Gary Herrigel discusses Karl Marx's Capital and its continuing relevance and theoretical limitations. Some key points of continuing relevance include Marx being the first modern social theorist and developing theories of class, economic crisis, exploitation, and historical transformation. However, Marx had some theoretical problems, such as the transformation problem between value and price and issues with the theory of the division of labor. Herrigel also discusses problems with Marx's views on specialization, hierarchy and power in production, the developmental dynamic of concentration and centralization of capital, and Marxism's narrow conception of social transformation. As an alternative, Herrigel discusses the perspective of pragmatism, which rejects Marxism's aim for a complete theory and emphasizes contingency, error, learning,

2. Marx’s Capital.
Thoughts on its continuing relevance
and the theoretical consequences of its
limitations
Gary Herrigel
Department of Political Science

3. Karl Marx & Me
• Not a Marx Scholar
Student of modern industry and the division of labor
Not an economist, but have written several books on industrial
development and change in advanced industrial political economies.
• Marx is an inescapable figure for me
Marx a founding figure in modern social and economic thought
Teach Marx regularly in a year long core course on the emergence of
modern liberal thought (and its critics)
• Is it a useable view? What is still useable?
• Marx as a Hegelian and the problem with that.
Pragmatism as one reaction on the left to the theoretical limits
of Marxian social theory
Department of Political Science

4. Continuing Relevance of Marx
• First Modern Social Theorist
No Marx, no Weber or Durkheim, no Veblen or Parsons
Historical, Material and Institutional theory of social development
Wholistic theory: Integration of economic, cultural, social and
political processes
Pioneer of class analysis and of the notion of social class
Systematic arguments about the relationship between law and
exchange
• Crucial on-going influence on Modern Economic Thought
Theory of mechanization/automation
Theory of innovation and historical change (Schumpeter)
Theory of crisis and instability
Endogenous dynamics of overproduction and profit squeezes
(OCC)
Department of Political Science

5. Continuing Relevance of Marx
• Theory of exploitation
Commodity form, absolute & relative surplus value
Critique of the idea of equal exchange
Characterization of work, production and firm governance as power relations
and sites of struggle (modification of Smithian view)
• Theory of Reification/Fetishism
Highlighting the social construction of objects & institutions
Lukacs, Simmel, Bourdieu etc
• Theory of historical transformation
Identification of endogenous mechanisms
Theory of contradiction
Role of classes as transformative agents
• Insistence on the centrality of work and production
Source of identity and interest
Driver of change
Conditioner of superordinate social & political governance arrangements
Department of Political Science

6. Various Problems with the View
• Transformation problem : How to move from Value to Price?
Significant practical limitation
• Theory of DoL and Mechanization too focused on specialization as productivity
driver
Follows Smith:
Limited by extent of market
production, industry nation
Dexterity, time saving, fosters innovation
Historical Evidence
Taylorism, Fordism, Ultra-specialization
Very productive under contingent conditions
Rigid
Industrial districts, skilled labor, discretion, team work, lean production
Profitable
Flexible
Self-recomposing
Specialization can be disadvantageous under conditions of uncertainty
Inhibit innovation in firms and regions (Chicago vs Detroit)
Decreasing returns to specialization- diversification logic important
No natural categories or groupings at scale
A variety of viable groupings:Eg: Siemens, General Electric, Apple, Nokia, Garmen,
Nintendo
Department of Political Science

7. More Problems…
• Limits of specialization logic continued:
Diversification, cross-fertilization seems important
Creates stability, fosters innovation, produces enduring growth
Costs of specialization avoided
Uncertainty limits specialization
• Limits to Structural View of Hierarchy and Power in Production,
Firms and Industries
Uncertainty (from innovation and competition) can undermine top
down control.
Create interest in collaboration
Team work
Collaborative sub-contracting
Cartelization fosters innovation
Focus on power asymmetries overlooks collaborative social
dynamics that affect direction and character of development and
transformation
Department of Political Science

8. Still more problems
• Limits to core developmental dynamic: Concentration and Centralization
of Capital
Too dependent on specialization logic
Misses processes of disintegration
Collaborative production
Industrial Districts
Supply Chains
• Problems with class as transformative agent
Position in division of labor does not exhaust possibilities for
identity or interest formation
Over concern for specialization obscures possibilities for
identity and interest (even within production)
Power and control only one dimension of governance (in firms,
industries, states)
• Focus on class underestimates autonomy of the political
Creates myopia concerning possibilities for transformation
Department of Political Science

9. A few more problems
• Is all market exchange fetishized?
Demonization of the market gave rise to idea of central planning
Rigid
Blocks innovation of various sorts
• No positive or constructive Marxian theory of the market
Interestingly, like Smith, but unlike Rousseau, Marxism tends to view
markets from the bottom up—that is social forms determined by
property and production interest, rather than as political shaped entities
• Very little in Marx concerning alternative governance forms
Neither market nor hierarchy
Department of Political Science

10. A little bit more on limits
• Politics and collective exploration, in addition to or in spite of power and
property asymmetries , seem to shape choices about specialization and
strategy when the direction of technological development– and of interest–
is not clear (uncertainty)
• Many of the questions identified by Marx can’t be answered within the
action and governance frameworks he provides
What we share seems to make it possible for us to exchange
How things are governed seems to shape how specialization takes place
• Theoretical lacunae of these sorts affect Marxism’s capacity to accurately
characterize dynamics of development at all levels (production, firm,
industry, region, nation, global economy—etc)
• Narrow unitary conception of social and historical transformation rooted in
contradictions generated by nexus of property-class-production-market
reifications obscures alternative transformative possibilities
Department of Political Science

11. Post Marxian Thought
• One Example: Pragmatism (Dewey, Veblen, Mitchell, Commons, Elias,
Dahl, Selznick, Rorty, Unger, Castoriadis, Sabel, Stark, Latour, Boltanski &
Thevenmont - etc)
Pragmatism sympathetic to the holism in Hegelian/Marxian thought—the
idea that there was a large overarching interconnected system that both
historically constituted actors and was driven by their creative interactions—
but it rejected the enlightenment ambitions in Hegel and Marx that aimed at
a full and complete understanding of emergent social systems and that used
that understanding to identify directionality in the historical process.
For the pragmatists, following Darwin, the social world, like the natural
world, was so multilayered, dynamic and interactive that it was impossible to
identify a complete set of stable causal relations that existed across space
and time. The best we can do as actors and theorists to develop frames for
understanding our world based in our joint efforts to negotiate common
problems.
Department of Political Science

12. Pragmatism continued
Such frames have power when they work, but one has to be extremely attentive to the limits
of any given frame (mode of life, world view, life world, institutional order—etc). By
searching for, noticing and addressing incidents, processes and events that do not
correspond to the expectations that a given frame provided, social players (and theorists)
can expand and reform their understandings of the world and possibilities for action. Joint
reflection and creativity is in this way considered a central dimension of social process
Pragmatism is a holistic learning theory based on attention to the unexpected and revision
of our contigently and socially constituted cognitive and practical expectations in response to
error. In this way, the world remains a whole or a totality, but it was always an emergent and
contingently arranged reality, shaped by the enormous multilayered complexity of social life
and the limited capacity of human cognition and human relations to grasp and control what
was going on.
For pragmatists, this orientation makes democracy—socially and politically inclusive problem
solving – an especially attractive mode of governance, as it maximizes inputs and
experiences that can be used for problem solving.
Department of Political Science

13. Pragmatism…
By contrast, centralized bureaucratic decision making and reified conceptions of individual
and collective actors (such as classes) are unreliable as they involve the systematic exclusion
of perspectives and the reduction of the multiple sources of self-definition to a small subset
of relations and activities.
Pragmatism provides a way to abandon unitary conceptions of social and political
transformation as well as specific and artificially coherent conceptions of transformative
agents, such as the working class.
In place of these, pragmatists emphasizes contingency, error, learning and broad,
multidirectional and multilayered possibilities for transformation.
The interesting and paradoxically parsimonious consequence of this shift is that despite the
seeming (and actual) complexity of layers and relational complexes (eg linked ecologies or
fields or orders) in the analysis, the mechanism for interpretation remains constant:
The key is to identify a shared historically and contextually specific frame of analysis that
actors share in common practice, and then focus on the degree to which interrelated players
are able to identify and respond to challenges to their frame. The response to unexpected
error and inconsistency is what drives transformation in individual and social identities and in
social and political organization.
Department of Political Science

14. Pragmatism…
Ultimately, this orientation gives rise to the ambition to construct forms of
social and political governance that facilitate learning and self-and social
recomposition.
Instead of focusing on the structural possibilities for working class
mobilization, class agency and the potential abolition of capitalism, this
post Marxian approach to social analysis seeks to identify as many
possibilities for the democratization of social, economic and political life
as possible.
This involves systematic attention to the interpenetration of levels of
practice and to the disruptions and opportunities that the dynamics of
that interpenetration give rise to.
Department of Political Science