[OPE-L:6394] Production techniques

From: Alejandro Ramos (aramos@btl.net)
Date: Mon Jan 21 2002 - 10:29:38 EST


Re Julian #6382:

[...]

>Personally, I don't have any difficulty with the idea that [a subset of] the
>content of "Capital" is [a critique of] the subject-matter of
>micro-economics.

Can you expand the idea? If Microeconomics postadates "Capital", in which
sense the latter can be a "critique of" the former?

Also: what is the subject-matter of Microeconomics? At first sight, I'd say
that it deals more with "mind states" (presumed  optimization behaviours
that abstract, Benthamian, individuals and firms perform) while "Capital"
deals with objective facts (e.g. expenditures of social labor-time, amounts
of money, real temporal circulation and production processes, real social
relations, "wage labor", etc.).

Regarding typical Microeconomics  abstract "mind-states" as subject-matter
see, for example, the following text in Lancaster: "...a fundamental
presumption of economic analysis [is] that buyers and sellers possess
cotingent plans as to how they would behave in all market circumstances and
that all prices within the range of variation that is likely to occur"
(IMM, p. 11)

I don't see these sort of "fundamental presumptions" in "Capital".

>Aren't the issues

[...]

>(2) whether either or both of Marx's and X's critiques say anything
>illuminating?

Sure! But, personally, I have never found until now anything illuminating
in a Microeconomics textbook. Do you? They seem to me applied mathematics
exercises using fancy "economics" notation. My impression is that the
authors are permanently trying to adapt the "reality" to the math exercise
by means of "fundamental presumptions" as in the above-cited text. One can
even *enjoy* this as math exercises, but I doubt the results can tell us
something interesting about the real world we live in. Of course, if you
wish to have a degree in Economics, the bourgeois academic system *forces*
you to spend time in this discipline. I remember my brother (a real
capitalist entrepreneur) who, at some point, decided to took some Economics
courses at the University. After a couple of semesters, he told me he has
never seen something more "absurd and unuseful" in the world than
Microeconomics!

A.



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