Economic Thought – Page 2 – Undergraduate Economist

Frank Ramsey and the Rate of Interest

I first came across Frank Ramsey in the preface to Piero Sraffa’s classic Production of Commodities by the Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory (1960). My recent interest in Ramsey is primarily motivated by the following news. Cheryl Misak, a philosopher based at the University of Toronto has recently completed a biography of Ramsey. This blog post provides an introduction to Ramsey’s life and his contribution to the growth theory literature. [It was reassuring to notice that I first blogged about History of Economic Thought (HET) explicitly more than 10 years ago.]

Ramsey was born in 1903. In the year 1920, he read around 45 books, which included Karl Marx’s Capital, Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb’s The History of Trade Unionism, J. A. Hobson’s The Industrial System, J. S. MiIl, and Alfred Marshall’s Industry and Trade. At the age of 19, he was commissioned to review Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), a significant treatise in philosophy, for the journal Mind; the review was published in 1923. Subsequently, he was commissioned to translate Wittgenstein’s work into English. In Wittgenstein’s later work, Philosophical Investigations, there is an explicit acknowledgement of Ramsey. He was acknowledged for his critique/interventions of Bertrand Russell’s and Alfred Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica in a new introduction by the authors. Sraffa, in his PCMC, had acknowledged Ramsey for mathematical help. In 1929-30, Ramsey met with J. M. Keynes, Sraffa, and Wittgenstein to discuss the theory of probability advanced by Keynes and Ramsey and also to discuss Freidrich Hayek’s theory of business cycles. Ramsey also had a close engagement with AC Pigou, a leading marginalist economist who was also the target of criticism in Keynes’s General Theory. Ramsey died in 1930.’

Under the patronage of Keynes, who was the editor of the’ Economic Journal, Ramsey published in it articles on the ‘theory of taxation’ (1927) and the ‘theory of saving’ (1928). In my 2019 article which critically evaluated the Nobel contributions of Paul Romer and Nordhaus, I had highlighted that Nordhaus employs a marginalist growth model drawing from Ramsey (without further comment). Ramsey’s question was the following: how much should a nation save today for future consumption tomorrow so as to maximise consumption across generations’ Nordhaus employs the optimal growth model with environmental protection as an important constraint. And, the rate of interest is seen as a price which equilibrates the society’s time preference. In other words, the rate of interest equilibrates the society’s preference for the future with that of the present. The policy implication when marginalist economists have a significant say in practical matters is as follows. Since the (actual) rate of interest captures the time preference of the society, this rate can be used to decide how much of current gross domestic product (GDP) should be devoted to environmental protection. In effect, not enough resources are being allocated to mitigate climate change and undertake environmental protection.’

Ramsey’s optimal growth theory also underlies Thomas Piketty’s position on economic growth. In his 2015 article in the American Economic Review, he writes that in the standard model ‘where each individual behaves as an infinitely lived family, the steady-state rate of return is well known to be given by the modified ‘golden rule’ r = ‘ + ‘ g (where ‘ is the rate of time preference and ‘ is the curvature of the utility function)’ (p. 2). The reciprocal of ‘ is the intertemporal elasticity of substitution which captures how much the representative family wishes to smoothen consumption over time. He uses this to point out that in general (marginalist) economic theory, we arrive at the r>g result–the focal argument in his book Capital in the Twenty First Century (2015; for a critical assessment see Thomas 2017). Furthermore, ‘in steady-state each family only needs to reinvest a fraction g/r of its capital income in order to ensure that its capital stock will grow at the same rate g as the size of the economy, and the family can then consume a fraction 1 ‘ g/r‘ (p. 3). To a marginalist (or neoclassical) economist, as Joseph Stiglitz wrote in an article in 1974, ‘interest rates are just intertemporal prices’ (p. 901).’

Therefore, for both Nordhaus and Piketty, interest rates are ‘intertemporal prices’ which allocate today’s income between today’s consumption and tomorrow’s consumption (today’s saving). As Ramsey (1928) writes, ‘The more we save the sooner we shall reach bliss, but the less enjoyment we shall have now, and we have to set the one against the other’ (p. 545). It is also interesting to note that their use of optimal growth models yields vastly different policy suggestions. While Nordhaus is conservative in his proposals for environmental protection, Piketty is progressive in his proposals to tax wealth.’

The rate of interest in Ramsey, as in Alfred Marshall, is a reward for waiting. Therefore, inequality in Ramsey necessarily arises from the heterogeneity of tastes or preferences; if a family is (relatively) more patient, it saves more than the (relatively) impatient one, and ends up owning all the capital stock (Attanasio 2015). How does this conception differ from the notions of interest rate found in Marx and Keynes’ For Marx, the rate of interest is the part of surplus value which is expropriated by the financial capitalist; the source of it is from the value added by labour. Keynes views the rate of interest as an expression of the preference for liquidity. To conclude, is the conception of the rate of interest found in Ramsey satisfactory for understanding a competitive economy’

REFERENCES

Attanasio, Orazio P.’ (2015), ‘Frank Ramsey’s Mathematical Theory of Saving’, The Economic Journal, 125 (March), pp. 269’294. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12229

Duarte, Pedro (2017), ‘Frank Ramsey’, In: Robert Cord (ed.) The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 2, pp. 649’671.

Monk, Ray (1990), Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, London: Vintage Books.’

Stiglitz, Joseph E. (1974), ‘The Cambridge-Cambridge Controversy in the Theory of Capital; A View from New Haven: A Review Article,’ Journal of Political Economy, vol. 82, no. 4, pp.’ 893‘903.

Further reading

Collard, David (2011), ‘Ramsey, saving and the generations’, Generations of Economists, London: Routledge.’

[Most of the contents of this post was informally discussed with my Economics colleagues at Azim Premji University on 19th February 2020.]

A Case for Pluralism in ‘Microeconomics’

[My return to blogging is motivated by the extremely warm response I’ve received in person – in the last 6 months – from several people who have been readers of this blog. I’m also happy to announce the publication of my co-edited book on the history of economic thought.]

The subject matter of microeconomics is enshrined in the economics curriculum at all levels – school, undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral. The central objective of microeconomic theory is to provide a solution for equilibrium price and quantity in both the commodity (say, apples or coconuts) and factor (wage and ‘capital’) markets. Indeed, questions of what is the source of value and what is the exchange value of two commodities have been posed much earlier. You can find answers in Kautilya, Aquinas, Petty, and Cantillon – all of them writing prior to Adam Smith’s foundational treatise on political economy.

Kautilya’s Arthashastra contains discussions of a fair price. Aquinas, drawing inspiration from Aristotle and Christianity, tries to arrive at the notion of a just price. One of the founders of political economy, William Petty, derives the distinction between necessary price and political price and possesses a rudimentary labour theory of value. Following Petty, Cantillon distinguishes between ‘intrinsic value’ and ‘market price’ based on a land-cum-labour theory of value. The contributions of Smith, Ricardo, Marx, and Sraffa to value theory follow this tradition of objectively determining value.

The dominant theory of value in contemporary economics is not the objective theories of value found in Ricardo, Marx, or Sraffa but the subjective theories of value whose pioneers are Jeremy Bentham, William Stanley Jevons (whose son taught at Allahabad University), Alfred Marshall, AC Pigou, and Paul Samuelson. The value theory (or microeconomic theory, as it is now called more fashionably) found in the textbooks of Hal Varian or Gregory Mankiw take the following as data when solving for equilibrium prices and quantity: (i) preferences, (ii) technology, and (iii) endowments. On the other hand, Piero Sraffa’s value theory, found in his Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960), takes the following as given when arriving at a solution for prices and one distributive variable: (i) size and composition of output, (ii) technology, (iii) the real wage or rate of profit.

How do you measure the data listed above’ While technology, endowments, and real wage can be measured in terms of the commodity-mix, the rate of profit is a pure number. However, how are preferences measured (or ordered)’ They are measured in a subjective manner. This is one of the core differences between the dominant marginalist theory of value and the Classical/Sraffian objective theory of value. Given this core difference, it is incorrect to treat the objective theory of value found in Ricardo or Marx as a precursor or rudimentary version of modern subjective theory of value. And therefore, it is important that students of economics learn about different value theories in microeconomics.

I shall end by drawing your attention to the practical implications of believing in the marginalist conception of the labour market vis-a-vis that of the classical economists (see an earlier post on wages). Under conditions of perfect competition, the equilibrium real wage is determined by the marginal product of labour. Any intervention, such as a minimum wage legislation or collective bargaining by the workers, results in imperfections and consequently leads to unemployment. However, in classical economics, real wage is exogenously determined though historical and social factors. If you believe in the marginalist conception, the logical policy recommendation is to eliminate any intervention/imperfection (such as minimum wage legislation or collective wage bargaining) whereas if you believe in the classical conception, you would treat collective wage bargaining and minimum legislation as legitimate ways of improving workers’ conditions.

This post argues that value theory matters for both contemporary politics and policy. And consequently, the teaching of microeconomics needs to become pluralistic. Moreover, as pointed out earlier, the politics of microeconomics ought to be made explicit. It is, as Keynes, said that we are the ‘usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

150th Anniversary of Capital: Reading Wage-Labour and Capital (Part II)

This post is second in the two-part commemoration of Capital‘s 150^th anniversary (last year); part I was a commentary on Francis Wheen’s biography of Capital and Part II undertakes a critical engagement with Wage-Labour and Capital (available freely at Marxists.org), which were originally lectures, and later published as a set of articles in 1849 in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (which roughly translates into the ‘New Rhenish Newspaper’). Marx had delivered the lectures at the German Working Men’s Club of Brussels in 1847, a year before the publication of the Communist Manifesto and twenty years before the publication of Das Kapital.

Wage-Labour and Capital is made up of 9 short chapters, with the largest chapter containing 5 pages, and a total of 48 pages. In the introduction, F. Engels provides his reasons for altering the original text of Marx, and writes ‘this pamphlet is not as Marx wrote it in 1849, but approximately as Marx would have written it in 1891’ (p. 6). To assess the merits of Engel’s editorial intervention, one needs to compare it with Marx’s original. Marx intended his writings to be understood by the workers and therefore they do not ‘presuppose a knowledge of even the most elementary notions of political economy’ (p. 16).

In capitalism, according to Marx, ‘it appears that the capitalist buys their labour with money, and that for money they sell him their labour. But this is merely an illusion. What they actually sell to the capitalist for money is their labour-power’ (p. 17). Therefore, labour-power ‘is a commodity, no more, no less so than is the sugar. The first is measured by the clock, the other by the scales’ (p. 17). And wages is the ‘special name for the price of labour-power’, a ‘peculiar commodity’. The wage-workers, who owns labour-power, does not really have a choice in deciding whether to sell it to the capitalist or not, but is forced to ‘in order to live’ (p. 19). While it appears that the worker has a choice, in essence, she does not (this idea can help transform the dominant labour-leisure trade-off story). Then Marx points out that this feature ‘ the idea of free labour ‘ is particular to capitalism, and not found in slave or feudal societies. While the worker owns labour-power, the capitalist owns ‘raw materials, tools, and means of life’ (p. 20). The following description of work (and life) deserves to be quoted in full.

‘Life for him begins where this activity [work] ceases, at the table, at the tavern, in bed. The 12 hours’ work, on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving, spinning, boring, and so on, but only as earnings, which enable him to sit down at a table, to take his seat in the tavern, and to lie down in a bed.’ (p. 19)

Subsequently, Marx discusses the determination of commodity prices, which contains an account of competition. The latter is studied in three parts: ‘among the sellers’, ‘among the buyers’, and ‘between the buyers and the sellers’ (p. 21). It is this competition which seeks the highest ‘customary profits’ among the different sectors, and this constant ‘immigration’ (p. 23) tends to equalise the rate of profits across sectors. This force of competition also tends to bring the actual price of a commodity close to its ‘cost of production’ (p. 24). The ‘fluctuations’ occasioned by competition is not an ‘accident’ or exception but the ‘law’ contrary to the accounts of the ‘bourgeois economists’ (p. 24). Thus, ‘In the totality of this disorderly movement is to be found its order’ (p. 24).

Wages are regulated by the cost of production of labour-power, which ‘is the cost required for the maintenance of the labourer as a labourer, and for his education and training as a labourer’ (p. 26). In other words, it is ‘the cost of the existence and propagation of the worker’ (p. 27). Here, Marx is referring to the wages for the entire class of workers and not of an individual worker because ‘millions of workers, do not receive enough to be able to exist and to propagate themselves’ (p. 27).

Most economists define capital as produced means of production, and this is the starting point of their analysis. But Marx pushes the starting point further and rightly labels capital as ‘accumulated labour’, as the raw materials, instruments, and machines were also created by labour. Capital is also a ‘social relation of production’ (p. 29). As noted earlier, the existence of wage labour is a characteristic of capitalism where workers are forced to sell their labour power to the capitalist in order to live. And as Marx writes, ‘The existence of a class which possesses nothing but the ability to work is a necessary presupposition of capital’ (p. 30). Furthermore, capital, or accumulated labour dominates living labour.

Mainstream (marginalist) economics is built on the marginal productivity theory of distribution which states that under conditions of perfect competition, in equilibrium, workers are paid the marginal product of capital and capitalists get the marginal product of capital ‘ a harmonious explanation of income distribution. In contrast, Marx argues that wages are profit are inversely related pointing to the fundamental conflict characterising income distribution in a capitalist society (p. 37). In the same chapter (VII), Marx outlines two major routes through which profits increase: (1) increase in aggregate demand and (2) technological improvements (see an earlier post on the link between demand, profits, and employment). In the following chapter, Marx reiterates the distributional conflict: ‘the interests of capitals and the interests of wage-labour are diametrically opposed to each other’ (p. 39). And ‘If capital grows rapidly, wages may rise, but the profit of capital rises disproportionately faster. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social chasm that separates him from the capitalist has widened’ (p. 40). This underscores the social nature of economic relations, an aspect which marginalist economics has eschewed with its assumption of the independence of individual preferences.

The following remark about economists by Marx is appropriate for our current times: ‘The economists tell us, to be sure, that those labourers who have been rendered superfluous by machinery find new venues of employment’ (p. 45). I shall end this post by quoting Marx on capitalist accumulation, crises, and exploitation of markets, since it continues to remain relevant today.

”capitalists are compelled ‘ to exploit the already existing gigantic means of production on an ever-increasing scale, and for this purpose to set in motion all the mainsprings of credit, in the same measure do they increase the industrial earthquakes, in the midst of which the commercial world can preserve itself only by sacrificing a portion of its wealth, its products, and even its forces of production, to the gods of the lower world ‘ in short, the crises increase. They become more frequent and more violent, if for no other reason, than for this alone, that in the same measure in which the mass of products grows, and therefore the needs for extensive markets, in the same measure does the world market shrink ever more, and ever fewer markets remain to be exploited, since every previous crisis has subjected to the commerce of the world a hitherto unconquered or but superficially exploited market’ (pp. 47-8)

150th Anniversary of Capital: Reading Francis Wheen’s Biography of Capital (Part I)

Although I had read the three volumes of Capital, three parts of Theories of Surplus-Value, and Grundrisse over the course of my PhD research, all of them merit rereading and I ought to read Marx’s other works. Hence, given that 2017 marks the 150^th anniversary of Capital, Volume 1 (first published in 1867), I decided to commemorate it by reading a work of Marx I hadn’t read ‘ Wage-Labour and Capital ‘ and a short biography of Capital by Francis Wheen (2006). I shall present my commentary in two parts as it is too lengthy for one post. Part I is a commentary on Wheen 2006, and part II is on Wage-Labour and Capital.

Despite writing about Steuart, Smith, Ricardo, Sismondi, Malthus, Keynes, Sraffa, Krishna Bharadwaj and many others in several posts, I have dealt with Marx’s ideas exclusively only in one: ‘Is Marx (Ir)relevant’‘. In the next year, I hope to write more on Marx’s economics.‘

Wheen’s biography of Capital is just about 125 pages. Marx’s Das Capital: A Biography is a three chaptered book dealing with the gestation, birth, and afterlife of Das Capital.

Marx, the studious worker’

According to Wheen, ‘Marx’s character was a curious hybrid of ferocious self-confidence and anguished self-doubt’ (p. 3).’ It was ‘only after many years of spadework in philosophy and literature’ that Marx turned to the study of political economy (p. 7). At the age of seventeen, Marx precociously wrote in a schoolboy essay: ‘Our relations in society have to some extent already begun to be established before we are in a position to determine them’ (p. 8). [Wheen’s excerpts from Marx which I quote are in ‘double quotes’ and those by Wheen are in ‘single quotes’.]

The reader gets to appreciate Marx’s style of studying from Wheen’s scattered references across the book. Marx had the habit of noting down extracts from all the books he read while at the university. And he read widely. As Wheen writes, ‘This is the same eclectic, omnivorous and often tangential style of research which gave Das Capital its extraordinary breadth of reference’ (pp. 10-11). His use of dialectic is influenced by his early study of Hegel’s (1770’1831) ‘pursuit of contradictions’. He had taken the idea that ‘people create the constitution’ from Ludwig Feuerbach (1804’1872), the German philosopher; Feuerbach had argued that ‘thought arises from being, and not being from thought’ (p. 13). Therefore, humans have to assert themselves as subjects and not as mere objects of capitalism. And to thoroughly engage with the land question, Marx thought it ‘essential to study Russian land-owning relationships from primary sources’ (p. 37). Marx’s data sources included ‘newspapers, parliamentary commissions, factory inspectors and copies of Hansard’ (p. 51); Hansard contains ‘edited verbatim report of proceedings of both the House of Commons and the House of Lords’. Marx’s data on child labourers were taken from English match factory records. [On the importance of using a wider set of data, see English for Economists: Sowvendra’s ‘The Adivasi Will Not Dance’.]

Already well versed in German Philosophy and French politics, Marx set out to educate himself in British economics. As he went along, he kept taking copious notes. These notes, which formed the early rough draft of Das Capital, are commonly known as the Paris manuscripts, published as Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (available for under Rs. 200 from Aakar Books and freely available at Marxists.org).

Marx worked extremely hard. He spent most of 1850-1 in the British Museum reading past issues of The Economist and books on economics. He sat in the Museum’s reading room from 9 AM to 7 PM. In the winter of 1857-8, he used to sit in his study until about 4 AM. When he realised that his ‘rudimentary arithmetic’ would prove inadequate in his economic studies, he undertook a ‘quick revision course in algebra’ (p. 27). Marx felt that his study of algebra was necessary ‘for the benefit of the public’. His ‘nocturnal scribblings’, as Wheen describes them, running to more than 800 pages were published in German in 1953 entitled Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie (popularly known today as simply Grundrisse). And the notes he took in 1862 and 1863 filled more than 1500 pages (p. 32); this was posthumously published as Theories of Surplus-value.

Marx’s intellectual corpus in political economy’

Here is a succinct timeline of Marx’s key works in political economy. At the same time, this is also a timeline of how Marx’s thinking evolved to culminate in Capital.

1844: Paris Manuscripts/Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 {notes; posthumously published}

1847: Wage-Labour and Capital {lectures; published as a set of articles in 1849}

1848: Communist Manifesto (political pamphlet; with Engels)

1857-8: Grundrisse {notes; posthumously published}

1859: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy {Marx’s first book}

1862-3: Theories of Surplus-Value {notes; posthumously published}

1865: Value, Price and Profit {speech; posthumously published}

1867: Capital, vol. 1 {Marx’s second book} (second edition in 1873)

The first manuscript in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 begins with the following sentences: ‘Wages are determined by the fierce struggle between capitalist and worker. The capitalist inevitable wins. The capitalist can live longer without the worker than the worker can without him’ (p. 14). This struggle is also found in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. In capitalism, Marx writes that, productivity rises by transforming the worker’s ‘lifetime into working time, and ‘ [by dragging] his wife and child beneath the juggernaut of capital’ (p. 15).

Marx’s ‘first small book’ is A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. It was first published in 1859 (in German). [I took the phrase ‘the first small book’ from Maurice Dobb’s introduction to the 1979 English translation brought out by Progress Publishers.] Marx had earlier intended to call Das Capital ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Volume II’ (p. 33). It was Engels who compiled, edited, and published volumes II and III of Capital in 1885 and 1905 respectively; see Regina Roth‘s work which argues that these interventions were often significant. The Theories of Surplus-Value, sometimes called volume IV of Capital, was published by Karl Kautsky in 1905.

‘Capital: key ideas

In capitalism, commodity carries a specific meaning. Even today, a commodity, at the first sight, appears to be a ‘trivial thing’ (p. 42). Fetishism is the ‘belief that commodities have some mystical intrinsic value’ (p. 43). Instead, the value of commodities, for Marx, owes to the value labour provides. The wages of the workers are determined by subsistence wages, a social and cultural variable unlike in neoclassical (more accurately, marginalist) economics where it is determined by the marginal product of labour (and is a labour clearing wage, that is, there is full employment of labour). Subsistence wages includes ‘education and training’ (p. 49). As Wheen writes, ‘Marx has no illusions about the supposedly sacred symmetry of the law of supply and demand’ (p. 55) which is central to marginalist economics. Indeed, as Wheen notes, ‘The only difference from previous epochs is the guile with which the robbery is concealed from the victims’ (p. 50).

The relation between technological progress and better living standards or higher wages is not as straightforward as in the marginalist growth models of Solow and Romer. In contrast to these models, Marx concludes that greater the productivity, greater is the labour unemployment (p. 56). Thus, Marx writes, ‘It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse’ (p. 57). For Marx, poverty ‘is about the crushing of the human spirit’ (p. 58). In an article published in the New York Review of Books, Jeff Madrick observes: ‘people of all racial and ethnic groups are losing confidence in the core American principle that hard work is a means to upward mobility.’ And as Wheen notes, ‘The average British employee now puts in 80,224 hours over his or her working life, as against 69,000 hours in 1981. ‘ many people have no time for anything beyond labour and sleep’ (p. 59). The effects of technological progress or rising productivity has been very uneven.

What causes crises in capitalism’ According to Marx, ‘The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses’ relative to private investment (p. 61). This key idea resurfaced with vigour in the twentieth century in the seminal works of Michal Kalecki and John Maynard Keynes.

Capital‘s afterlife’

In the Preface to Capital, Marx writes, ‘I assume, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself’ (pp. 82-3). Undoubtedly, since its first publication, Capital has enabled many individuals to know the capitalist order better. George Bernard Shaw articulates this view clearly: ‘Das Kapital achieved the greatest feat of which a book is capable ‘ that of changing the minds of the people who read it’ (p. 90). However, the initial reception to its publication was ‘muted’. Wheen thinks that it was ‘sheer incomprehension’ and not ‘political enmity’ which explains the ‘muted reaction’ to the publication of Capital.

As Sir John MacDonnell wrote in the Fortnightly Review (March 1875): ‘People may do him the honour of abusing him; read him they do not! (p. 87). Resorting to an ‘authority’ for support without proper reasoning is always troubling. Wheen notes how during the 1917 Russian revolution, the ‘architects ‘ all cited Marx, and Das Kapital in particular, as the divine authority for the correctness of their views’ (p. 98).

Unfortunately, mainstream economics still views income distribution as a harmonious process. That income distribution is a process characterised by conflict and power relations has been ignored, and perhaps even intentionally supressed. These ideas continue to be studied and researched by ‘heterodox’ economists working in the Classical, Marxian, and Keynesian traditions. And one must not confuse ‘new political economy’ with the political economy found in the works of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx. It is interesting to note that before the 2007 Global Financial Crisis, economists looked down upon ‘political economy’ but after the crisis, the number of mainstream economists who started doing ‘political economy’ rapidly increased.

Conclusion

Marx’s Capital remains one of the most insightful studies on capitalism. With all the strides in technological progress with respect to global value chains, transnational corporations, industry automation, etc., reading Marx’s Capital enables the reader to see the cells of the capitalist order ‘ impoverished workers.

Let me end this post with Marx’s favourite motto (p. 101): ‘de omnibus dubitandum’ (‘everything should be doubted’).

I acknowledge Prasanth Radhakrishnan for his helpful comments.’