Via Chris, on Twitter (I hope I’m not preempting him here), an Open Letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist by Joan Robinson, and “Zombie Marx“, an essay by Mike Beggs. Here is Robinson, writing in 1953:
I was a student at a time when vulgar economics was in a particularly vulgar state. … There was Great Britain with never less than a million workers unemployed, and there was I with my supervisor teaching me that it is logically impossible to have unemployment because of Say’s Law. Now comes Keynes and proves that Say’s Law is nonsense (so did Marx, of course, but my supervisor never drew my attention to Marx’s views on the subject). … The thing I am going to say that will make you too numb or too hot (according to temperament) to understand the rest of my letter is this: I understand Marx far and away better than you do. (I shall give you an interesting historical explanation of why this is so in a minute, if you are not completely frozen stiff or boiling over before you get to that bit.) When I say I understand Marx better than you, I don’t mean to say that I know the text better than you do. If you start throwing quotations at me you will have me baffled in no time. In fact, I refuse to play before you begin. What I mean is that I have Marx in my bones and you have him in your mouth. … suppose we each want to recall some tricky point in Capital, for instance the schema at the end of Volume II. What do you do? You take down the volume and look it up. What do I do? I take the back of an envelope and work it out.
And here is Beggs:
There are generations of economists who would call themselves Marxists, or admit Marx as a major influence, who have … engaged with other strands of economic thought and folded them into their worldview, have worried little about dropping from their analyses those aspects of Marx’s argument they believed to be wrong or unhelpful, and have felt no need to pepper their writing with appeals to authority in the form of biblical quotations. But in each generation, there are others who have defended an “orthodox” Marxian economics as a separate and superior paradigm, which can only be contaminated by absorbing ideas from elsewhere. … If we are to engage in these ways with modern economics, what, if anything, makes our analysis distinctively Marxist? It is the two-fold project behind Capital as a critique of political economy: first to demonstrate the social preconditions that lie beneath the concepts of political economy, and especially their dependence on class relationships; and second, to demonstrate these social relations as historical, not eternal. These two strands of Marx’s thought are as valid as ever. The way to apply them today is … is to deal not only, not even mainly, with economic high theory, but also with the applied economics produced every day in the reports and statements of central banks, Treasuries, the IMF, etc., and ask, what are the implicit class relations here? Why are these the driving issues at this point in history? What are the deeper social contradictions lying behind them? The pursuit of a separate system of economics as something wholly other from mainstream economics isolates us from the political and ideological space where these things take place: better, instead, to fight from the inside, to make clear the social and political content of the categories. A side effect is that we learn to think for ourselves again about how capitalism works, to be able to answer the kinds of question DeLong raised against Harvey, no longer lost without the appropriate quotation.
{ 97 comments }
Nils 07.17.11 at 11:43 am
Hear hear!! What we need is close reading, not exegesis….
philofra 07.17.11 at 12:38 pm
George Lukacs, the influential Hungarian Marxist, also had Marx in his bones in the fact that he was nonsensical about him. He said, and I am quoting from a book, he would continue to be believe in Marxism even if every empirical prediction it made were proven to be false.
I suppose now someone is going to distinguish the difference between Marx and Marxism.
tomslee 07.17.11 at 1:59 pm
The most convincing statement on the limits of “taking down the volume (of Capital) and looking it up” was that of Smith (Mel) et al here.
imajoebob 07.17.11 at 1:59 pm
#1 – Which makes Lukacs just like Greenspan and Objectivism. Even after his policies directly lead to TWO of our worst economic debacles in less than a 20 year span.
Louis Proyect 07.17.11 at 2:00 pm
I continue to be puzzled by the spate of articles here recently against Marxism that remind me so much of the tale of the princess and the pea. But on the substance of the post, I really wonder if any of the Keynesians here have ever thought about whether deficit spending and all the other formulas associated with Keynesian economic policy have anything to do with most of the world’s nations. How is Keynesianism supposed to solve Somalia’s problems? Or Haiti’s? Or the Congo? In chapter 2 of “Economic Philosophy,” Joan Roboinson wrote:”As we see nowadays in South-East Asia or the Caribbean, the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.” This statement underlines for me why a Keynesian approach to the “3rd World” makes no sense at all. As the Monthly Review theorists, A.G. Frank et al, made clear, the lack of jobs and the spread of capitalism go hand in hand in such places. To resolve the economic misery of Haiti et al, Marx is required since–after all–his main goal was socialist revolution. All of the exercises here about value theory seem utterly besides the point. They are intended to strengthen the tepid gradualism of a segment of the academic left that is far more unscientific than anything Marx ever wrote.
dictateursanguinaire 07.17.11 at 2:01 pm
philofra at one, what are you getting at? First and foremost, your use of the phrase has almost nothing to do with what the OP meant by having “Marx in one’s bones.” Did you just write something vaguely related to Marxism.
and don’t scoff like there’s no difference between what a person says and what their successors say. “don’t try to tell me about the difference between Christ and Christians”. How about “don’t try to tell me about the difference between Muhammad and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed” – is this also acceptable by your standards?
William Timberman 07.17.11 at 2:19 pm
Numbnutsian Western Marxists have been around a long time. I missed the high tide of Marxist exegesis, but even in the Sixties, when looking for a solid criticism of the beginnings of today’s madnesses, it was possible to find oneself on a folding chair, in a windowless room in some low-rent district or another, listening to an intense young academic in a work shirt and fatigue jacket, who carried on and on and ON like the equally intense Southern Baptist preachers of my childhood.
Although in those days it was mostly about politics, not economics, it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Nevertheless, the madnesses we’d all hoped to snuff out, or at least to divert somehow, are far worse today, and the consequences we feared now seem much, much farther along.
I very much liked the Nick Begg article, for all sorts of reasons, but chiefly because he seems to have serious concerns about the social engineering of demand on a grand and sophisticated scale which, in my opinion, has given capitalism much of its second wind, quite a bit more so than its mastery of supply. If cheap-but-useful trinkets, and equally cheap, but not so useful pleasures in enormous and diverse quantities had been the only outcome, perhaps we could have forgiven capitalism for its decidedly lumpy, if not loopy, attempts at equitable distribution.
That definitely wasn’t the only outcome, and the externalized social costs — everything from the sheeplike apathy of the screwed 80% to the collapse of the biosphere ought to have somebody other than the Brad DeLongs of the world not only engaged, but enraged about them. Marxism, for all its unlovelinesses, technical and otherwise, has at least been banging rubbish bins in the alley. The next time we hear those smug references to the international community, the global war on terror, energy independence, or the Greeks-brought-it-all-on-themselves, we ought to be at least a little grateful to the true believers.
matthias 07.17.11 at 2:22 pm
This is such an egregious mischaracterization that I have difficulty believing it’s not malicious. Although much else surely divides them, Lucaks’ point here does not greatly differ from Beggs’:
The fact that the title of the essay is “What is Orthodox Marxism?” and that he contrasts himself to others with quite different conceptions of orthodoxy should make it clear that he’s interested in setting out “orthodox Marxism” as a useful concept defined more or less in this way, rather than e.g. explicating how the term “Marxism” is most commonly used by others.
William Timberman 07.17.11 at 2:36 pm
Fact check: It’s Mike Beggs, not Nick Begg. I should have read the author’s name along with his article, I guess, and not taken it straight from KH’s post.
chrismealy 07.17.11 at 3:03 pm
That Robinson letter is terrific.
matthias 07.17.11 at 3:04 pm
my last post was intended to have an inline link to the essay in question, sorry: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/orthodox.htm
(it’s a good essay, read it)
hartal 07.17.11 at 3:12 pm
Just go to the centerpiece of Beggs’ critique–supply and demand analysis.
Now by supply and demand analysis, neoclassical economics mean silly things such as *
stable* equilibrium prices, and they refuse to see the primacy of supply or
changed real-cost conditions as the ultimate determinant of equilibrium
price (to the extent that it exists) and quantity demanded and supplied.
Beggs misinterprets the supposed knock-down quote.
About it Samuel Hollander, not widely known for his Marxist sympathies, writes: “Were Marx alluding here to demand-equality at any price, including short-run market price, the assertion would be nonsensical; but he is in fact specifically concerned with equality at “market valueâ€, or long run cost price, and insisting upon cost conditions
as determining final equilibrium.’
Here is the real knock down quote, and Beggs does not even try to see how
it stands in relation to neoclassical S and D analysis:
“Should the market-value [costs] change, this would also entail a change in
the conditions on which the total mass of commodities could be sold. Should
the market-value fall, this would entail a rise in the average social demand
(this always taken to mean the effective demand), which could, within
certain limits, absorb larger masses of commodities. Should the market-value
rise, this would entail a drop in the social demand, and a smaller mass of
commodities would be absorbed. Hence, if supply and demand regulate the
market-price, or rather the deviations of the market-price from the
market-value, then, in turn, the market-value regulates the ratio of supply
to demand, or the centre round which fluctuations of supply and demand cause
market-prices to oscillate.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch10.htm
Beggs gets a bit closer to Marx’s position when he writes:
“Alfred Marshall himself argued in an appendix to his *Principles of
Economics *that his marginalist analysis did not undermine Ricardo’s theory
of long-run value, because in the long run producers shift between sectors
chasing abnormally high and fleeing abnormally low returns to their
investments, so that supply conditions determine price. Demand matters in
the long run only to the extent that the quantity produced and sold affects
the cost of production, due to economies of scale, inputs whose supply can
be increased only at increasing cost, etc. That demand or “social needâ€
could influence socially-necessary labor time and therefore value, Marx was
fully aware.â€
But in neither sentence can Beggs get himself to say that for Marx the law
of value meant the primacy of supply or changed cost conditions. At the very least, Beggs could have consulted II Rubin’s discussion of supply and demand analysis. It’s on the web; it’s easy to read. But this is not a serious attempt to engage Marxist thinking.
hartal 07.17.11 at 3:19 pm
Of course Joan Robinson could play with reproduction schema off the top of her head while a lesser mind, like mine, would have to begin with Marx’s own exposition. OK so she can figure out what the capitalization rate has to be in Div II if it is to adjust to the capitalization rate in Dept I to maintain interdepartmental equilibrium in expanded reproduction. I confess that I would not start doing this without consulting the text and working from there. I am sure Joan Robinson would not have to start with Marx’s own model and could work from her own memory or experience with Harrod-Domar growth model inferior as it is in many ways to Marx’s reproduction schema.
I really don’t see the point of her comment except to say that she is smarter than almost anyone else, certainly your ordinary Marxist. That’s true. Who cares?
hartal 07.17.11 at 3:29 pm
In this letter which was addressed to Ronald Meek IIRC, Robinson also does not get to the real problem with whether C is a stock or flow. In the reproduction schema it is both insofar as Marx assumes the constant capital is used up each period. So the value of the capital stock flows entirely to the value of the output. This is a simplifying assumption Marx made and to which he called attention in his study of equilibrium. As I remember it, Marx’s point is that things get much more difficult for equilibrium expanded reproduction when we drop that assumption. But I would have to consult the text. I can’t do this off the top of my head, and Robinson probably should have consulted the text more carefully.
Brad DeLong 07.17.11 at 3:37 pm
I would note that from my perspective Harvey’s big mistake was his claim that we could not undertake expansionary fiscal policy because we had to borrow the money from somewhere and China would not lend it to us.
As I pointed out then, this was a mistake. As Paul Krugman said a couple of weeks ago:
>Think about it: U.S. interest rates are low; there’s no crowding out going on; we are NOT suffering from a shortage of saving. So if foreign investors decide they love us, what does it do? It drives up the value of the dollar, which reduces exports, which leads to fewer jobs.
>Does this sound familiar? It’s closely related to the reasons Chinese accumulation of dollar reserves unambiguously hurts the US economy when we’re in a liquidity trap. And what we just learned is that the White House still doesn’t get it.
>Mind you, this failure to comprehend is minor compared with what’s going on across the aisle. But it’s still disappointing and depressing.
hartal 07.17.11 at 3:47 pm
Harvey does not speak for all Marxists. Marx did refer to government debt as fictitious capital. Government debt-financed spending does not itself or does not directly create surplus value, so repayment depends on future taxation or credit operations. It’s true that many Marxists have inferred from the idea that a bond represents fictitious capital to the conclusion that debt-financed government spending has to be fictitious in its effects. But this inference does not in my reading really follow from the structure of Marx’s theory. I don’t see any reason why Marx would have to deny any multiplier effect, but in a deep slump caused by a sharp reduction in profitability on marginal investments he would certainly be skeptical effect of any accelerator effect.
bert 07.17.11 at 3:55 pm
bq. #12: I would have to consult the text.
QED.
bob mcmanus 07.17.11 at 4:17 pm
Well, it’s about the tenth thesis, isn’t. Capitalism and modernism is revolutionary, and while I think Keynes, Robinson, Kalecki and Paul Davidson for examples did understand that economics needs to be revolutionary (not necessarily guillotines, but structural and systemic change) to keep up, the GFC has convinced me that the conservatism and caution of mainstream economists (who I do believe want to change the world, just a little, very slowly) is precisely what causes and intensifies the crises and dysfunctions.
Behavioral nudging and bigger bank reserves are only attempts to preserve a system that renders such tweaking irrelevant. They are counter-productive. Understanding the pernicious effects of bourgeois economics is what it means to have “Marx in your bones.” Keynes etc didn’t need Marx to understand, because to genius, the objective analysis of how economics harms the political economy is apparent in the objective conditions. The rest of us need revelation and faith to resist the consensus.
Bhaskar 07.17.11 at 4:18 pm
His name is Mike Beggs, not Nick Begg. Anyway, since the material is long out-of-print and hard to find, we’re glad to host it until the DMCA takedown notices come.
Sandwichman 07.17.11 at 4:34 pm
The Sandwichman has Marx in his BOWELS! He swallows Keynesians and shits Marxism.
The Raven 07.17.11 at 4:35 pm
“I take the back of an envelope and work it out.”
Analysis from first principles is, in the mathematical sciences, a respected way of understanding, but proofs have to be checked. Speaking as someone who works with physical simulations, this is not an easy or certain thing, even when the first principles are well-understood and reliable. There is much to be said for doing a literature search before spending hours, days, or even months or years on doing one’s own analysis.
In other words: in science, theory is not enough. There must also be experiment. The results of previous theoretical and experimental work are an important part of the knowledge of working scientists.
Two main things can go wrong with analysis from first principles: (1) the principles may themselves be wrong, or in internal conflict (as in macro vs. micro) or (2) the analysis may contain subtle logical errors (as in the failure of the freshwater school.)
But surely this is not needed any more? In this, at least, Marx has triumphed. These ideas are taken as simply true by every credible economist and historian.
I return to my broad-brush analysis of the scientific history of economics: Marx, maybe, stands in the place of Copernicus and Kepler, maybe stands in the place of Kepler. Maybe we await Newton. It is possible that he or she is already beginning to formulate their ideas. Perhaps they are even writing on the net.
matthias 07.17.11 at 4:41 pm
That little word “credible” does a lot of work, though, doesn’t it?
Sandwichman 07.17.11 at 4:51 pm
“Now comes Keynes and proves that Say’s Law is nonsense…”
Think about it dialectically, though, Joan.
“The first principle of the dialectic is that the meaning of a proposition depends on what it denies. Thus the very same proposition has two opposite meanings according to whether you come at it from above or from below.”
Say’s Law is nonsense, depending on from where you come at it. It IS logically impossible to have unemployment. Therefore the bourgeois state must invent the fiction of unemployment and enforce it. It is called primitive accumulation and is performed by enclosing the commons, violating the Charter of the Forest.
Sandwichman 07.17.11 at 5:14 pm
“You assume away the complication till you have got the main problem worked out. So Keynes began by getting money prices out of the way. Marshall’s cup of tea dissolved into thin air. But if you cannot use money, what unit of value do you take? A man hour of labour time. It is the most handy and sensible measure of value, so naturally you take it. You do not have to prove anything, you just do it.”
Blah, blah, blah, blah, Ginger. Blah, blah, blah, a man hour of labour time. Blah, blah, blah, blah.
A MAN HOUR OF LABOUR TIME??!! In that case it would be mighty handy to have (Marshall’s pupil) Sydney J. Chapman’s theory of the hours of labour available, in which 10 may very well have less value than 8. Of course, in the 1930s, at Cambridge, Chapman’s theory was known and accepted as canonical.
christian_h 07.17.11 at 5:49 pm
This whole discussion is a bit strange. Starting with that Robinson letter it utterly misses the point of Marx’s work and Marxism – which is political action, not economic analysis. Liberals who spend their time ranting against the labour theory of value or “the tendency of the rate of profit to fall” are certainly welcome to do so, but they shouldn’t claim to be engaging with Marxism. It might be noted as an aside that Robinson, besides taking the usual arrogance of liberal academia to an extreme, also was a supporter of the cultural revolution. Guess she also “worked that out on the back of an envelope”.
The Raven 07.17.11 at 6:02 pm
“political action, not economic analysis”
“Patience my ass. Let’s kill something.”
Political action without strategy is not likely to go well. And strategy, in turn, must be based on analysis if it is to be effective. This doesn’t mean one must analyze things to death, but it does mean that taking thought before taking action is worthwhile.
I live in the USA. What action would you suggest? That’s a serious question. It looks like we are on track for a ten-year depression. All the people with the power to act to set matters right are not acting. So what do people without that kind of power do to improve matters when there finally is the possibility of action? How do we get through the long cold time?
bert 07.17.11 at 6:57 pm
#22: Read the Beggs piece, particularly the final section. It’s not exactly a call to arms, but it does point the analysis in a practical direction. His criticism of the scholastic tendency is that it precisely fails to do this.
hartal 07.17.11 at 6:57 pm
Kieran,
This Marx discussion seems to be going nowhere, given some proudly nescient posting.
So may I ask you to blog about organ donation. Your book looks absolutely fascinating I have four questions:
1. What do you make of “Dirty Pretty Things”?
2. Do you know the work of Lawrence Cohen; what do you think of it? My wife found it very insightful, and told me about it.
3. What about Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Die?
4. Ricardo’s and Marx’s value theory would have ruled out organs as commodities; Bohm-Bawerk could have accommodated them. How do you understand value in the case of marketable that the classical economists would not have considered freely reproducible, and thus commodities?
hartal 07.17.11 at 7:05 pm
The scholastic tendency is least pronounced among Marxists. Beggs does not know what he is talking about.
Even Kliman’s work is not entirely exegetical. He has measured the profit rate and the OCC in his own way. His cowriter Alan Freeman is very politically engaged, and writes a lot about politics. He contributed to the volume on quantitative Marxism. Foley and Shaikh do a lot of empirical work. So have Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff who by the way is one of the most dynamic speakers I have ever heard–he can connect with an audience of unionists in truly profound ways. Desai, a revisionist, obviously feels at home in the world. Prabhat Patnaik’s work is as empirically rich as it comes. Dumenil and Levy are empiricists. Harvey who I think was out of his depth in the discussion with DeLong (but who isn’t) has done very interesting work on spatial fixes, the history of Paris and the architectural contours of flexible capitalism. And I am only counting work done by people considered to be Marxist economists.
hartal 07.17.11 at 7:15 pm
The idea that people like Hans Ehrbar and Al Campbell at Utah are scholastic is risible. Ehrbar for example is a profoundly informed ecological activist and he has prepared something like a 1000 page annotated edition of Capital !. These are not scholastic or lesser minds you are dealing with. Calling them zombies is out-of-bounds.
christian_h 07.17.11 at 7:37 pm
The Raven (23.): Of course there must be, to be ‘scholastic’, a “unity of theory and practice”. What I strongly object to is the tendency to reduce Marxism to an academic exercise (which isn’t to say that academics can’t be political activists as well). It’s not, and it never has been. The goal of Marx’s work, and of the vast majority of Marxists since (certainly those organized in any fashion) has been to achieve social and political change, and in particular, to overcome the capitalist mode of production. It’s debatable whether these are realistic goals, whether any reasonable tactics to achieve them are available, or even whether some intricacy of the Marxist approach to economics brings the whole house down, if you will. But Robinson’s letter is meant as a contribution to debate within academic economics, and that’s a different animal.
Begg’s contribution is quite interesting and I wouldn’t disagree with the thrust of it, yet it is still a discussion of economics as an analytical enterprise. Besides, he’s breaking down open doors, surely.
bert 07.17.11 at 7:45 pm
bq. he has prepared something like a 1000 page annotated edition of Capital
QED2.
skidmarx 07.17.11 at 8:13 pm
@bert – I refer you to the work of Hal Draper, who combined an incredibly detailed knowledge of Marx’s works with a lifelong interest in aplying them to the world, so perhaps it still requires demonstration.
I think there are a lot of Marxists who think that Marx’s economics can be defended in toto because the whole thing does hang together, and the passage of time has changed the detail but not the fundamentals. Obviously the rise of imperialism has required some new thinking, but to build on the original rather than to supersede it.
The pet trade is a multi-billion dollar industry that treats animals as commodities to be bought and sold for profit. This leads to suffering on a massive scale when animals are warehoused, bred for sale, denied socialization and basic veterinary care, and finally transported with minimal care.
Even the San Francisco Commission of Animal Control & Welfare can see what capitalism is like.
bert 07.17.11 at 8:19 pm
I don’t want to be unfair to hartal.
I misread his #27.
He was offering “he has prepared something like a 1000 page annotated edition of Capital” as evidence that someone might be thought scholastic, and “a profoundly informed ecological activist” as evidence that he in fact wasn’t.
Apologies.
John Quiggin 07.17.11 at 9:58 pm
“Liberals who spend their time ranting against the labour theory of value or “the tendency of the rate of profit to fall†are certainly welcome to do so, but they shouldn’t claim to be engaging with Marxism.”
And yet, when I wrote a post which started from the minor premise “labour theory of value is wrong/uninteresting”, and went on to ask how we (social democrats and liberals) should best engage with Marx’s theory of capital in its absence, I got 293 comments pointing out that anyone who didn’t accept the centrality of the LTV to Marxist thought was a tool of the bourgeoisie.
christian_h 07.17.11 at 10:20 pm
Zero of those comments were mine. And I’d be stunned if all 293 comments to that post did in fact address the LTV.
Sandwichman 07.17.11 at 10:20 pm
“…anyone who didn’t accept the centrality of the LTV to Marxist thought was a tool…”
The elaboration and critique of the LTV (as in contrast between value in use and value in exchange, commodity form and the fetishism of commodities) is central to Marx’s thought. Is that the same thing? In the Grundrisse “fragment on machines” Marx blows the LTV “sky high.”
christian_h 07.17.11 at 10:25 pm
In fact lazily checking the first 30 comments to that post or so only a handful seem to be by people who would call themselves Marxists and only two directly defend the LTV. Neither claims it’s “central to Marxism”. I guess we see the usual relationship between liberal economics and empiricism displayed here…
Lee A. Arnold 07.17.11 at 10:36 pm
Tomslee #2 “The most convincing statement on the limits of “taking down the volume (of Capital) and looking it up†was that of Smith (Mel) et al here.”
“The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.” — attributed to Oscar Wilde.
I think the cleverest thing ever said about Marx is that he and Freud are two sides of the SAME coin. (I first found the idea I think in Anthony Wilden’s fine book System and Structure, which is heavily influenced by Lacan.)
In essence, Marx and Freud represented a contemporary emergence of the idea that there is an “underlying disease”.
But their intellectual coincidences and oppositions go well beyond this, and are rather striking. One is exterior, one interior.
Both have had their basic categories discredited — indeed “alienation” is finally unmeasurable as “anxiety” — yet their indications of class struggle, and of semiconscious psychological aggregates, BOTH remain for us, or almost all of us, the general way to think.
So their basic outlooks hit us right between the eyes. Yet these were nearly unverbalized before they wrote — the biggest precursors of Marx and Freud are respectively Hegel and Vico (whether or not Freud ever knew this), and of course Hegel and Vico are from an entirely different era of thinking, something we might group within the framework of the Ancient Classical modes of thought.
The appearance of this coin in two people at the same historical moment might be the more general phenomenon of those moments when prior intellectual gains suddenly crystallise in different people.
(If there is a technical name for the bridge from the Vico/Hegel categorical understandings to the new Freud/Mark attitude, I don’t know what it is, but I would surely love to… It may be part of the overthrow of the Great Chain of Being by the evolutionary way of thinking — see Arthur O. Lovejoy. The only problem for a scientific understanding of this phenomenon is that “evolutionary psychology” or its equivalent must be called upon to describe intellectual emergence as a reorganization caused by warring subsystems, inside of something. This may become considered to be intellectually endless, due to logical circularities and so forth. Yet the basic form of the idea that first appeared in Marx and Freud will at once be apprehensible.)
There are many other examples of simultaneous realization of course; most people know that Newton and Leibnitz independently crystallised the calculus. Most people do NOT know that Joyce and Jung independently crystallized the idea of a “collective unconscious”. Leibnitz won in the symbolical representation of calculus, and Joyce’s use of a collective unconscious merely as a ridiculous Rabelaisian literary conceit shows the greater intellectual power, and provides the lasting joke. (Finnegans Wake is among other things a final artistic/philosophical crossing of vectors converging since Vico, and Joyce was clearly conscious of this.)
Lee A. Arnold 07.17.11 at 10:56 pm
John Quiggin #35: I got 293 comments pointing out that anyone who didn’t accept the centrality of the LTV to Marxist thought was a tool of the bourgeoisie.”
I wrote 4 or 5 of those comments trying to argue that although Mark’s theory of labor value is useless, today’s economics has not presented a value theory that is traceable to anything other than human effort or intention; moreover that today’s economics has not presented any sort of explanatory theory or even a coherent view of why a rearrangement of institutions is going to be required, shortly.
Random Lurker 07.17.11 at 10:59 pm
@John Quiggin 35
Sorry, but I think that I wrote in my comments in that thread that the LTV was not Marx’s theory of value (since today we usually mean “use value” with value) and that the core of the Capital was the concept of capital continuous accumulation, not the LTV.
John Quiggin 07.17.11 at 11:21 pm
Apologies for thread derailment. To restate, my starting point was that the LTV was not what we should be talking about, and that the point to engage with Marx’s ideas about capital was to think about capital as a social relation. The comments took all sorts of different positions, but pretty clearly demonstrated a high degree of concern with the debates surrounding LTV and very little with the issues where I saw some hope of productive engagement. And, as with every other discussion of (topics related to) LTV that I’ve ever seen, it went nowhere.
Anyway, apologies once again for snarking. Please let’s not let this thread be swallowed as mine was..
Shatterface 07.17.11 at 11:23 pm
I don’t know about the mouth or the bones but I did sociology in the Eighties and I had Marxism up the wazoo.
Marx and Freud (or Lacan) were synthesised (dialectically, of course) by Althusser.
Althusser wasn’t just in denial about empirical challenges to Marxist orthodoxy, he attacked the empirical method itself as ideological, abolishing the human ‘subject’ while he was at it.
Sandwichman 07.17.11 at 11:25 pm
“And, as with every other discussion of (topics related to) LTV that I’ve ever seen, it went nowhere.”
Also works elliptically: And, as with every other discussion… it went nowhere.
Sandwichman 07.17.11 at 11:26 pm
Marx and Freud (or Lacan) were synthesised (dialectically, of course) by Althusser.
Don’t mean strangled?
Shatterface 07.17.11 at 11:30 pm
‘Don’t mean strangled?’
And yet you’ll still see him cited as an authority by Marxist feminists.
bob mcmanus 07.17.11 at 11:35 pm
If there is a technical name for the bridge from the Vico/Hegel categorical understandings to the new Freud/Marx attitude, I don’t know what it is, but I would surely love to…
“Decadent Romanticism?”
And you forgot Nietzsche, who wouldn’t be normative about it all, and admitted his decadence. There is nothing wrong with it, the era determines. There is no doubt that Marx and probably JS Mill are the decadence (Nietzsche) of classical economics and classical liberalism.
Kieran 07.17.11 at 11:38 pm
My apologies for mangling Mike Begg’s name: I posted this after a long drive and was very tired. It’s been corrected.
John Quiggin 07.17.11 at 11:47 pm
You’re still Begging him, apostrophically, at least !
John Quiggin 07.17.11 at 11:48 pm
Of course, I managed to name the wrong Miliband as Leader of the Opposition, the only surprising thing being that his brother’s name was in my memory store at all.
Kieran 07.17.11 at 11:49 pm
1. What do you make of “Dirty Pretty Things� 3. What about Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Die?
I liked (1), and (3) (Never Let Me Go) a little less.
2. Do you know the work of Lawrence Cohen; what do you think of it? My wife found it very insightful, and told me about it.
Yes. of course. It’s good—there’s a group of anthropologists who’ve done a lot of valuable work on the black/grey market in organs, which isn’t something my book examines.
4. Ricardo’s and Marx’s value theory would have ruled out organs as commodities; Bohm-Bawerk could have accommodated them. How do you understand value in the case of marketable that the classical economists would not have considered freely reproducible, and thus commodities?
I don’t have a direct answer to the “value” part of this, beyond saying that markets in human organs & tissues are an interesting case for both neoclassical and Marxist economists: Chicago-style neoclassicals want to treat them like any other commodity, of course. And the connection to labor/bodily exploitation is immediate for the other side. In the book I spend a few sentences talking about how many of Marx’s metaphors about the situation of labor under capitalism involve images of blood, vampirism, bodily violation, money becoming incarnate, etc.
Kieran 07.17.11 at 11:50 pm
You’re still Begging him, apostrophically, at least !
Crap. I am very tired.
bob mcmanus 07.17.11 at 11:51 pm
Althusser wasn’t just in denial about empirical challenges to Marxist orthodoxy, he attacked the empirical method itself as ideological, abolishing the human ‘subject’ while he was at it.
Althusser was wrong about a lot, but that should be taken seriously. Nietszsche had uncomplimentary things to say about empiricism.
The usual “Big Three” are Marx, Freud, and Darwin, but the problem with that is the fans of Darwin can’t see his decadent romanticism and thus try to repair or critique the other two on the basis of an “empiricism”
By putting Nietzsche as the third 19thcentury giant who nobody claims was an empiricist, you then view the other two, and then perhaps Darwin, in their true lights as Manfred manques, modern Prometheans.
Shatterface 07.18.11 at 12:06 am
‘Althusser was wrong about a lot, but that should be taken seriously. Nietszsche had uncomplimentary things to say about empiricism.’
The empirical method and empiricism aren’t quite the same thing – and Althusser treated them as if they were. In fact, he treated both as if they were positivism.
The empirical method recognises the influence theory has on experience.
Shatterface 07.18.11 at 12:10 am
‘The usual “Big Three†are Marx, Freud, and Darwin, but the problem with that is the fans of Darwin can’t see his decadent romanticism and thus try to repair or critique the other two on the basis of an “empiricismâ€
I suspect Darwin will still be taught 100 years from now. Historians might teach Marx because of the influence he had on 20th Century geopolitics but Freud will be forgotten before L Ron Hubbard.
William Timberman 07.18.11 at 12:29 am
Shatterface @ 54-55
But only belatedly, it seems to me, although practicing scientists were always far more humble about such things than the propagandists for science were.
I doubt this very much. Whatever his faults, Freud, along with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, represented a recovery of things mislaid by the Enlightenment, and together signaled, if you like, something of a return of the collective repressed on the one hand, and a warning against hubris on the other.
I’m a little surprised that no one has yet raised the specter of Marcuse or Norman O. Brown in this thread. I mean, if we’re going to go after Althusser…. Perhaps it’s just that I’ve lived too long, and my list of fashionable bête noires is a couple of decades out of date.
bob mcmanus 07.18.11 at 12:40 am
There are several dialectics goin on with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in that while they return to the understanding that truth is a social construct, they simultaneously romantically viewed themselves as those modern Prometheans, heroes seeking the objective reality “out there.” There are even sometimes self-aware.
Darwin is like totally lost in the Victorian imperialist romantic ideology, the free and courageous scientist discovering the truth in the beaks of finches and leading the poor confused masses to the promised land. Hilarious.
LFC 07.18.11 at 1:07 am
Darwin, Marx, and Freud all had a major impact on cultural and political life in much of the world and therefore all three will be read 100 years from now. For example Freud, as filtered through and probably distorted by American psychoanalysis, had a considerable effect in the U.S. in the 50s and 60s and beyond. I’m just glancing now at the introduction to Benjamin Nelson, ed., Freud and the Twentieth Century, published in 1957, in which Nelson wrote: “Freud seems destined to be the bridge from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.” If one were to replace “the bridge” with “a bridge,” the statement is not absurd; it could certainly be set on an exam as in “Freud seems destined [etc.]. Discuss.”
Steve LaBonne 07.18.11 at 1:07 am
You are like totally full of shit. Darwin was one of the most meticulous, down to earth, hard-working observers in the history of science.
Lee A. Arnold 07.18.11 at 1:08 am
Darwin’s final influence will be profound, long after Marx and Freud are “also-rans”. (And in this sense Darwin’s influence partly belongs to Wallace: another case of simultaneous intellectual crystallisation or new emergence.)
That is because evolution turns Western cosmology from top-down to bottom-up. Do not fail to read The Great Chain of Being. We have entered a completely different cosmology after the reign of the Absolute for milennia.
It completely inverts the intentional framework, or the pitching-receiving logic of the actants used in discourse construction.
It brings back atomism and suggests reductionism while compensating holistically (i.e. non-reductionistically) with feedbacks and new emergence. Nothing is there that was not there before; it just completely reconfigures it.
Hegel’s idealism is vaguely traceable in the concept of emergence.
Inverse traces of Vico’s linguistic explanation were derailed for a while by logical positivism (or more precisely, the ding an sich or explanatory power claimed of logical positivism) until it was rather precisely inverted by the later Wittgenstein: The higher logical type (of the intentional context) is involved in CONSTRUCTING the meaning.
Shatterface #43: “Marx and Freud (or Lacan) were synthesised (dialectically, of course) by Althusser.”
–Thank you. I see now that Wilden references Althusser. I remember the main arguments but not all the attributions in the book, though it sits on my prominent shelf for thirty-five years.
Bob McManus #53 — I know Darwin was simultaneous with romanticism, which suggests some interesting points about simultaneous crystallization, for me. And I want to thank you for that! But I do not understand how the theory of evolution itself is romantic… On Nietzsche? — to me, he is describing the mental correlates of psychosomatic pain, — and said lots of humorous stuff about it! Of which, he may have gone through a good deal himself! A sort of a 19th century Catskills comedian, and brilliant for all time like an aphoristic Montaigne.
From my own insignificant perch, I would neither doubt nor deny that there is a lot of psychosomatics in romanticism.
Colin Danby 07.18.11 at 1:09 am
Re #5 and a few others we can distinguish between the analytical tools developed by Keynes and Post Keynesians and the political positions associated with them; the latter are all over the map. There’s a large and long-standing Keynes-Marx synthesis literature; one recent example is Jonathan Goldstein and Michaal Hillard’s 2009 _Heterodox Economics: Keynes, Marx and Globalization._
I see via http://scandalum.wordpress.com/ that Beggs has a longer and more academic version of the piece at http://scandalum.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/zombie-marx-and-modern-economics.pdf
philofra 07.18.11 at 1:57 am
“What I mean is that I have Marx in my bones and you have him in your mouthâ€
Well, I am just going to write what came into my head. I was told not to be afraid of expressing myself. This is what came to mind: Perhaps you have Marx in your diapers.
Mike Beggs 07.18.11 at 2:02 am
Thanks for the interest and engagement guys. I’m glad the Joan Robinson piece seems to have struck a chord with people.
Thanks for posting the link Colin – yes, my Jacobin piece started as a conference paper which has some more material in it – a little more on supply and demand in Marx, but substantially more on the value of money, which might be a less contentious issue. I changed the tone a little for the magazine version, though, and added the Joan Robinson.
I can’t hope to respond to everything here but I do want to reply to Hartal, who certainly knows what he is talking about, and who may not be as far from my point of view as he thinks.
At #12, Hartal makes exactly the point I was in fact making. The quote about supply and demand explaining nothing is a ‘knock-down argument’ against neoclassical price theory for so many interpreters of Marx, not for Marx himself – who had no such neoclassical theory to react against. I was trying to point out the anachronism, and show that Marx was actually drawing on proto-marginalist arguments himself in that section – Hartal’s quote is a further example along the same lines as the ones I gave, and there are still more in the conference paper version of my article. Also in the paper, which might make things clearer, is some material from Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis, where he makes the point that when the pre-marginalist classicals talked about supply and demand they generally had no conception of these as schedules or curves. Effectively, in these passages, Marx was criticising this position _with_ the concept of demand schedules.
As Hartal notes, Samuel Hollander has noticed this stuff in Marx, and so did Isaak Rubin way back in the 1920s – in fact there are supply and demand curves in his ‘Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value’. But it has been lost on many Marxists.
Mike Beggs 07.18.11 at 2:15 am
As for the likes of Duncan Foley and Anwar Shaikh (Hartal’s comment #29), I do not consider them the target of my critique at all. They are excellent, creative economists who do not argue from authority. I tried to make it clear in my piece that I was criticising a certain kind of scholasticism that still absorbs far too much energy within the Marxian tradition. As I wrote:
Foley and Shaikh are part of the solution here, not part of the problem. In fact Foley has a talk from 1989 on his website which I highly recommend, in which he makes the same call I do for young radical economists to engage with the mainstream:
Mike Beggs 07.18.11 at 2:28 am
Sorry, the link for that Foley talk: http://homepage.newschool.edu/~foleyd/ideo.pdf
Finally, on the likes of Ehrbar and other serious Marxologists (Hartal comment #30). Clearly, I have also been a big consumer of Marxology and it is work I have a lot of respect for – as intellectual history. Intellectual history is great for ideas and inspiration, and to understand the development of your discipline or tradition. But there should be a separation between history of thought and analysis itself – the former should be mined for as much as it can give us, but it shouldn’t be allowed to weigh us down.
But Marxism all too easily lapses back into interpretation of its founding texts. In my piece I suggested some reasons for that – it’s held together not as an academic discipline but by shared commitment to a fractious political tradition, so that the founding texts are about all everyone can agree on. Or, at least, agree that they were important. From that we have the embarrassing phenomenon that arises when analytical disagreements can’t just be analytical disagreements but have to dress themselves up in rival interpretations and shadow-box.
bianca steele 07.18.11 at 3:06 am
@21
Huh. Surely there should be a mathematical means of verifying simulations are correct before you waste computer time on them.
Sandwichman 07.18.11 at 4:03 am
Beggs dismisses Marx’s alleged “knockdown argument” against supply and demand with the following explanation: “the marginalists who inaugurated neoclassical analysis meant something quite different by ‘supply and demand’. They thought in terms of supply and demand schedules or curves – this is precisely what constitutes the marginalist revolution and separates the neoclassicals from the classicals.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but these supply and demand schedules were (and are) essentially microeconomic and the challenge (or impossibility) remains of aggregating them. If I recall correctly, John Q. has something to say about the “microfoundations” and the DSGE models that purportedly provide “the framework for answering this question” of “what determined the level of supply and demand.”
It would help Beggs’s knockdown of Marx’s supposed knockdown of supply and demand, he would credit the real slayer of the supply and demand theory, William Thomas Thornton, whose arguments also changed John Stuart Mill’s mind about the classical Wages-Fund Doctrine.
This is not to dispute Beggs’s broader point, which I suppose is that there is much to be learned from cross fertilization of neoclassical analysis and Marx’s analysis that could move beyond either a Frankenstein or a Zombie Marxism. There is also much to be learned by turning to some of Marx’s scantily-credited radical precursors, such as Sismondi, Charles Wentworth Dilke, Thomas Paine and William Godwin.
Sandwichman 07.18.11 at 4:11 am
Shorter Sandwichman: what’s the logic of knocking down a Zombie with another Zombie?
matthias 07.18.11 at 4:14 am
Perhaps he [Bob] is [like full of shit], but what does Darwin’s being one of the most meticulous, down to earth, hard-working observers in the history of science have to do with it? Dare I say that he would be cited by biologists even if he had strangled his wife?
Linnaeus 07.18.11 at 4:27 am
Okay, I need to read a lot more Marx. I’ll be back when I’ve done that.
David Moles 07.18.11 at 4:32 am
@62 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
hartal 07.18.11 at 4:32 am
OK John Quiggin.
What is capital as a social relation? You say that capital is not dead labor; nor does Marx really. But for the sake of progress let us leave that aside.
What do you mean by capital as a social relation? Joan Robinson once noted that economists write down the production function so many times that they learn not to ask what is really meant by K and L.
The standard def of capital as a social relation:
1. private ownership of means of production
2. production of commodities for profit
3. formally free wage labor.
But of course this has the same limits as Marx’s focus.
No asset markets
No organized labor
Implicit perfect competition
Only a minimal state
Aow do we define money? Perhaps the fundamental problem with Marx’s theory as he left it is the lack of any theory of credit, plus the supposition (really theoretical argument) that money had to be a commodity.
In that sense Marx leaves us little to make sense of today. How for example will we be able to make sense of the currency wars on the horizon on the basis of Marx’s theory of money as he left it to us? Not easily to say the least.
Yet there are resources in the Marxist tradition to tackle contemporary problems.
For example–and this has been missed even by Marxists since Sweezy–Hilferding did provide a brilliant analysis of the securitization process, showing how financial capital could make such fantastic promoters’ profit by capitalizing income flows in relation to the prevailing market rate of interest that it (finance capital) could come to dominate society.
Of course this was central to how Wall Street, understating risk with the connivance of the credit agencies, made money by securitizing everything from mortgages to rock band royalties to delinquent taxes for investors looking for yield lift.
David Moles 07.18.11 at 4:33 am
Sorry, that @62 should read @66. At least till a few more comments make it out of moderation.
hartal 07.18.11 at 4:36 am
OK I wrote the above comment before I saw Mike Beggs’ thoughtful replies. With such serious minds here, I am excited at the prospect of learning a lot.
Mike Beggs 07.18.11 at 4:44 am
Sandwichman (at # 67) – see my response (#63) to Hartal above about the ‘knock-down argument’. It was stuck in the moderation filter for a while.
I fully agree with your point about the problem with explaining the whole system of prices with supply and demand alone. I didn’t mean to imply that supply-and-demand was all there was to it, and I did say that this was why Marx preferred Ricardo’s to Smith’s value theory in the first place.
This issue of course brought us the classic general equilibrium critique of partial equilibrium, though I think Marshall, the quintessential partial equilibrium man, actually did general equilibrium better than the Walrasians when he put his mind to it. But Robinson did it better still – a couple of Robinson’s main themes across her whole career were (1) a critique of marginalist theories of distribution, and (2) the point that Walrasian general equilibrium was not really the right way to deal with general interdependencies between markets in a world with real historical time and and unpredictable future.
Bhaskar 07.18.11 at 4:47 am
Peter Frase has a blog post, as well, http://jacobinmag.com/blog/?p=642 that riffs off some of Mike’s points and John Quiggin’s recent series.
bert 07.18.11 at 10:13 am
“Beggs does not know what he is talking about.”
“With such serious minds here, I am excited at the prospect of learning a lot.”
I’ll just observe, nesciently, that this is a temperament revealing itself.
Steve LaBonne 07.18.11 at 11:10 am
Everything. As a thinker he was the very opposite of the kind of grand romantic system-builder that intellectually lazy humanists ignorant of biology have often imagined him to be.
bob mcmanus 07.18.11 at 12:40 pm
78:No, La Bonne I meant what I said, and I know who Darwin was. It is exactly the careful collection of evidence and data, and the accumulation of cautious argument supported by said evidence that will change the world and the minds of men, that is the Western Imperial Hegemony. There is a romance to the withdrawn apolitical humble toiler, like the Curies, the scientists and investigators, that has origins in the Romanticism of Faust and Manfred. Axel’s Castle. The scientist as Romantic Hero is most apparent in science fiction.
Now Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche also fell into the seduction of the boring of hard boards, but they also knew that the truth would not set people free.
Steve LaBonne 07.18.11 at 12:42 pm
Grandiose, empty twaddle. It’s the method for making any sort of real intellectual advance, in West or East or any points in between.
Shatterface 07.18.11 at 1:04 pm
‘Darwin, Marx, and Freud all had a major impact on cultural and political life in much of the world and therefore all three will be read 100 years from now. For example Freud, as filtered through and probably distorted by American psychoanalysis, had a considerable effect in the U.S. in the 50s and 60s and beyond. I’m just glancing now at the introduction to Benjamin Nelson, ed., Freud and the Twentieth Century, published in 1957, in which Nelson wrote: “Freud seems destined to be the bridge from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.†If one were to replace “the bridge†with “a bridge,†the statement is not absurd; it could certainly be set on an exam as in “Freud seems destined [etc.]. Discuss.â€
I doubt there’s a serious psychology book published in the last 50 years that treats Freud as more than a footnote in the prehistory of psychology. He’s big with literary theorists or in cultural studies departments where evidence or theoretical consistency don’t have much of a value, but he set the science of psychology back by about a century.
Darwin though, along with Mandel, is pretty central to biology and associated disciplines.
tomslee 07.18.11 at 1:05 pm
“There is a romance to the withdrawn apolitical humble toiler, like the Curies, the scientists and investigators, that has origins in the Romanticism of Faust and Manfred.”
Au contraire. There is a romance to the extrovert rabble-rousing demagogue. Plus, Faust was a cautionary tale, no? Humble toil is just that – humble – and all the more to be admired for its lack of presumption.
I’m with Steve LaBonne on this. The problem is that this sentence could be completed a million ways, none of them exactly wrong, but none with much content to them either: “It is exactly the [insert method here] that will change the world and the minds of men, that is the Western Imperial Hegemony.”
bianca steele 07.18.11 at 1:45 pm
@73
Yeah, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_proof. Are you saying you don’t care whether a program is correct?
Sandwichman 07.18.11 at 1:52 pm
Mike Beggs @75, Thanks for drawing my attention to to your reply @63 to hartal @12. I still think there is huge hole in neoclassical value theory that your discussion of supply and demand schedules elides. I would draw your attention to David Spencer’s writing on the disappearance of labour from neoclassical value theory and to Rob Bryer’s on Marx’s theory of value as an accounting convention rather than as the ultimate determinant of some presumably “objective” exchange value.
Sandwichman 07.18.11 at 1:54 pm
Gosh, there’s a lot of NOISE in this comment thread!
Random Lurker 07.18.11 at 2:25 pm
It seems to me that this post is in line with Quiggin’s serie on “Marx without revolution”, and basically states that – yeah maybe Marx was cool in the 19th century, but later developements in economic/politic thought are much better so it is time to stop worring about the Bearded One and just move on.
However, I’d like to pose the question from the opposite perspective, using a personal annedocte:
When I voted the first time for italian general elections, the italian communist party (PCI), that since a lot of years was clearly a non-revolutionary, social-democratic party, chose to drop the name “communist” and the hammer and sickle symbol, becoming the PDI. I tought: correct, the hammer and sickle give a stalinist message, so a social democratic party would drop it. A fringe of the party decided to keep the name and create a new party, called “rifondazione comunista” (RC) and the hammer and sickle as a logo, and I thought, “what anacronistic and stupid idea”.
However, during the electoral debates, a politician from PDI clearly stated that they wanted to replicate Blair’s politics, whereas politicians from RC were more interested in things like 35h workweek and pro-immigrant policies, and I voted RC.
Later on, whenever (very often) there was a split between the “center left” party and the “hammer and sickle” guys, I found myself on the side of the hammer and sickle: opposition to various wars, redefinition of the minimum wage (that in pratice today cannot be applied to more than 50% of the contracts, because some new forms of contract can “dodge” the requirements), request for stricter rules for aforementioned new contracts and so on.
In the end, the only (very minoritarian) parties that stood in Italy for an effective social-democratic policy (as opposed to a less extreme liberist policy), were the guys with the hammer and sickle.
Hence, my point: the problem of the left, today, is an “Overton window” problem: choices that are not inspired by a liberistic economic theory are simply not considered “serious”, and thus are relegated to the “non serious” parties: so called “extreme” left and, for protectionistic policies, really extreme social right.
To change this, it is necessarious to shift leftwards the Overton window, thinking of leftish policies (statal intervention in the economy) from a “supply side” point of view, and not just from a “demand side”, because the demand side argument often imply that most economic activity is better done by privates, and thus lead to the rightwards shift of the window.
LFC 07.18.11 at 3:15 pm
Shatterface @81:
I have no particular stake in defending Freud but it’s wrong to imply, as you do, that psychology, literary theory, and cultural studies exhaust the fields that might be interested in Freud. See e.g. Paul Roazen’s and Jeffrey Abramson’s books on Freud’s social/political thought. (Or from a different angle Frank Sulloway’s, with subtitle “biologist of the mind,” which I haven’t read.)
The notion that someone has to have been right in order to be read 100 years from now is preposterous. There are all kinds of reasons that X might be read 100 years from now, and only one of those reasons is that X was right or contributed to the cumulative development of a science as that development has come to be thought of by its practitioners. You are evidently unaware that there is such a thing as intellectual history and that studying the development of ideas and doctrines can be important even when the ideas were totally or partially wrong or were subsequently rejected by most practitioners of a particular science. Your comment is indicative of a narrow, blinkered concern with the development of the “science of psychology,” presumably b/c you are a psychologist, and your suggestion that anyone who “set the science of psychology back” is therefore worthless is not one that I think many people (except perhaps professors of psychology) will accept.
William Timberman 07.18.11 at 3:34 pm
Sandwichman @ 85
Yes, there is. The trick is to try and make some sort music out of it, and by that measure, I don’t think we’ve done so badly. If you look at all the names mentioned, and the critiques advanced, even those not seemingly relevant to the post, it’s hard not to see the shadow of a dialectic at work, and consequently some small measure of justice being done.
Was Darwin a romantic, or did he slowly, patiently, humbly turn our understanding of how we fit into the world inside out? Was Freud a literary figure rather than a scientific one? Was Nietzsche describing his own unspecified psychosomatic ailment? Did Marx, as Brad DeLong put it some months back, get so deep into the weeds of the LTV that he was never able to find his way out again?
I doubt that anyone commenting here thinks that the answers to such questions depend merely on one’s point of view, nor, on the other hand, that such questions can be completely dispensed with by a simple yes or no.
Shatterface @ 54 says:
Well, this may be a cheap shot, but when I look around, what I see everywhere is the fruits of the empirical method being accepted by virtually every Serious Person (using Krugman’s formulation) as the foundation of an arguably terminal case of positivism. I think that Lee A. Arnold has the right of it here. We know lots and lots of things that Freud and Marx didn’t know, but the malady lingers on. The reasons why this is so aren’t simple, and do deserve our attention. Perhaps the more diffuse — and the more heretical — that attention is, the better off we’ll be in the long run.
Walt 07.18.11 at 4:07 pm
I think Serious Person is from Atrios, and Krugman picked it up.
If we can lay the fruits of the empirical method at the feet of positivism, then I’d have to say positivism is looking pretty good right about how. The failure of Serious People is that researchers keep handing them the fruits of the empirical method and they just won’t eat the goddamn things.
William Timberman 07.18.11 at 4:40 pm
Apologies to Atrios. Yes, what you say is true enough — anthropogenic global warming being the most visible example. But that’s my point, in a way. They’re stupid, these Serious Ones, and they’re venal. They take from the results of scientific research only those juicy bits which seem to serve them, chief among them the idea that they can solve any problem, control any opposing force, and remain absolutely immune to any form of mental and social instability in their own ranks. If you’re not cop, you’re little people, so to speak.
What is the Pentagon if not a bloated faith in the absolute efficacy of remotely-controlled explosives? Exactly how did the patient experimentation of the Wright Brothers evolve into Full Spectrum Dominance? Serious People consider this the march of progress. Why doesn’t interest them, only how. It isn’t that the empirical method is a form of positivism, it’s that positivism is still the religion of the Serious, and the empirical method furnishes them with the tools necessary to maintain the very self-serving delusions that its catechism demands.
Louis Proyect 07.18.11 at 4:44 pm
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/marxism-and-keynesianism/
john c. halasz 07.18.11 at 11:33 pm
Hartal #72:
“Aow do we define money? Perhaps the fundamental problem with Marx’s theory as he left it is the lack of any theory of credit, plus the supposition (really theoretical argument) that money had to be a commodity.”
This comment I don’t quite get. No theory of finance and credit? What’s Vol.3/pt. 5? What about the prescient sketch of the notion of “fictitious capital”? To the contrary don’t they play a central role of the explanation of the expanded reproduction of “capital in general”?
As to money necessarily being a commodity, yes, I think it was a tremendous convenience for Marx that he lived in the gold standard days, since, e.g., money being constant meant that he could make a ready empirical, commonsensical supposition that the money wage of labor-power was, at first approximation, a ready equivalent of its value, (without having to decompose wages into the “value” of a basket of wage goods, since workers could spend their money on whatever they wanted, be it Bibles or whiskey, provided they got them, without effecting the existence of the wage goods sectors). And further, the gold standard imparted a deflationary bias to price-levels, which helped out his account of crisis tendencies. So he didn’t have to deal with problems of inflationary money-illusion, nor with the loopy world of floating FX rates nowadays. But other than reversing the quantity theory of money, I don’t see how money being a “commodity” was especially important to him. Rather than money being really a cypher, a fetish, a representation of “value” in its role as medium of universal exchange rather than the “thing” itself. I think one can espy in nuce in Marx something like post-Keynesian theories of endogenous money and credit.
hartal 07.19.11 at 3:11 am
No I don’t think Marx integrates credit with his cycle theory, certainly nothing as well-thought-out as Minsky as James Crotty and even Fred Moseley would tell you. Moreover, he has no real theory of how the asset markets and real economy interact. Marx uses gold in a highly contrived way in Capital. Now putting aside the question of whether he is committed to a commodity theory of money, one should note that Marx assumes a fixed value for gold. Productivity is never allowed to vary in the production of gold. Why would he do such an unrealistic thing? It’s his answer to the Ricardian search for an invariant measure of value.
hartal 07.19.11 at 3:16 am
At any rate, I have tried to do my best to defend Marx but it is time to abandon ship. Jobs are booming in Texas. Rick Perry, not Karl Marx, has the economic answers. He’s a magic man, and he’s going to be our next President.
LFC 07.19.11 at 3:43 am
@94
I hope this is your idea of a bad joke rather than a serious prediction.
hartal 07.19.11 at 3:48 am
All Rick Perry does is grow jobs and win elections; he’s a Good Christian; and he looks like Burt Reynolds in The Longest Yard (original and remake at the same time).
Really who’s going to stop him? Hopey in a bad economy? I don’t think so.
hartal 07.19.11 at 4:03 am
And don’t you think this country has done enough to prove that it’s overcome its mildly troubling racial past? Don’t Americans have the right to vote for one of our own this time, one who will look after our interests. You gotta love how the Governor isn’t just counting on the actual collapse of illegal immigration; he is still going to bust up the two or three sanctuary cities in Tejas.
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