In the world of theory, it is very difficult to find an audience. Each year, a near endless stream of books, colloquia, and journal articles are diffused, purporting to reinterrogate the role of "arche-writing" in Derrida, apply Lyotard’s critique of grand narratives to challenge ableism, or whatever else. Very few of these ever find more than a specialist audience. Indeed, according to some estimates, 82% of humanities articles are never even cited once.^[1]

This is, in a sense, the nature of the profession. Even in our age of neoliberal austerity, punctuated by periodic bouts of quantitative easing to simulate profitability, we remain significantly committed to the idea that research is an end in of itself, that should function outside the parameters of the marketplace (though what type of research deserves to be treated this way remains a fractious point of political dispute). The persistence of this consensus in the face of challenges is no doubt commendable. But it does often leave one feeling rather starved for readers, as if they’re writing into a void—or perhaps like Cain, forced to wander the Earth in solitude for the crime of eschewing a supply-demand curve.

All of this is to say that I’m extremely pleased that the volume I co-authored with Matt McManus, Ben Burgis, and Ernesto Vargas—Flowers for Marx—has attracted such a vigorous reception.^[2] I certainly did not expect that a text that deals with a historically obscure debate over whether Marxism is a science would be greeted with more than a soupçon of enthusiasm (even if its relating of this to the ongoing fissure between Marxism-Leninism and more-reform minded socialisms is bound to serve as a more accessible point of reference for many readers). But to my great surprise, since its publication by Revol Press in June it has generated no less than four in-depth written responses.

Erik Haines, in his blog Integral [+] Facticity, has argued that the book would’ve benefitted—in light of its focus on the rift between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ Marxisms—from integrating the late Michael Brooks’ vision of “cosmopolitan socialism” into its conceptual lexicon.^[3] Cadell Last, in a piece for his Philosophy Portal, draws upon the works of Chris Cutrone, Slavoj Žižek, and Dimitri Crooijmans in order to pose the question of how we might think an immanent escape from our present-day, “absolute capitalism” (something undertaken with the goal of supplementing the book, which with its differing viewpoints he sees as bound to leave the reader “confused about the state of the left”).^[4] Nicolas D Villarreal, in a review for Cosmonaut, reproaches it with what he construes as a number of factual errors, as well as argues that the porridge is either too cold or too hot—that is, that the authors err too much on the side of either bourgeois science and its corollary, bourgeois socialism, or the dogmas of top-down communist parties.^[5] And John Milton Bunch, in Everyday Analysis, subjects the work to the scrutiny of the cognitive and neural sciences, before concluding that—while my contribution may be less methodologically rigorous than those of McManus and Burgis—it’s both more comprehensive, as well as more realistic about the need for political rupture.^[6]

Note that I have only surveyed here written responses. Were we to get into podcasts, we would need to distill the responses of many other formidable thinkers and activists who’ve weighed in on the book’s contents, from Dhruv Jain to Marina Simokova to Derick Varn to Khadija Haynes.

I would like, therefore, to thank all of those who lent their time and intellectual energy to responding to Flowers for Marx. Given that the book was not easy to bring to press—one may recall that it was unceremoniously cancelled by Punctum Books, over a couple of objections to content as well as the egregious sin of including contributions from authors who had the temerity to promote socialism on right-wing platforms—this feels like a vindication of the efforts invested in it.^[7]

That said, there is one response in particular that troubled me—something true even if I remain appreciative of its spirited engagement. This is Villarreal’s review for Cosmonaut. To be clear: I am not bothered by the fact Villarreal has a different view of socialism than those in the book. He has every bit as much a right to his perspective—what seems to be an odd, “neo-Kautskyist,” left-DSA stance—as does Last to his “conservative” ultra-leftism, or Milton Bunch to his deeply Anglo-American conviction that Marxism is in certain respects out of step with human nature (now known, of course, by cognitive science). Nor am I bothered by the fact that the review is, on balance, negative. I have been criticized many times before, as have my co-authors; so far as this furnishes proof of theoretical relevance, I hope to be many more times in the future.

Rather, what bothers me is that—in what purports to be an objective balance sheet of sorts—Villarreal reproaches the book on the basis of a number of readings that are, if not outright wrong, then at least highly contentious. Typically, this follows a familiar pattern. Adopting a tone of intellectual superiority, Villarreal will evince astonishment that the authors failed to grasp this or that ‘obvious’ point. By way of demonstration, he will then unfurl, if not a discrete quote ripped from context, then an argument that is anything but obvious, in the sense that it either misrepresents the source in question or leans on sources that are far from being globally accepted. Since these gestures will be eminently identifiable to anyone well-versed in Marxist theory, I did not initially intend to respond—if Villarreal is a bit out of his depth, after all, it is equally true that this is how one learns how to swim. But out of respect for the editor in chief of Cosmonaut Donald Parkinson, who explicitly requested that I prepare a response, I offer below a set of very schematic rejoinders to Villarreal’s claims.

Point #1: Pre-1966 Althusser Does Not Reject the “Empirical Element”

One of the first points Villarreal makes is that I err in my analysis by claiming that Althusser “excluded the whole empirical element of science from his theory until 1966 due to scolding he received from the French Communist Party (PCF).” Drawing from a passage in the fourth chapter of Althusser’s contribution to Reading Capital, he asserts on the contrary that for Althusser “the empirical relates to science specifically through the relationship of the empirical to its abstract category.” This amounts to “nothing more nor less than the basic structuralist insight that before we can establish the relationship between certain phenomena, we must break up the continuum of experience of the phenomena into signs.”

One thing here is certainly true: I do make the claim that Villarreal attributes to me (though if we were to nitpick, it could said that Villarreal overstates the causal determinacy of the PCF’s criticisms in dictating Althusser’s theoretical trajectory in comparison with my comments, which are more partial). Beyond that, however, his critique is rather dubitable. What seems to be at issue here is a confusion between the appreciation of empiricism within ‘structuralism’ as a generic movement and the more strongly anti-empiricist bent of Althusser’s pre-1966 work. If Villarreal were addressing the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss—widely considered the most influential of all structuralists—it would perhaps be appropriate to speak of science as being a matter of the “empirical” relating to its “abstract category.” In 1963’s Structural Anthropology, for example, Lévi-Strauss does not use the adjective “empirical” in an automatically derisory fashion, since he sees the systematized models that structural anthropology depends upon as arising from a fluid relationship between field work and theory. His critique is not aimed at empiricism per se, but at the surfeit of it that had hitherto defined British anthropology in particular.

As a characterization of Althusser’s pre-1966 work, however, Villarreal’s notion that he incorporates the “empirical element” is—to reverse the charge he levels at me—“simply” not true. This was clear enough to Althusser himself, who wrote in the 1967 preface to the English translation of 1965’s For Marx that he “denounced all forms of empiricism” in the essays therein.^[8] Moreover, in his pre-1966 work, empiricism is defined extremely widely, so that it encompasses both “mechanical causality” (the Cartesian lineage) and “expressive causality” (the Hegelian one), being nothing other than any system which leans on “the false obviousness of everyday practice.”^[9] Or to put it more technically: that “oppose[s] a given subject to a given object and call[s] knowledge the abstraction by the subject of the essence of the object.”^[10]

It could be said we’re being a little unfair to Villarreal here. He does not claim, after all, that Althusser accepts “empiricism” in For Marx and Reading Capital; rather, his objection is to the idea that he wholly excludes the “empirical element.” To try to clear this up, let us draw from the precise passage he cites to support his argument:

According to the economistic or mechanistic hypothesis, the role of the essence/phenomena opposition is to explain the non-economic as a phenomenon of the economic, which is its essence. In this operation, the theoretical (and the ‘abstract’) is surreptitiously substituted for the economy (since we have its theory in Capital) and the empirical or ‘concrete’ for the non-economic, i.e., for politics, ideology, etc. The essence/phenomena opposition performs this role well enough so long as we regard the ‘phenomena’ as the empirical and concrete, and the essence as the non-empirical, as the abstract, as the truth of the phenomenon. The result is to set up an absurd relationship between the theoretical (the economic) and the empirical (the non-economic) by a change in partners which compares the knowledge of one object with the existence of another – which is to commit us to a fallacy…we are dealing with a short-circuit between crossed terms which it is illegitimate to compare: for to do so is to compare the knowledge of one definite object with the empirical existence of another!^[11]

Althusser’s point here is that mechanical theories of historical materialism—as with the one found in Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism, though it goes unmentioned here for obvious reasons—simply ‘remix’ the approach of standard historians. Standard historians take for granted the primacy of “homogeneous-continuous/self-contemporaneous time,”^[12] making this “’empirical’ temporality”^[13] preside over the ‘concrete’ contents of history (and thereby failing to recognize “the different temporalities produced by the different levels of the structure”^[14]—the way time functions differently within different modes of production, for instance). Similarly, within mechanical historical materialism the “economic” is made the index of the “non-economic” (politics, culture, etc.), in a way that fails to acknowledge any process of mediation (and thus the “(relative) regional autonomy” of the non-economic).

One may notice that there is nothing in this passage that supports Villarreal’s conviction that for Althusser “the empirical relates to science specifically through the relationship of the empirical to its abstract category.” There are however multiple passages in which this notion is rejected. Take this one, for instance, in which he draws attention the pseudo-problems generated by mechanical historical materialism:

‘Necessity’, in this case, designates a knowledge (e.g., the law of determination in the last instance by the economy), and the ‘circumstances’ what is not known. But instead of comparing a knowledge with a non-knowledge, the non-knowledge is put into parenthesis and the empirical existence of the unknown object (called the ‘circumstances’ or contingent givens, etc.) is substituted for it – which allows the terms to be crossed, achieving a fallacious short-circuit in which the knowledge of a determinate object (economic necessity) is compared with the empirical existence of a different object (the ‘circumstances’, political or otherwise, amid which this ‘necessity’ is said to ‘assert itself’). The most famous form of this fallacy is found in the ‘problem’ of the ‘role of the individual in history’ ... a tragic argument which consists of a comparison between the theoretical part or knowledge of a determinate object (e.g., the economy) which represents the essence of which the other objects (the political, the ideological, etc.) are regarded as the phenomena – and that fiendishly important (politically!) empirical reality, individual action. Here again we are dealing with a short-circuit between crossed terms which it is illegitimate to compare: for to do so is to compare the knowledge of one definite object with the empirical existence of another! I do not want to insist on the difficulties which these concepts put in the way of their users, who cannot escape them in practice except by questioning critically the Hegelian (and more generally classical) philosophical concepts which are fish in the water of this fallacy. But I should like to signal that this false problem of the ‘role of the individual in history’ is nevertheless an index to a true problem, one which arises by right in the theory of history: the problem of the concept of the historical forms of existence of individuality.^[15]

What Althusser is saying here is that the problem with mechanical economic determination is that it both does too much and too little. By trying to measure the sweep of the non-economic in relation to itself without adequately reckoning with its specificity, it does too much. But by doing too much it also does too little, in the sense that this blunt gesture ends up leaving outside of its remit all kinds of “empirical realit[ies]” that thereby cannot be comprehensively explained. One of these is the (ideological) problem of “individual action”—that is, the problem of how to account for the actions of individuals insofar as they cannot be definitively related to mechanical economic determination. While this may seem like a straightforward enough dilemma, for Althusser to accept it is already to concede the poverty of Marxism as a science. For the gap here between individual action and economic determination only arises due to the non-articulation of “the problem of the concept of the historical forms of existence of individuality”—that is, how the economic indirectly establishes the conditions through which individuals are formed, as well as how they act.

In this passage, as with virtually the entirety of the chapter Villarreal draws from, the “empirical” is used synonymously with assumptions which are not subjected to sufficiently rigorous intellectual inspection. It is ‘knowledge’ taken at face value, on the pretense that it emanates directly from reality, without being subjected to the criterion of Marxist science. But let us pay attention in particular to the earlier part of the quote. Mechanical economic determination, Althusser tells us, knows of economic necessity; of the theoretical model of Capital. That is well and good. Where it errs is in turning what it does not know—what he calls “non-knowledge”—into “empirical” objects that it can thereby only partially explain. The problem of the “individual” here is the example he gives: for the “individual” is simply a received notion, that is then taken for granted. Yet what is important to note for our purposes is that Althusser is so adamant here to not validate the language of the empirical that he uses another term: “non-knowledge.” The “empirical” is by its very nature a distortion—once “non-knowledge" becomes “empirical,” it has already been misrepresented.

From a philosophical standpoint, the obvious problem with this gesture is that it cannot explain the origin of abstractions. For if the empirical is always-already theoretical, then where do theories come from? While Villarreal does not acknowledge the seriousness of this issue—partly perhaps because doing so would undermine his narrative of me thoughtlessly aping the invective of authoritarian party apparatchiks—it is a real problem; one many commentators of Althusser’s corpus have tried to resolve. One of the first of these was Althusser himself. Three months after the PCF’s March 1966 issuance of an official resolution that de facto rejected his ideas, he delivered a lecture in which he backtracked on comments in Reading Capital, describing a tradition of “rationalist empiricism”^[16] that stretches from the “materialist aspects of Descartes's work”^[17] to Comte to Bachelard to Canguilhem and that “saved the honour of French philosophy” from spiritualist reaction in the nineteenth century.^[18] This went hand-in-hand with a repositioning of the empirical in his philosophical writings, in a manner that put him closer to Lévi-Strauss. “Empirical concepts,” he states in his “Spontaneous Philosophy” lectures, are “irreducible to the pure data of an immediate empirical investigation.” But at the same time, they “express the absolute requirement that no concrete knowledge can do without observation, experiment, and the data they provide.”^[19]

Villarreal does not seem to be aware of this. So he simply ignores the entire episode, ‘revising’ Althusser’s circa 1965 output so as to bring it in conformance with the norms of structuralism. Nor is this the only such instance in which he conflates Althusser with other structuralist currents. For when he claims that Althusser’s pre-1966 work amounts to the “basic structuralist insight that before we can establish the relationship between certain phenomena, we must break up the continuum of experience of the phenomena into signs,” he is erasing one of its key features—to wit, that Althusser’s Marxist “combination” consists precisely not of signs, but rather of contradictory material processes or “tendencies.”^[20] But as we have already expended far too much time on this part of Villarreal’s review, let us move on.

Point #2: Althusser Was Not Attempting to Create an Alternative to Popper’s Criteria for Scientificity

In the following paragraph of his review, Villarreal claims that both myself and McManus fundamentally misunderstand the relation between Althusser and Karl Popper. For us, Althusser was trying to “create an alternative criteria for scientificity vis a vis Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability; the idea that scientific claims must necessarily be open to refutation.” In reality, Villarreal asserts, he “does not do this.” Villarreal backs this up with a quotation from Philosophy for Non-Philosophers; that the “British philosopher Popper was right to insist on this condition (the risk of experimental refutation), even if he worked it up into an idealist philosophy of the conditions to which a theory must subscribe in advance if it is to be certain of squarely confronting this risk.”^[21]

What is particularly odd about this objection is that in my chapter in Flowers for Marx I cite directly from and summarize Althusser’s most substantial discussion of Popper—the one in the posthumously published How to Be a Marxist in Philosophy. There, he makes two points. First, while Popper is correct to insist on the importance of refutation, he is wrong to dismiss Marxism and psychoanalysis as sciences on this basis. This is because it is “never possible to decide in advance whether a given theory is scientific or not”^[22]—even if Marxism and psychoanalysis have not been proven now, they could (as with many proto-sciences of the past!) be in the future. Second, because while it is true that the experiments they perform “cannot be repeated under exactly the same conditions,”^[23] this doesn’t necessarily discredit them. They are sciences of the conjuncture—class struggle, much like “the tête-à- tête between patient and psychoanalyst in the solitude of an office,”^[24] is inextricable from the transient conditions in which it occurs. Yet can it not be equally said of other sciences that Popper recognizes the validity of that they differ methodologically from one another? Mathematics, for example, is not “material” in the way that physics and chemistry are. This does make it any less “real” than them.^[25] Therefore we should not hastily dismiss the scientificity of Marxism or psychoanalysis because their operations diverge from other sciences.

I will let the reader judge whether this represents “an alternative criteria for scientificity vis a vis Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability.”

Point #3: A “More Qualitative or Immanent” Science Does Not Follow from Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Work

A few paragraphs later, Villarreal expresses his disagreement with my use of the work of Alred Sohn-Rethel. In my chapter I argue that Sohn-Rethel’s writings suggest that certain sciences have already begun to supersede the logic of capitalism. I provide three examples at least partly of my own making:

Natural science has put the lie to the idea of nature as a sullen “object” which exists to satisfy man’s material needs — and shown us the catastrophic results which will be engendered if we treat it as such. The Newtonian machine Adam Smith relied on to portray capitalism as self-regulating has been superseded by quantum physics, with its shadowy and paradoxical conjunction of waves and particles. And the collapsing of the distinction between automation and recursive thought in the field of AI now threatens to deal a death blow to the premise of capitalism as a system capable of providing productive employment to the bulk of the working-age population...^[26]

These lines are admittedly somewhat impressionistic, in the sense that they blur together the logic of capitalism’s reproduction (the question of its material continuance, as with the environment or underconsumption) and the logic of its ideology (how it is imaginatively structured, as with Smith’s view of “commercial society” as an ordered, self-regulating economic system akin to Newton's laws of physics). In any case, I follow up these speculations by stating that the “most radical branches of the sciences and class struggle share this in common: the ability to make a world appear beyond the quantitative reduction of value, of socially necessary labor time.”^[27] To support the latter claim, I cite Italian Marxist feminism (the Italian “Wages for Housework” movement,” which demanded that housework be remunerated by the government only to expose the impossibility of such a demand) and Andreas Malm’s “ecological Leninism” (the call to apply “class violence, and terror, to mitigate an environmental collapse that now seems inevitable”^[28]).

To fully understand this theoretical exercise, it will be helpful to consult the book itself, since it rests not just on Sohn-Rethel’s work but on an analogy with Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge (as a corrective to Althusser’s inadequate comparison of it with the synchronic in Reading Capital).^[29] Sohn-Rethel is furthermore introduced in my chapter to resolve a specific dilemma within Althusser’s thought—namely the question of how to explain the origin of abstractions. Althusser’s initial, rationalist standpoint left him with no means to explain where concepts come from. He resolved this fairly straightforwardly, by equivocally integrating elements of empiricism into his worldview. Sohn-Rethel offers a far more compelling solution. For him, abstraction as we know it originates within commodity exchange. When we exchange commodities, we thereby presuppose a “postulate of equivalence” that furnishes the basis for the thinking of the category of the archē or substance.

As this description may suggest, Sohn-Rethel traces the origin of abstraction within commodity exchange—what he calls “real abstraction”—back to Ancient Greece, framing the “Greek miracle” that occurred therein as a consequence of expanded maritime trade (which he follows the British classicist George Thomson in seeing as decisive to the Ancient Greek economy—a thesis contested by Geoffrey de Ste. Croix among others). But he is careful to note that real abstraction did not become fully generalized until the arrival of capitalism, when the wide commodification of labour power engendered a climate in which Newtonian physics could “make real” Euclidean geometry and when Kantian epistemology could misconstrue the abstractions latent within the commodity-form as objective properties of the mind.

For Villarreal, the problem with my appropriation of Sohn-Rethel is that the “distinction between a quantitative bourgeois science and a more qualitative or immanent way of knowing is certainly not something that follows from [his] work.” To support this, he supplies a quote from Sohn-Rethel’s chef-d'œuvre, Intellectual and Manual Labour, in which—comparing Lysenkoism unfavourably with both the ecological initiatives of the Tennessee Valley Authority as well as the afforestation projects pursued in post-1949 China—he writes that “what emerges from these examples is, first, that the science indispensable for socialism is methodologically the same as the science in capitalism; second, that socialism has the means to counteract the properties which, in capitalism, constitute the bourgeois character of this science.”^[30] Villarreal adds in regards to the latter point that, for Sohn-Rethel, in “the case of protecting the environment in socialism, this is only accomplished by the unity of all scientific knowledge and the deprofessionalization of the scientific knowledge used in production.”

What we have here is another case where Villarreal has plucked out a discrete quote from a work by an author we cite, possibly with the use of CTRL+F, and declared our book wrong—all without bothering to seriously read the source he’s citing. Worse yet, he can’t even be bothered to read our book. On page 70, I quote from Chapter 20 of Intellectual and Manual Labour. There, Sohn-Rethel—after citing Marx’s famed claim that under socialism there will be “one science”^[31]—writes that “there are signs that our twentieth-century science which has achieved the enormous advance to atomic and nuclear physics has left bourgeois science behind and has assumed a state where it no longer fits the ‘rationality’ on which capitalism relies for its continuance.”^[32] This analysis is further developed in Chapter 35. The findings of classical physics, he explains, are “valid irrespective of any particular production relations”^[33]—including in the socialist world. But, on the other hand:

…looking at nature under the categories of the commodity form, science affords precisely the technology on which hinges the controlling power of capital over production. It cuts up nature piecemeal by isolating its objects of study from the context in which they occur, ignoring nature in its importance as the habitat of society. The environmental conditions are treated as a mass of interfering circumstances which must at all cost be kept out of the experiments. In this way the phenomena are severed from the human world and cut down to recurrent events; these are defined by mathematical equations signifying the description of immutable ‘laws of nature’ providing the automatism demanded by capital.^[34]

Classical physics is undoubtedly true. Yet this truth was not arrived at by innocent means, having been derived surreptitiously from the commodity form. Still, science seems to be in the throes of eclipsing the axioms of real abstraction, giving way into new forms that do not tidily correspond with it. “Relativity theory” and “quantum physics,” he asserts, have “thrown science into methodological uncertainty”—and are, unlike the classical physics that reigned supreme during capitalism’s “classical free-market period,” not securely based on the “mathematical and experimental method.”^[35]

The movement of the sciences beyond the bourgeois heuristic of real abstraction is what I term—in a nod to Alexander Bogdanov—“proletarian science.” In addition to Sohn-Rethel, it also reflects the influence of Engels, who makes similar arguments in the Dialectics of Nature regarding advancements ranging from the nebular hypothesis to the discovery of the cell (albeit without recourse to the concept of real abstraction). Though Villarreal’s (underqualified) description of it as a “more qualitative or immanent way of knowing,” may suggest otherwise, it has nothing to do with mysticism, or Lysenkoism—it is just science. One could say many things about this. What they cannot say is that it does not “follow” from Sohn-Rethel’s work.

Point #4: Ben Burgis Provides a Misleading Description of the Transformation Problem

In Ben Burgis’ chapter, he provides—as part of a commentary on the analytical Marxism of G.A. Cohen—a defense of three of his basic “commitments”: his rejection of Hegel, his willingness to jettison aspects of Marx’s analysis, and his belief in the importance of the normative dimension of socialist thought (though he stops short of endorsing his inflation of the importance of “moral beliefs” at the expense of material analysis characteristic of his later career). In the sub-section of the chapter devoted to defending the second “commitment,” Burgis discusses Cohen’s rejection of the labor theory of value. There, he writes that:

One concern leading some of these economists away from Marxist orthodoxy has to do with the “transformation problem” that vexed Marx long before he came out with Capital Vol. 1, and which has continued to vex orthodox Marxist economists. How can we account for the extreme divergence (indeed, it seems to many observers, the lack of any obvious relationship at all) between the market prices of commodities, which remember are supposed to be at least a distorted reflection of labor-time value, and the average socially necessary labor time it takes to produce them? There are many proposed solutions to this problem, some quite sophisticated, but — to borrow an analogy from heterodox Marxist economist and Jacobin contributing editor Mike Beggs — they often feel uncomfortably like intellectually heroic attempts to stitch together the individual pieces of Marx’s views circa 1867 and reanimate the corpse.^[36]

For Villarreal, “this last sentence is totally misleading.” For:

There is no empirical divergence between market prices and labor time, as a number of studies have established a robust correlation between the two. They have even been the topic of a somewhat important debate between Andrew Kliman and Paul Cockshott. There are arguments that these correlations are spurious, but it remains a fact that there is a correlation, rather than some extreme divergence, and indeed, labor correlates better to prices than many other common cost inputs to the production process.

This passage is actually far more misleading than that of Burgis. For Villarreal, what Burgis does not register is that “there is no empirical divergence between market prices and labor time”—a position that as far as I’m aware no one has ever argued for, though Villarreal backpedals two sentences later by claiming “there is no extreme divergence.” But the bigger issue is that Villarreal seems to misunderstand the nature of the problem under discussion. For him, what the studies of economists like Cockshott show is that—regardless of whether one thinks there is a causal relationship between market prices and labor time—there nevertheless is a correlation (indeed, Cockshott and Cottrell is the citation he uses here at the end of the quoted section).^[37]

Ignored by this is that the presence of a correlation has never been in doubt. Even marginalists—who treat labor as one factor of production among others—accept this, if for no other reason than because labor is a significant input. Thus the “studies” he’s referring to do not, in of themselves, demonstrate very much if they cannot definitely show that relative values are a determinant of relative prices (a position that Marx himself didn’t hold, hence the transformation problem). And since this point is rejected by the vast majority of economists—not just mainstream ones, but also Marxists like Kliman^[38]—it’s really not the case that we’ve moved beyond our preexisting assumptions.

Under these circumstances, most individuals reading a book called Flowers for Marx—when confronted with a reference to “extreme divergence” between the “market prices of commodities” and the “socially necessary labor time it takes to produce them”—would understand that Burgis is referring to the presence of extreme divergences (something all the more clear since he subsequently—when speaking of a category as general as “many observers”—only claims they see no “obvious correlation”). And indeed, there are many sectors in which this is the case—why Marx, after all, sought to transform values into prices of production.

Point #5: Ben Burgis and Mike Beggs Overestimate the Difference Between Classical and Neoclassical Theories of Supply and Demand

Continuing his argument about the difficulties of reanimating orthodox Marxist economics, Ben Burgis draws further from the work of economist and Jacobin contributing editor Mike Beggs.^[39] Classical economists, Beggs argues in his essay “Zombie Marx,”^[40] weren’t capable of understanding in detailed terms what determined supply and demand. This is because they lacked recourse to the “marginalists’ apparatus of supply and demand schedules”—the graphic representation of which has been christened, in honour of the contributions of Alfred Marshall, the “Marshallian cross.” In this context, Marx was correct to draw the conclusion that supply and demand “settled nothing,” and to focus his attention elsewhere. But the marginalist revolution has considerably transformed this dispensation, providing supply and demand-based economics with much greater explanatory power than it previously had.^[41]

Villarreal strongly objects to this argument. Burgis and Beggs, he argues, “claim that the classical political economists had a totally foreign notion of supply and demand such that we should put no stock into Marx’s critique of supply and demand.” This is incorrect for Villarreal for two reasons. First, because the classicals were “capable of imagining hypothetical increases in supply versus demand and their effects on price.” Second, because “the precursors of the Marshallian curve already existed in Marx’s time.” He proceeds from here to note that Marx wrote often in a language that presupposed “a deeper regulator of market prices beyond temporary changes in supply and demand,” and to accuse Beggs of failing to grasp the need for the assumption of declining returns in any determination of long term equilibrium prices on the basis of no evidence whatsoever.^[42]

Villarreal concludes all this by stating that if Beggs “was to submit his ‘Zombie Marx’ essay to any legitimate history of economic thought undergraduate course, Beggs would probably receive a ‘D-.’” Well, I’m glad he’s giving the grades. But could our rigorous scholar be bothered to check that the essay that appeared in Jacobin is a slightly cut-down version of one that appeared a year later in the peer-reviewed, SSCI Journal of Australian Political Economy?^[43] That doesn’t automatically mean it’s good—assessment by committee has its own perils. But he’s the one appealing to academic authority.

Quite beyond that hiccup, though, the level of bad faith on display here is rather astonishing. For starters, neither Burgis nor Beggs actually argue for the wholesale rejection of Marx’s ideas on supply and demand. After citing several passages from the third volume of Capital in which Marx anticipates a neoclassical understanding of the subject, Beggs sums up his argument by stating that “there is perhaps not such a gulf between Marx and certain aspects of neoclassical analysis as is often implied.”^[44] This point is echoed by Burgis: that Marx foresaw “some of the very insights that later fueled all this neoclassical theorizing.”^[45] Nor do either of them reject the centrality of labor to economic calculation. Though Burgis follows Cohen in claiming that exploitation can be more straightforwardly explained simply by virtue of the fact the bourgeoisie own the means of production,^[46] he argues for the compatibility of this analysis with the labor theory of value at the end of this sub-section of his chapter.^[47] In a similar spirit, Beggs makes the point we evoked earlier—that “the critical importance of labor time does not disappear” in the context of supply-and-demand analysis.^[48]

Villarreal’s other arguments don’t rise above this initial mischaracterization. He tells us that classicals were “capable of imagining hypothetical increases in supply versus demand and their effects on price”—a point that’s obvious, but when pitched against Beggs’ analysis ignores the difference between complex graphing procedures and the sort of verbal description of this problem provided by John Stuart Mill in his Principles of Political Economy. As if to make up for this, he then draws attention to the antecedents of the Marshallian Cross—individuals like Karl Heinrich Rau and Hans von Mangoldt, who pioneered aspects of it prior to its widespread acceptance. Though you’d never know it from Villarreal’s description, Beggs references these in his essay, making a passing allusion to the “isolated forerunners” of supply and demand schedules prior to the 1870s.^[49] His use of the adjective “isolated” gives us a clue as to why he doesn’t assign greater importance to them: because they virtually all wrote separately without knowing each other’s work, because they only approximate Marshall’s achievements when added together, and because none of their treatments of this subject influenced mainstream economics (with the possible belated exception of Antoine-Augustin Cournot, whose ideas Marshall encountered in 1870).^[50] Indeed: as late as 1871, a publisher deleted the diagrams from one of Mangoldt’s books, on the grounds that “it is utterly inconceivable to me that graphs or mathematical formulae could facilitate the understanding of economic laws.”^[51]

After this comes the part of Villarreal’s review where he points out that we can find passages in Marx that suggest “an equivalent shift from the short term to the longer term in Marshallian language.” That’s true—though it’s strange that Villarreal omits to note that Burgis and Beggs both say this. Maybe he deserves some credit. It’s one thing to strawman an argument. It’s another thing, and almost impressive, to strawman an argument then use the argument you strawmanned to disprove itself.

Conclusion

Given all of this, what does one make of Villarreal’s conclusion that the authors of Flowers for Marx—for all our critiques of censorship—embody a more “subtle” form of it? That I represent “deference to the authority of the party in controlling theoretical practice” while Burgis and McManus represent “deference […] to the authority of bourgeois science as the only science”? Let us pay attention to how this argument is constructed. “Whenever the PCF and Althusser come into conflict,” Villarreal writes, “except on the issue of humanism, Hamilton always appears to take the side of the PCF,” including with respect to the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the charge of theoreticism.

Setting aside the vast differences between the way I approach these issues and the 1960s PCF, the problem with this formulation is that humanism was the main point of dispute between it and Althusser.^[52] Thus this is a bit like saying that a bird exactly resembles a plane except for the fact it’s not metal and jet-fueled, or that Jacques Derrida would be an industrial demolitionist if he only deconstructed buildings instead of texts. Villarreal’s claim that Burgis and McManus are overly beholden to bourgeois science is—if I may so myself—slightly more plausible. This doesn’t change the fact he has to lean on misrepresentations to make his case, offering readings that range from flatly incorrect to comically uncharitable.

In light of this, I suspect that in authoring his review Villarreal indulged one of the most classic of scientific errors. He had an agenda—he wanted to show, as he puts it himself, that the authors of this book, or at least its pro-Jacobin wing, were no longer “the adults in the room”; that “younger generations” have now accumulated their own “theoretical knowledge.” Therefore he tailored his arguments to fit his conclusion. When they weren’t strong enough, he simply punched them up, replacing analysis he couldn’t muster with high-sounding declarations.

As someone who deeply believes that the Western left is in need of heightened radicalization, as well as deeply believes in the potential of the younger generation, I take no great pleasure in pronouncing the failure of this operation. “There is no royal road to science,” Marx wrote in 1872, “and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.” To which we might append an old proverb, borrowed from by Lenin: that sometimes to go up a mountain, you have to go back down first.^[53]

1. There exists significant debate about these numbers. See: Sierra Williams, “Are 90% of academic papers really never cited? Reviewing the literature on academic citations,” London School of Economics, April 23, 2014, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/23/academic-papers-citation-rates-remler.

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2. Though not technically a co-author of the book, Daniel Tutt’s foreword is substantial enough in its own right he may as well be one.

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3. Erik Haines, “A Lament for a Missing Element of Flowers for Marx,” Integral [+] Facticity (blog), July 28, 2025, https://www.erikhaines.org/p/a-lament-for-a-missing-element-of.

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4. Cadell Last, “No Marxism Without Žižek, or: thinking towards ‘Conservative Communism,’” Philosophy Portal (blog), August 10, 2025, https://philosophyportal.substack.com/p/no-marxism-without-zizek-or-an-outline.

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5. Nicholas D Villarreal, “When Science Is Abandoned, The Flower Withers: A Review of 'Flowers For Marx,'” Cosmonaut, August 20, 2025, https://cosmonautmag.com/2025/08/when-science-is-abandoned-the-flower-withers-review-flowers-for-marx.

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6. John Milton Bunch, “Flowers for Marx and Science,” Everyday Analysis, September 30, 2025, https://www.everydayanalysis.co.uk/post/flowers-for-science-and-marxism.

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7. For those unfamiliar with this episode, see Ben Burgis, “Five Questions for Punctum Books,” Philosophy for the People (blog), October 27, 2024, https://benburgis.substack.com/p/five-questions-for-punctum-books.

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8. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (Verso, 2005 [1965]), 14.

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9. Louis Althusser, “Part Four: The Object of Capital” in Reading Capital (Verso, 2009 [1965]), 243.

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10. Ben Brewster and Louis Althusser, “Empiricism,” in the glossary of For Marx (Verso, 2005 [1965]), 251.

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11. Althusser, “Object of Capital,” 259.

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12. Ibid, 254.

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13. Ibid, 253.

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14. Ibid, 252.

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15. Ibid, 259-260.

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16. My recognition of the importance of Althusser’s positive reference to “rationalist empiricism” and the arc of his theoretical trajectory owes to the work of Nathan Brown. See: Nathan Brown, Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique (Fordham University Press, 2021).

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17. To be more specific, what he’s referring to here is the tradition of “idealist rationalist empiricism,” in contradistinction to a less interesting, “materialist rationalist empiricism” which “lives on in the ideology of certain scientific practices (psycho-physiology, etc.).” See: Louis Althusser, “The Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Research,” in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, ed. François Matheron, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (Verso, 2003 [1966]), 4.

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18. Althusser, “Conjuncture,” 4.

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19. Louis Althusser, “On Theoretical Work: Difficulties and Resources,” in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists & Other Essays, ed. Gregory Elliott, trans. James H. Kavanagh (Verso, 1990 [1967]), 48.

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20. Louis Althusser, Elements of Self-Criticism, trans. Graham Locke (New Left Books, 1976 [1974]), 130.

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21. Louis Althusser, Philosophy for Non-Philosophers, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (Bloomsbury, 2017 [2014]), 92.

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22. Louis Althusser, How to Be a Marxist in Philosophy, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (Bloomsbury, 2017 [2015]), 28.

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23. Ibid.

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24. Ibid.

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25. Ibid.

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26. Conrad Hamilton, “Rupture and Reunion: A Response to Matthew McManus,” in Flowers for Marx, eds. Conrad Hamilton and Matthew McManus (Revol Press, 2025), 71.

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27. Ibid, 71.

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28. Ibid, 73.

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29. In this matter I’m offering my own solution to a problem that Nathan Brown draws attention to in his Rationalist Empiricism. See: Brown, Rationalist Empiricism, 208.

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30. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, trans. Martin Sohn-Rethel (Brill, 2021 [1970]), 151.

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31. From the 1844 Manuscripts.

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32. Sohn-Rethel, Labour, 112.

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33. Ibid, 147.

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34. Ibid, 147-148.

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35. Ibid, 147.

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36. Ben Burgis, “Analytical Marxism, Marx’s Marxism, and the Future of Scientific Socialism: Reflections on G.A. Cohen’s Contributions to Socialist Thought,” in Flowers for Marx, eds. Conrad Hamilton and Matthew McManus (Revol Press, 2025), 115.

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37. See Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell, “The Scientific Status of the Labour Theory of Value,” paper presentation at the Eastern Economic Association meetings, April 3-6, 1997, https://users.wfu.edu/cottrell/eea97.pdf.

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38. See: Andrew J. Kliman, “The law of value and laws of statistics: sectoral values and prices in the US economy, 1977-97,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 26 (2002): 299-311.

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39. Burgis, “Analytical Marxism,” 116-17.

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40. Mike Beggs, “Zombie Marx,” Jacobin, July 14, 2011, https://jacobin.com/2011/07/zombie-marx.

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41. Beggs, “Zombie Marx,” Jacobin.

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42. Villarreal writes that “It’s also well known that the long term classical supply and demand analysis assumed constant returns to scale, whereas the marginalists and Marshall assumed declining returns to scale […] Beggs seems to say declining returns to scale was always a common sense assumption, and omits the fact that this assumption of declining returns is required for demand to matter at all in the determination of long term equilibrium prices.” But this assumption isn’t needed for this. Moreover, it’s not clear where this line of criticism derives from. Beggs writes in “Zombie Marx” that “Alfred Marshall himself argued in an appendix to his Principles of Economics that his marginalist analysis did not undermine Ricardo’s theory of long-run value, because in the long run producers shift between sectors chasing abnormally high and fleeing abnormally low returns to their investments, so that supply conditions determine price. Demand matters in the long run only to the extent that the quantity produced and sold affects the cost of production, due to economies of scale, inputs whose supply can be increased only at increasing cost, etc. That demand or ‘social need’ could influence socially-necessary labor time and therefore value, Marx was fully aware.” ‘Economies of scale’ is a reference to increasing, not declining, returns. And if we consult the appendix by Marshall in question, he actually claims that “perhaps [Ricardo] was justified” in assuming “the law of constant return” on the grounds that the laws of diminishing and of increasing return cancel each other out. Marshall himself believed that production of a commodity could be subject to increasing, constant or decreasing returns to scale, depending on circumstances. Thus it’s odd that Villarreal asserts that “Marshall assumed declining returns to scale.” See Alfred Marshall, “Ricardo’s Theory of Value: Appendix I,” in Principles of Economics, 8th ed. (Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1920 [1890]), Econlib, https://www.econlib.org/library/Marshall/marP.html?chapter_num=65.

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43. Mike Beggs, “Zombie Marx and Modern Economics, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Forget the Transformation Problem,” Journal of Australian Political Economy 70 (2012): 11-24.

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44. Beggs, “Zombie Marx,” Jacobin.

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45. Burgis, “Analytical Marxism,” 117.

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46. Burgis sees this as a historical variant of what he calls “Exploitation as a Broader Historical Phenomenon” (EBHP): “simply a matter of some of the hours or weeks or months of labor of the immediate producers in any mode of production (or, equivalents, the products they spend that time producing) being taken by a given ruling class.” Though he also states that—while it may be the case the capitalism is premised on exploitation via ownership of the means of production—this isn’t the case in every instance (he cites Uber drivers as an example). See: Burgis, “Analytical Marxism,” 113, 105.

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47. Burgis, “Analytical Marxism,” 117.

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48. Beggs, “Zombie Marx,” Jacobin.

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49. Ibid.

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50. Thomas M. Humphrey, “Marshallian Cross Diagrams and Their Uses before Alfred Marshall: The Origins of Supply and Demand Geometry,” Economic Review (March/April 1992), Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond: 20.

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51. Ibid, 14.

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52. Indeed, the resolution passed by the PCF in March 1966 that effectively denounced Althusser contained a passage that stated “there is a Marxist humanism.” See Louis Althusser, “Letter to the Central Committee of the PCF, 18 March 1966,” Historical Materialism 15 (2007): 153-72.

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53. V.I. Lenin, “Notes of a Publicist: On Ascending A High Mountain; The Harm Of Despondency; The Utility Of Trade; Attitude Towards The Mensheviks, Etc.,” Marxists Internet Archive, Lenin’s Collected Works Vol. 33, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Progress Publishers), 204-211, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/feb/x01.htm.

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