[OPE-L:2750] "Austrians" reading Marx

From: Alejandro Ramos (aramos@btl.net)
Date: Thu Apr 06 2000 - 16:13:39 EDT


[ show plain text ]

Hi Julian:

>Is your Weizsacker the same as in the following ref.? I've had this pending
>for ages, partly because of unavailing attempts to find a definite source
>nearer than the Library of Congress (I can't seem to turn up any ref. to it
>on the British Library catalogue, though presumably the BL must have it).
>
>von Weizsacker, Carl Christian (1971). 'A new labor theory of value for
>rational planning through use of the bourgeois profit rate'. Proceedings of
>the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 68(6):
>1192-1194.

Yes, he is the same professor. The quoted article is actually by
Weizsaecker and Samuelson.

>Do you have some other references for him?

v.Weizsacker, CC (1971), "Steady State Capital Theory", Springer Verlag,
Berlin, Heidelberg. This is based on his lectures in 1970/71 at the
University of Heidlberg, and it seems it's the fundamental text to
understand this little known attempt to "read Marx" (perhaps this was most
to "read Sweezy... Okishio... Morishima") from the "Austrian" point of view
carried out in the 70s.

There is also a review of Morishima's Marx's Economics by him:

v.Weizsacker, CC (1973), "Morishima on Marx", The Economic Journal,
December, pp. 1245-1254.

There is also Morishima's reply in the same Ec. J., but I don't have it.
BTW, if you find it, I'd be grateful if you send me a copy! That should be
in the BL!

>And I take it that your Wolfstetter is the one in these, just retrieved from
>the BL catalogue?:
>
>Wert, Profitrate und Beschäftigung Aspekte der Marxschen und der
>klassischen Wirtschaftstheorie
>Elmar Wolfstetter. 1977
>
>Die Marxsche Theorie und ihre Kritik eine Textsammlung zur Kritik der
>Politischen Ökonomie
>zusammengestellt und eingeleitet von Hans G. Nutzinger und Elmar
>Wolfstetter. 1974
>
>-- from which I take it that no English versions are available.

Yes, he is the same person. Now, he's the director of one of the Economic
Theory Departaments at the University of Berlin. He's working on stock
markets, auctions, industrial structure and similars. He recently published
a book (CUP). I exchanged some letters with him and seem a wonderful person
but unfortunately has no time to discuss on Marx again. Wolfstetter was one
of Weizsaecker students in the far winter 70/71 when CCW gave the above
mentioned lectures.

I haven't seen the works you refer to but I understand the second one is a
kind of collection of German translations of articles on the
transformation, etc. famous at that time.

I have two other references:

Wolfstetter E, "Surplus labour, synchronised labor costs and Marx's labour
theory of value", The Economic Journal, September 1973, pp 787-809.

Wolfstetter E, "Value, natural price, duality, and time: A reexamination of
some propositions in Marxian Economics", Metroeconomica, Giugno-Ottobre
1980, pp 137-153.

This article is very interesting but plenty of typos. His notation is also
hard to follow. (Rieu Dong-Min sent me a copy of this article some years
ago. Is Rieu still on the list?) The article is aimed at to show that if
time is taken in a way that differs from the stationary state, propositions
such the Okishio-Morishima "Fundamental Marxian Theorem" cannot be
demonstrated. "Therefore", "Marx" would be possible only in a stationary
framework (of course, there's a little confusion here between "Marx" and
his input/output interpreters but...). At the end of this article,
Wolfstetter writes "Marx may have failed to sufficiently appreciate the
role of the time structure of production, yet, in a different sense, he did
put "time" at the center of his economic analysis. The keywords are
labor-time, labor power, and labor services." (p. 151)

Abrazos,

Alejandro



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Apr 30 2000 - 19:59:43 EDT