Gary, don't have my copies of Ricardo, Marx and Peach in front of me, so a very brief reply. > > >I don't think Peach is the best source on Ricardo, particularly if one wants >to understand the connection between Ricardo & Marx. Peach depicts Ricardo as >a thoroughly muddled thinker, and indeed favors Malthus's analytics over >Ricardo's. Marx would have none of that. You've got Marx wrong. As Andrew B just noted, Marx praised Ricardo for attempting to save an explanatory theory in which value is the explanans in the face of the recalcirance of the concrete, though I am not sure that the source of Ricardo's failure here is his commitment to analytical logic, as Andrew B has suggest. At any rate, Marx clearly thinks Malthus had been quite effective in critique, and Marx's sharpest criticism is actually not of Malthus as you imply but of Ricardo's followers (eg. MacCullough) who attempted to defend Ricardo in the face of real problems with verbal games and the like. So in appreciating the real force of Malthus' objections, Peach is quite consistent with Marx. > Peach moreover denies that R was a >surplus theorist in the tradition of Sraffa, Sraffa comes after Ricardo, right? So how could R be in the tradition of S? To me, it seems that Peach's reading of R is in important ways similar to Rubin's. >which again goes against the >grain of Marx's reading of Ricardo. Marx could not have read R in the Sraffian surplus tradition; and Marx does not praise R so much in my estimation for being in the surplus tradition but for attempting a scientific explanation of the phenomena which seemed on the face of it to contradict the labor theory of value. Moreover, Marx respects Ricardo's scientific discipline in argument, e.g., his careful maintainence of the distinction between explanans (value) and explanandum (profit, wages, rent)--though due to the absence of the labor power/power distinction Ricardo cannot escape the circle in which Adam Smith was stuck. Yet for Marx, Ricardo is clearly a giant of scientific integrity. Perhaps Peach's estimation is not so high as Marx's, but surely Peach does not reduce Ricardo's value theory to its ability to function as a justification for the repeal of the corn laws (see Brewer vs. Kanth). > >Acknowledging, as Ricardo and Marx do, that the world is not static doesn't >mean you must abandon the long-period method. At any rate, neither Ricardo >nor Marx felt that they needed to ditch the traditional method when analyzing >the forces that regulate price and the profit rate. The working presumption, I >would argue, is that the technical conditions of production change gradually >enough to permit the use of the use of the method as a practical tool. No my reading of Ricardo--and Marx follows him here--is that natural prices or prices of production change in clear and significant fashion due to changes in the average rate of profit only over the long run. This is simply because changes in the average rate of profit take some time to clearly assert themselves in the face of the chaos of market relations. However, prices of production do change fairly constantly due to changes in the values of the commodities themselves. You will note that Marx appropriates this two fold foundation for changes in prices of production from the first chapter of Ricardo's Principles. I disagree here with you and Fred about the appropriateness of long run thinking in terms of the analysis of prices of production. So again I ask you: since your presumption is not shared, how do you propose to operationalize and test it? And if this is but a presumption, then why the fierceness of your criticism towards those who do not share it? > >Once again, I do not deny, nor does any Sraffian, that other approaches are >required and are themselves very useful for the analysis of dynamic problems. >The classicals and Marx utilized such other methods when they moved beyond the >theory of value and distribution. >> >> >>But all this aside, I think it is absurd to argue that Marx was >>interested in essentially the same issues as Ricardo. > >> >>And do you deny that Marx argued that Ricardo was unable to >>understand the possibility of a general crisis due (in part) to an >>inadequate theory of money? > >Again: I never claimed -- indeed I explicitly denied -- that Marx was ONLY >interested in the problems that preoccupied Ricardo. No but you did say that Marx was ESSENTIALLY interested in the same problems as Ricardo. > I would be the last one >to suggest that Ricardo has an adequate treatment of money (though I have >plenty of reservations about Marx's)or that Ricardo's position on the >possibility of crisis is sound. ok > I don't believe any Sraffian has made such >claims either. but they don't recognize Marx's critique of Ricardo's money theory or crisis theory--see Steedman on Marx on Ricardo. By the way, there is an excellent discusssion in many places in Felton Shortall's Incomplete Marx of Marx's critique of Ricardo's (and Ricardo's followers') money and crisis theory. > Why do you (and so many others) insist on attributing those >views to us? All that a Sraffian would claim is that ON THE MATTER OF VALUE & >DISTRIBUTION, Marx was ploughing much the same field as Ricardo, and that the >ANALYTICAL ISSUES he was trying to sort out IN HIS DISCUSSION OF VALUE AND THE >PROFIT RATE are largely resolved by the approach taken by Sraffa. But here you miss the qualitative side of Marx's value theory which is not only a theory of distribution or the profit rate. Marx is very explicit that the qualitative side of value theory completely escapes Ricardo. We have a couple of names for the qualitative side on this list--value form and the necessity of money. > > >Too vague. What fish do you think he was after? An invariable >>standard to allow for the study of distribution? Do you think Marx's >>main concern was distribution? Not even the analytical Marxists would >>make this claim > >I think he was trying to explain the tendential laws of motion of capitalism, >not the day-to-day fluctuations of market prices. Prices of production and market prices can both be changing not in the long term. > The latter are what >technicians (the economist as plumber) fuss over. Marx was a big-picture man. >> Except when it came to the microscopic treatment of the commodity. > > >There's one coming out, by Kurz & Salvadori. I think Ajit is more or less on >target. Blaug's piece really gets Sraffa wrong. The mistake is not different >from the one Rakesh, Freeman and others make. Let's be clear here. Freeman is a leading theorist; I, a mere autodidact, find him (and John E, Andrew and Carchedi) right about a lot of things. Of course I wish they would acknowledge the roots of their dynamics in Grossmann's dynamics books. I consider myself a student of Grossmann and Mattick, Sr. > The fact that Sraffa focused on >a particular set of problems does not mean that he denies the importance of >all the other problems that Marx and the classicals took up. > >And wasn't Jones a post-Ricardian? yes indeed. A while ago, I read the one dissertation every written in the uS about Richard Jones--early 1930s by a Chinese student at Columbia. thanks for the reply, R
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sun Jul 15 2001 - 10:56:28 EDT