Oskar Engländer’s article reexamines Böhm-Bawerk’s criticism of Marx on the occasion of the republication of Zum Abschluß des Marxschen Systems. Its organizing distinction is between the logical consistency of an economic theory and the validity of its premises. Engländer defends the coherence of Marx’s reconciliation of labor value with equalized profit rates, while ultimately rejecting the assumptions that would make the system explain actual economic relations.
Wir müssen dabei das Marxsche Mehrwertgesetz von dem Marx-Ricardoschen Wertgesetz unterscheiden.
English translation: In doing so we must distinguish the Marxian law of surplus value from the Marx-Ricardian law of value.
This distinction separates the explanation of exchange ratios from the explanation of capitalists’ share of output. The value law relates exchange ratios to labor requirements; the surplus-value law relates capitalist income to the difference between labor performed and the labor necessary to maintain workers. Engländer reconstructs their relationship through progressively more complex models. When homogeneous labor is the sole scarce productive resource, single-stage production yields prices proportional to labor inputs. Introducing capitalist employers does not by itself alter those proportions. Nor does multistage production, provided labor is distributed identically across stages for every good.
Different production periods introduce a further determinant without, in Engländer’s reconstruction, logically destroying the original account.
Vielmehr wird nunmehr das Preisverhältnis der Güter außer von der Arbeitsmenge auch von der Zeit abhängen, über die diese Arbeitsmenge verteilt ist.
English translation: Rather, the price ratio of goods will henceforth depend, besides on the quantity of labour, also on the time over which this quantity of labour is distributed.
Prices must now accommodate both labor requirements and the duration of investment. Competition redistributes production until returns reflect the capital advanced and the time for which it is committed. Engländer treats this as a modification generated within the model, not as an incompatible explanation imported from outside it.
Es handelt sich nun um das Verhältnis des Ausgleiches der Profitrate zum Mehrwertgesetz.
English translation: What is now at issue is the relation of the equalization of the rate of profit to the law of surplus value.
The distinction between the profit rate and the surplus-value rate is decisive. The former measures income against invested capital; the latter concerns the division between workers and capitalists. Additional production stages can enlarge the capital requiring remuneration and lower the profit rate without changing the underlying division of the social product. Equalized profits therefore need not contradict the surplus-value law.
Engländer then assesses Böhm-Bawerk’s objections to four arguments offered in support of Marx’s reconciliation. He accepts that equality between aggregate prices and aggregate values cannot explain individual exchange ratios, but reads it as a proposition about compensating deviations. He also defends changes in labor requirements as the ultimate explanation of price movements within the system. This interpretation situates Marx within Ricardo’s objective-technical construction, in which differential rent represents payment for labor saved under favorable conditions.
The historical priority of exchange at labor values is a separate matter. Engländer leaves its verification to empirical inquiry and denies that the theoretical argument depends on it. A conceptual sequence can begin with labor-proportional prices and subsequently introduce rent and uniform profit without claiming that history followed those stages. The fourth argument connects total surplus value to aggregate capitalist income, derives the average profit rate by relating that income to capital, and uses this rate to modify relative prices. Within the assumed framework, wages remain linked to subsistence labor requirements, while capital expansion takes the form of longer or more elaborate production processes.
This defense does not endorse every Marxian proof. Engländer considers competition a stronger explanation of labor-proportional prices under the stipulated conditions than Marx’s own demonstration. He extends a comparable criticism to Austrian explanations of product and input prices through equality of value. Skilled labor presents another difficulty: demand-dependent wage differences can be accommodated as disturbances, but do not arise as necessary modifications of the model itself.
The conclusion relocates the strongest objection from contradiction to inadequate premises. Homogeneous labor may serve as an approximation, but scarcity rents resist the reduction of price determination to labor requirements. More fundamentally, competition can explain the equalization of wages without establishing that labor exchanges at its reproduction cost. Without that premise, the surplus-value explanation of the origin and magnitude of interest fails. Engländer thus presents Marx as a coherent developer of Ricardo’s construction whose explanatory claims remain untenable: Böhm-Bawerk’s charge of inconsistency misses the system’s more fundamental vulnerability.
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