that the capitalist contributed "abstinence." But Arnold says here
specifically: "what the capitalist contributes is neither sacrifice nor abstinence: it is
time. That is what is valuable. . . . Time is both valuable and scarce; that is why it
has exchange value" (p. 106). Arnold, however, does not explain why, if it is in-
deed time that is valuable, and if the capitalist need give none of his own time to
profit, he—and not the workers or society—still gets for himself the rewards of
time he himself has not given.
In his Afterword to the second German edition of Capital, Marx writes of "the
bad conscience and evil intent of apologetic." While Arnold's argument does give
definite signs of this referent, there is also a conscientious, analytic concern in this
book's overall grappling with some of Marx's basic challenges to the capitalist
system's assigning and using human wealth and resources.

JOHNMcMURTRY University of Guelph