Marginal futility. Reflections on Simon Clarke’s Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology

Abstract

This reflection aims to address some of the problems of the old debate on subjective and objective value that goes back more than a hundred years to the early debates between Austrian economists and Marxists. In his book, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology (1991), Clarke develops a strong Marxist critique of marginalism based on Marx’s critique of bourgeois economics. Marginalism’s subjective approach to value emerged as a response to some inadequacies of classical economics. However, instead of overcoming these inadequacies, marginalism was presented as a pure, non-partisan theory that provided a naturalistic justification of capitalism. The aim of this review is to present the main arguments in Clarke’s book about how marginalism abstracts the whole of society from economic theory because of its claim that capitalism corresponds to a formal rationality rather than a substantive rationality, making the current state of affairs appear to be the permanent, unchanging and natural order of things.