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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