Take care…

My target here, though, wasn’t these sorts of things – apologies if this was unclear: it wasn’t what I had in mind, so I didn’t guard against this reading of the post. I see the opening chapter of Capital as laying the foundation for analysing certain forms of everyday consciousness and certain characteristic moves in philosophy, that revolve around notions of an “in itself”. My target here is Lukacs’ specific explanations of Marx’s argument about the “in itself” – that’s what I’m contesting. I’ve always read Marx as taking up from the political economists and then attempting to understand the social conditions for the plausibility – the social validity – of their positions. Marx can be very dismissive toward vulgar economy, but is (critically) respectful of Smith and Ricardo.

Sorry for the confusion (and also, on your other point that it’s somewhat easy to read Marx in the way I’m criticising here: I agree with this too – I’m obviously pushing for a different sort of reading, but I’m not unsympathetic to alternative readings: I think Marx opened himself in many ways to them…).

It’s just not true that Smith or Ricardo had historically-naive views of value, or saw it as a substance rather than a relation. Smith was acutely conscious of socio-historical change and how it affects production and exchange. The ‘Digression on Silver’ in Book One of the WoN, to take a single example, shows this pretty clearly.

Ricardo, meanwhile, was much less concerned with history but very interested in value as a relation that could _not_ be represented as inhering in a commodity. His puzzlings over this obsessed him towards the end of his life – famously he tried to conceive of a ‘standard commodity’ that could measure the value of other commodities without its own value changing with distribution between wages and profit, and realised that this was a can of worms.

Marx’s criticisms of political economists always take the form of trying to extract what is useful from what is confused. He wants to positively develop political economy as a science, including its quantitative dimensions, not to bury it.

So summing up his criticism of Smith in ‘Theories of Surplus Value’ he portrays him as oscillating between surface empiricism and exploring “more or less correctly” the “inner connection, the physiology… of the bourgeois system”. I basically agree with your take, that for Marx the ‘inner connection’ is immanent in the ‘surface flux’ (or at least that this is what he should have been saying), but it’s easy to see why people read him differently:

“Smith himself moves with great naïveté in a perpetual contradiction. On the one hand he traces the intrinsic connection existing between economic categories or the obscure structure of the bourgeois economic system. On the other, he simultaneously sets forth the connection as it appears in the phenomena of competition and thus as it presents itself to the unscientific observer just as to him who is actually involved and interested in the process of bourgeois production. One of these conceptions fathoms the inner connection, the physiology, so to speak, of the bourgeois system, whereas the other takes the external phenomena of life, as they seem and appear and merely describes, catalogues, recounts and arranges them under formal definitions. With Smith both these methods of approach not only merrily run alongside one another, but also intermingle and constantly contradict one another. With him this is justifiable (with the exception of a few special investigations, [such as] that into money) since his task was indeed a twofold one. On the one hand he attempted to penetrate the inner physiology of bourgeois society but on the other, he partly tried to describe its externally apparent forms of life for the first time, to show its relations as they appear outwardly and partly he had even to find a nomenclature and corresponding mental concepts for these phenomena, i.e., to reproduce them for the first time in the language and [in the] thought process. The one task interests him as much as the other and since both proceed independently of one another, this results in completely contradictory ways of presentation: the one expresses the intrinsic connections more or less correctly, the other, with the same justification—and without any connection to the first method of approach—expresses the apparent connections without any internal relation.” [TSV ch. 10]

On the other hand, Marx is even more favourable towards Ricardo, and because he saw him as basically right on the question of how to quantify value – and that he was consistent about it:

“But at last Ricardo steps in and calls to science: Halt! The basis, the starting-point for the physiology of the bourgeois system—for the understanding of its internal organic coherence and life process—is the determination of value by labour-time. Ricardo starts with this and forces science to get out of the rut, to render an account of the extent to which the other categories—the relations of production and commerce—evolved and described by it, correspond to or contradict this basis, this starting-point; to elucidate how far a science which in fact only reflects and reproduces the manifest forms of the process, and therefore also how far these manifestations themselves, correspond to the basis on which the inner coherence, the actual physiology of bourgeois society rests or the basis which forms its starting-point; and in general, to examine how matters stand with the contradiction between the apparent and the actual movement of the system. This then is Ricardo’s great historical significance for science.” [TSV ch. 10]