Re [7023] from Harry Cleaver: > For many years I have confronted this tendency on the part of > student critics of capitalism, especially Marxist students, to complain > about mainstream economics being boring and trivial and not worth the > trouble. During this time I have argued the following: while there are a > lot of boring technical details, especially as the profession sought more >and more sophisticated mathematics to accomplish more or less the same > things as in the past, in general the study of mainstream economics should > be taken on as an essential exercise in class espionage. Mainstream > economics is not just ideology and not just wrong; it is a key component > of capitalist strategy and is used to devise tactics against the rest of > us. To think that the enemy's thinking is boring and trivial is to risk > not taking it seriously and not learning to read it strategically and thus > not understanding the strategies and tactics being used against you. This > has, in fact, happened again and again. For example, go back and read > various Marxists on Keynes and see how they attacked Keynes as a mere > bourgeois apologist, as being wrong, how they belittled his theory because > it was based on psychology not "laws of motion", etc., all the while > failing to either recognize or confront the class politics of his >strategies and being blind to the significance of working class resistance > and subversion of them. Then compare all that with the Italian New Left > reading (Negri's for example) and the subsequent rereading in Zerowork > that moved the discussion of the crisis in the late 1960s and 1970s from >sterile debates about underconsumptions and falling rates of profit to a >class analysis of how working class struggle had ruptured the Keynesian > productivty deals (in factory and community) and how money was being used > in new ways to counter that subversion etc. etc. > Read in the spirit of espionage and as an urgent task in the development >of counterstrategies in the class struggle, bourgeois economics is not > boring but as exciting as the investigation of enemy plans discovered on a > military battlefield. I think that economists, especially economists working in academia, have a very poor and incomplete grasp of the the 'plans' of capital and the state. Nor do most mainstream (bourgeois) economists -- either consciously or unconsciously -- help to develop capitalist strategy and the tactics to be used against the rest of us. This is the case for a number of reasons: l) as products of academia, they often work in isolation from capitalists and state representatives who are the ones who develop those strategies and tactics. From that perspective, if you want to find out capitalist plans, then you would be better advised to read IMF documents, state publications on the economy, and corporate "think tank" analysis, although these sources as well have severe limitations since: a) one would have to separate the real plans from the propaganda [which is frequently not something that can be done just through an examination of the propaganda itself], and; b) the economists who are actually the policy advisors might have a very incomplete grasp -- indeed, they might purposely be kept in the dark -- about the real plans. 2) ideology can overpower all else such that particular economic theories should _just_ be interpreted as ideological rather than as an expression of capitalist plans and strategies (Walrasian theory comes to mind); 3) economists are often paid for their output regardless of whether it has "use-value" for capital and the state. Thus, the "publish or perish" imperative tends to lead very frequently to the creation of documents which have no usefulness to the ruling class -- nor were they designed to be useful. They were designed _only_ to be published and to serve a role in enhancing the status of academics such that their employment can be perpetuated and perhaps so that they can be promoted to a higher rank within the university academic hierarchy. I never suggested, btw, that the output of mainstream economists shouldn't be examined and subjected to critique. Rather, I was putting forward an assessment of those theories -- in other words, a conclusion of critique. It is, of course, the case that hard data and information on the plans of the class enemy are useful in the class war, but they are pretty hard to come by. Capitalists, state representatives, *and* economists don't always tell us what their real plans are even when they know what they are (surprise.) Nor can we assume that economists speak in a kind of "code" which can be de-ciphered by revolutionaries to reveal the hidden meaning embedded between the lines. Economists tend to be neither that smart nor that stupid. If what you want are enemy plans, then you can try to get a job *for* capital or the state. Even here there are problems of: a) access to the plans (e.g. if you get a job crunching numbers for the BLS, I doubt that you would thereby have access to information that revealed the "enemy plans"), and; b) it could very well be that it is the revolutionary who is subverted by the job rather than the revolutionary subverting the institution. In most cases of 'radicals' that I know who work for corporations or the state, the latter has been the case -- and indeed, we would expect this result more often than not from a materialist perspective (especially in a period where there isn't a mass redicalization.) c) real espionage by revolutionaries is, of course, possible (Alfred Sohn-Rethel's job as a research assistant for Mitteleuropaischer Wirtschaftstag, comes to mind) but it is: i) a risky business that could endanger the well-being and life of the revolutionary spy, and; ii) if discovered, even if i) doesn't result, the revolutionary could be fed dis-information or ounter-spied upon such that the well-being of other revolutionaries are endangered, and; iii) also often precludes open and overt revolutionary political activism since one's "cover" would thereby be blown. Thus, even when successful there is a trade-off. In solidarity, Jerry
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