This is Richard Wolff from Democracy at Work, responding to another Ask Prof. Wolff
question from our Patreon community, and this question comes from Brian An.
And Brian asks about the views of Vilfredo Pareto, a leading critic of Karl Marx toward
the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. Pareto is an important
character in the development of modern mainstream economics as well, but Brian's question focuses
on his critique of Marx, and it's a critique that others have also made, so I think it's appropriate
for me to respond. The critique is basically this: That Marx over-simplifies history by
seeing the struggle of classes—proletariat versus capitalists—as somehow more important, dominant,
key, central, essential, whatever word you want, and in the process misses, downplays, undervalues
all of the other kinds of struggles between men and women, between races, religions, ethnicities,
and so on—elites struggling for power, and on and on and on. Life is more complicated,
Pareto wanted to argue. Marx had simply seen a tiny fraction of what was going on, and then
had overstressed it to the detriment of all the other kinds of struggles in which human beings
are engaged. I do reject this criticism. I don't think it's reasonable. I don't think it's fair.
If I were in a harsher mood, I would say that Mr. Pareto had not read the Marx that he is
criticizing, and let me explain why there are basically two fundamental reasons I would reject
this criticism. First, it is simply not the case that Marx thought that the class struggle could be
summarized or was only about workers versus capitalist employers. Volume I of Capital,
his major work which had three volumes, is about that relationship between capitalists and the
workers who produce surplus value for them. But Volumes II and III—and particularly Volume III—are
about other classes. Basically, Marx's argument is that the workers produce a surplus
for the capitalists who employ them, and these are the workers who actually make goods and services.
But the capitalist, in order to make this system work, needs a whole lot of other people who don't,
in fact, produce goods and services. I'm going to give you a few examples.
He needs, for example, in a regular business, a purchasing officer, a purchasing employee.
All that person does is buy the inputs needed for production. That person doesn't produce anything
himself or herself. Likewise, there are sales personnel, people whose job it is to take the
finished product and convert it into money, sell it. But that doesn't produce anything. Likewise,
he needs a secretary to keep records. That's very interesting, very important, in a firm, just as
purchasing and sales are, but it's not production. All of these other groups whose work is necessary,
and you can think of them as creating the conditions which allow the capitalists to
get surplus, to get profits out of those workers who do produce whatever the capitalist sells,
but Marx goes to elaborate lengths to talk about all of those others as classes. Money lenders,
bankers, landlords, sales personnel, purchasing personnel, clerks, guards, all kinds of people
who are not capitalists (they don't hire anybody) and they're not workers who produce goods and
services. It's not what they're there for. They're there to create the conditions. That is all
worked out in great detail in Volume III. Marx is clearly working, as you can see when you read it,
with a theory that divides people not into two classes (capitalist and worker) but into
many classes that are related to capitalists and workers, but are different from them. In short,
it's a complex, rich class analysis. It doesn't conform to the caricature that Pareto offered.
Number two, Marx never said, never argued, nowhere, that the only struggle that goes
on in the world, or the most important struggle, is the struggle between capitalists and workers.
He focused on it—absolutely, he concentrated his attention on it, certainly—but that's not
because it was more important than the others. But it was because it had not
been understood. It had not been appreciated. Struggles over power, struggles over gender,
struggles over race, struggles over wealth are different from the struggle between the producer
of a surplus and the appropriator of a surplus. Marx's work was to teach us,
to persuade us, that what had been neglected, overlooked, inadequately or insufficiently
appreciated (the Capital–Labor struggle) was brought into the conversation, into our efforts,
to understand society, because it would be crucial to change the way we organize the production and
distribution of surplus, if we were ever going to get the liberty, the equality, the democracy
that Marx and so many of his critics wanted. And he thought he was contributing a new additional
insight, not some claim that what he was focusing on was any more important than what others had
already figured out. This is Richard Wolff from Democracy at Work thanking our Patreon community.