From: "Drewk" <Andrew_Kliman@msn.com> Subject: [OPE-L:4663] Re: David Yaffe on Ricardo and Marx Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2000 23:41:52 -0500 I stand with Paul Bullock in the challenge to "Marx"-ian economics, which, as he say, "spend[s] so much of [its] time picking holes in Marx where there are none." But I reject the term orthodox. Orthodoxy in "Marx"-ian economics has always been anti-Marx. And Marx himself was an extremely unorthodox Marxist even in his own day, as the Critique of the Gotha Program makes clear. I see no need to give in to it the term orthodox, when it is an ad hominem attack used by anti-Marx -- i.e., orthodox -- Marxists who have lost the theoretical debate because they simply cannot prove their arrogant claims that Marx made "errors." (There is something chillingly Stalinist about this term "errors.") A variant of this that has been floating around this list recently is the lovely appeal-to-authority-cum-ad-hominem-attack-on-Marx launched by Sinha: "every sensible person on this planet thinks that Marx has a transformation problem." That's an argument? In truth, such types have run out of arguments. Once one rejects their premises, their conclusions fall. It is that simple. So censorship is their last stand. It is more important to their hegemony than ever. I also dislike the term "fundamentalist." I believe it was applied because some people (Anwar Shaikh? John Weeks?) said that Marx made "errors," but he was "fundamentally" right. What is wrong with that kind of argument is that it lacks a *criterion* to discriminate between the fundamental and the non-fundamental. Someone can claim that Marx was "fundamentally" right, even though his law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit is false, and even though Marx himself wrote on at least three different occasions that this law of his was the most important law of political economy. (Indeed someone has claimed almost precisely this: David Laibman has stated that his interpretation conforms to Marx's "foundation concepts," even though that interpretation leads one to conclude that Marx's law is wrong.) Andrew Kliman ____________________________________________________________________ Get free email and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=1
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