Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx | Page 3

political purposes the unselfish
actions might be ignored. Croce insists, and surely with justice, that
economic actions are not moral or immoral, but in so far as they are
economic, non-moral. The moral worth of actions cannot be determined
by their success or failure in giving men satisfaction. For there are
some things in which men find satisfaction which they yet judge to be
bad. We must distinguish therefore the moral question whether such
and such an action is good or bad from the economic whether it is or is
not useful, whether it is a way by which men get what they, rightly or
wrongly want.In economics then we are merely discussing the
efficiency or utility of actions. We can ask of any action whether it
ought or ought not to be done at all. That is a moral question. We may
also ask whether it is done competently or efficiently: that is an
economic question. It might be contended that it is immoral to keep a
public house, but it would also have to be allowed that the discussion of
the most efficient way by keeping a public house was outside the scope
of the moral enquiry. Mrs Weir of Hermiston was confusing economics
with ethics when she answered Lord Braxfield's complaints of his
ill-cooked dinner by saying that the cook was a very pious woman.
Economic action according to Croce is the condition of moral action. If
action has no economic value, it is merely aimless, but it may have
economic value without being moral, and the consideration of
economic value must therefore be independent of ethics.
Marx, Croce holds was an economist and not a moralist, and the moral
judgments of socialists are not and cannot be derived from any
scientific examination of economic processes.
So much for criticisms of Marx or rather of exaggerated developments

of Marxianism, which though just and important, are comparatively
obvious. The most interesting part of Signor Croce's criticism is his
interpretation of the shibboleth of orthodox Marxians and the stumbling
block of economists, the Marxian theory of labour-value with its
corollary of surplus value. Marx's exposition of the doctrine in Das
Kapital is the extreme of abstract reasoning. Yet it is found in a book
full of concrete descriptions of the evils of the factory system and of
moral denunciation and satire. If Marx's theory be taken as an account
of what determines the actual value of concrete things it is obviously
untrue. The very use of the term surplus value is sufficient to show that
it might be and sometimes is taken to be the value which commodities
ought to have, but none can read Marx's arguments and think that he
was concerned with a value which should but did not exist. He is
clearly engaged on a scientific not a Utopian question.
Croce attempts to find a solution by pointing out that the society which
Marx is describing is not this or that actual society, but an ideal, in the
sense of a hypothetical society, capitalist society as such. Marx has
much to say of the development of capitalism in England, but he is not
primarily concerned to give an industrial history of England or of any
other existing society. He is a scientist and deals with abstractions or
types and considers England only in so far as in it the characteristics of
the abstract capitalist society are manifested. The capitalism which he
is analysing does not exist because no society is completely capitalist.
Further it is to be noticed that in his analysis of value Marx is dealing
with objects only in so far as they are commodities produced by labour.
This is evident enough in his argument. The basis of his contention that
all value is 'congealed labour time' is that all things which have
economic value have in common only the fact that labour has been
expended on them, and yet afterwards he admits that there are things in
which no labour has been expended which yet have economic value.
He seems to regard this as an incidental unimportant fact. Yet
obviously it is a contradiction which vitiates his whole argument. If all
things which have economic value have not had labour expended on
them, we must look elsewhere for their common characteristic. We
should probably say that they all have in common the fact that they are
desired and that there is not an unlimited supply of them. The pure

economist finds the key to this analysis of value in the consideration of
the laws of supply and demand, which alone affect all things that have
economic value, and finds little difficulty in refuting Marx's theory, on
the basis which his investigation assumes.
A consideration of Marx's own argument forces us therefore to the
conclusion that