‘Rigmarole’ or ‘Method’?

The persistence of a ‘certain Hegelian phraseology’ in the discourse of Marx’s Capital has been much remarked upon. For professional economists of what we could call a broadly neoclassical inspiration, it has been a source of constant annoyance, a ‘metaphysical’ residue worthy only of ridicule and contempt, at best an irrelevance and at worst an obstacle to serious scientific inquiry. The special target of abuse for Marx’s critics among the economists has been his theory of value, as developed at the very outset of the first volume of Capital. Even if other aspects of Marx’s economics deserved (at least ostensibly) more studied consideration, the attitude toward his value-theory has been one of simple dismissal, and such lack of engagement could always be justified by summarizing everything which the critics found most distasteful and inaccessible about the theory under the epithet of ‘Hegelianism’. In more recent times, self-styled ‘analytical Marxists’ - who are, much like the aspiring Romanian entrepreneur I met not long ago, Marxist ‘dans leurs coeurs’, but stridently neoclassical in their theoretical practice and indeed openly anf/-Marxist in their estimations of most everything usually associated with Marx - have followed the same sort of procedure in claiming to have developed a ‘Marxian theory of exploitation’ on the basis of the postulates of general equilibrium analysis: hence a ‘Marxian theory of exploitation’ which has been ‘liberated’ from the Marxian theory of value.