Browder on Marx

...This raises more questions than it answers...

...RICHARD SCHICKEt is a free lance writer who reviews fiction regularly for The Progressive...

...Browder shows that Marx, in a report to the First International in 1865, abandoned his earlier subsistence wage theory in favor of a quite different theory, according to which the value of labor is not a fixed but a variable magnitude, and that it is powerfully influenced by concrete social conditions in a country and by traditional standards of life...

...He is co-author, with Irving Howe, of the recent book, "The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919-1957...

...Reviewed by Lewis Coser This slim volume by the one-time secretary of the American Communist Party, who was expelled in 1945 for right-wing deviationism, is of interest on several counts...

...Browder accounts for the failure of communist propaganda in terms of its unreasonable insistence on the subsistence wage theory...

...The dust jacket claims that the book presents a precise and detailed criticism of Communist theory...

...This book gives evidence of a freshness of analysis, a freedom from dogmatic rigidity, and a willingness to learn from the facts of experience, which is most refreshing, indeed...

...It wasn't that a specific theory was wrong, but the very condition of the American working class which made it resistant to the anti-capitalist message...

...Browder now shows that Marx was well aware that real wages in America were considerably higher than in England or on the continent...

...Browder now contends that most socialist and all communist propaganda and activities in America have always been based on the subsistence theory of wages, and that this non-recognition of the special social conditions of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century America condemned such propaganda to ineffectuality...

...ROBERT OZANNE is director of the School for Workers at the University of Wisconsin...

...This new theory, however, was not published until more than 30 years after it was first enunciated, and while it appears besides the earlier subsistence theory in Capital, no attempt to harmonize the two has been made...

...Marx asserted that, although there might be temporary fluctuations, in the long run workers would never achieve wages higher than a minimum that would just cover the cost of the laborers' existence and reproduction...

...For this reviewer, who has recently had to wade through many of the dreary pages of Browder's earlier writings and reports, it comes as a most pleasant surprise to note that since his expulsion he has freed himself from the dreary scholasticism of his past...

...great majority of American workers, no matter what theory they were based on...

...The bulk of the book is concerned with a discussion of Marx's doctrine that capitalism, in its development, increases the impoverishment of the working class...

...But Marx was led to explain away this "awkward" fact by asserting that it was but a temporary phenomenon which would disappear by the time America would have evolved a fully capitalist economic system...

...Marx seems not to have recognized an obvious incompatibility between them...

...tEWIS COSER is chairman of the department of sociology at Bran-deis University and an editor of Dissent...

...American labor could not accept a theory which so obviously contradicted the empirical facts and thus tended to reject all socialist and communist theories...

...JACK RAYMOND is on the Washington staff of the New York Times...

...This is not the case, but it does present an able discussion of one of the major strands of Marxist dogma, and for this we must be grateful to its author...

...If we accept his own generalization that, contrary to orthodox Marxian theory, highly developed capitalist countries have a higher wage level, it would seem more plausible to contend that the high development of American capitalism with its concomitant high wage level was a key factor in blocking appeals of communism for the THE REVIEWERS GEORGE GIBIAN is a professor in the Russian and English departments at Smith College...