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George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950.
Famous Irish playwright, novelist and one of the leading Fabian socialists, who hoped to marry Marxian socialism with Neoclassical value theory.
Soon after joining the Fabian Society in 1884, George Bernard Shaw came across an article by Philip H. Wicksteed criticizing Karl Marx's theory of value from the marginalist viewpoint. Although hardly versed in economic theory, Shaw bravely took it upon himself to reply to Wicksteed. But his reply was feeble, as Shaw himself was not fully convinced of Marx's labor theory of value.
Wicksteed's good-hearted rejoinder to Shaw stoked up a friendship between the two men. Shaw joined Wicksteed's "Economic Circle", a Hampstead debating society. Congenitally incapable of understanding mathematics, Shaw set himself down to understand the economics of Jevons under the private tutelage of Wicksteed. As Shaw himself recalls, he put himself "into Mr. Wicksteed's hands and became a convinced Jevonian, fascinated by the subtlety of Jevons' theory and the exquisiteness with which it adapted itself to all the cases which had driven previous economists, including Marx, to take refuge in clumsy distinctions between use value, exchange value, labour value, supply and demand value, and the rest of the muddlements of that time."
The truth about value, Shaw gradually concluded, was with the marginalists -- but that should in no way implicate the remainder of Marx's contributions. Shaw had hoped to marry Marxian and Neoclassical economists, e.g. arguing that it was the purchaser, not the capitalist, who ultimately robbed the surplus value from labor.
In 1886, Shaw launched a campaign to divest Marxism from the labor theory of value. He took aim at British Marxists, such as H.M. Hyndman, who remained obstinately attached to Marx's theory of value and urged them to adopt Jevonian theory. He gathered his articles on the topic in his Fabian Essays (1889).
Shaw's campaign did not succeed. The chapter-and-verse Marxists just became more irritated. His fellow Fabians, while sharing his dissatisfaction with the labor theory of value, were not quite prepared to fully embrace marginalist economics in its stead. Nonetheless, by weaning the Fabians off value theory, Shaw insulated their brand of Marxian socialism from being bogged down in scholastic debates on "what Marx really meant" and to concentrate on their more practical program of building socialism in Britain.
Although he is often referred today as an Irish nationalist, Shaw's attitude to the British Empire was actually much more ambivalent. Shaw prodded the Fabians to adopt a pro-imperial stance and support imperialistic adventures, such as the Boer War. His argument was simple: as socialist reform is best conducted "from above", then the spread of socialism throughout the world is best achieved by bringing the peoples of the world under a single "enlightened" government, rather than hoping that a myriad of independent nationalist movements will gradually adopt socialist sensitivities.
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All rights reserved, Gonçalo L. Fonseca