The Vulgar (in) Marxism: Vacillating between Exchange and Production

Abstract

This essay’s exploration of the adjective “vulgar” and its function in the Marxian field begins with a debate between Abba Lerner (1903–82) and Maurice Dobb (1900–76), which foregrounded the vulgar in Marxism as a problem of economic method. The signifier thus functions as a portal to associated questions: the status of the adjective “vulgar” in Marx and Engels’s discourse; value theory’s role in the constitution of division and difference in the economics discipline; analytical Marxism’s place as a response to the crisis of Marxism in the twentieth century; the politics of market socialism or the role of markets (if any) in socialism; the necessity of mediation under any form of division of labor and the implications for Marx’s notion of associated production; and the possibility and promise of an affirmative take on the vulgar in the context of a postcapitalist pragmatics of participatory and democratic planning.