Invisible Leviathan: The Marxist Critique of Market Despotism Beyond Postmodernism

O.F. Hamouda is an economics professor at York University.

The principal theme of this book is that Marx’s theory of labor-value
remains the foundation for explaining socioeconomic phenomena. Smith
takes aim both at neoclassicals and others who advocate “invisible
hand” explanations of market forces and at those who, however
sympathetic to Marx, who differ from him in their interpretation of the
labor-value notion or its importance. For Smith, the theory of
labor-value rests unquestionably on abstract labor’s creating value;
he advocates an end to using money as the measure of abstract labor,
assessing wealth in terms of abstract labor, and rejecting the
prevailing of human technical rationality over sociological,
problem-solving rationality.

The author argues that Marx regarded the drive to increase
productivity, through both labor and labor-saving technology, as rooted
in the survivalist humanity-nature relation, and that his materialist
history derived from observing a pattern of this behavior in capitalist
development. To counter the rationality of the capitalist approach,
Smith recounts the arguable specification and the results of empirical
tests of fundamental Marxian ratios, his own examined within the
Canadian economy, 1947-80. Despite what he deems a graphic and urgent
need for change from capitalism’s inherently falling profits and
antagonistic labor-valuation, Smith concludes, with 1930s- and
1950s-style Marxism, that only the radical socialist transformation he
advocates can cause its final and salutary fall.