> Probably I expressed badly my feeling that we should stop go on >looking at the appearence of 'etiquette', or Sprach-Ethik if you >wish, and should move forward to a more substantial respect, which >means taking seriously the most further away from us of our >opponents, first of all looking at what he is actually saying (and >this, Rakesh, does not mean simply that the 'other' has to explain >himself/herself clearly, it means also that we have to pay attention >and that we should avoid to picture him without considering his/her >own self-represention). > >rb Dear Riccardo, Whose self representation have I failed to consider? I think that you are saying that I have been impolite to...you? I don't believe that I have ever said an impolite word to you or written an impolite word about you on OPE-L. I shall continue to praise your work as I always have. Now in terms of your acrimony with Paolo, we Marxists should not forget the conditions of work. Paolo is an independent intellectual; you are a member and chair of an economics department. It is your job to remain in dialogue and debate with other economists. I do not think Paolo should be too hard on you for that; at the same time, it does seem to me that you characterized Paolo as a fundamentalist textualist in comparison to this Vitale who seems to be a real fundamentalist textualist as well as a very obnoxious debater (by the way, I think Paolo's paper on the value of labor power is one of the great papers which I have read in Marxism). As for Sraffa, Keynes, Hayek and Schumpeter, a. I don't see how Sraffa is not a critic of the labor theory of value as those who were close to him (Dobb, Meek, Roncaglia) all use the Sraffian input-output black box to criticize the labor theory of value and proclaim that Sraffa alone 'solves' the transformation problem which took on new importance because it was a way of beating Marxists with neo Ricardianism and all that implies. b. as for Keynes, he would have been much helped--as Homa Katouzian has shown-- in his critique of Say's Law and liquidity theory of interest if he had not dismissed Marx on the basis of his putatively vile basis of personal correspondence; Keynes' own Social Darwinism was in fact truly vile; John Toye has demonstrated Keynes's vile and monstrous criticism of the british famine laws for attempting to save too many Hindu lives. Moreover, the Keynesian system is incapable of understanding why govt debt is fictitious capital because it has no understanding of what capital is in the first place; and its pivotal concept of the declining marginal efficiency of capital is a conceptual mess, though it is still treated by Keynesians as a simple datum which itself need not be clearly explained. The General Theory is a confused and confusing mess. c. I think you are more interested in Hayek's trade cycle theory than his critique of the socialist calculation debate (I may be wrong because I know that you have used Schumpeter against Hayek in that debate); and in the final analysis explaining disequilibrium by monetary over-expansion seems truly mono-causal and unconvincing, though again I agree with Hayek's critique of Keynes' underconsumptionism. Again Hayek could have developed this critique if he had considered Marx's critique of underconsumption, which was developed by Grossmann, Mattick and later Shaikh. Politically of course no Marxist agrees with Hayek's underconsumptionism because workers should never allow the crisis to be resolved on their own backs, but workers then do need to realize that direct or social wage gains (as well as their acceptance of direct or social wage cuts) will not free capitalism of its cycles and catastropes. d. as for Schumpeter, of course he was interesting insofar as he was deeply influenced by Marx. But wasn't it Semmler who underlined that Schumpeter simply conflated surplus value as such with innovator's profit which is in fact *extra* surplus value. It's an elementary mistake, but it brings down his whole system, no? It's not clear to me that Marxists have much to learn from the great bourgeois economic theorists, though of course Marxists do need how to use and analyze econometric data (my skills are quite lacking). So I would not maintain that the method of bourgeois economics (econometrics, modelling on the basis of non linear equations) are useless to Marxists (it seems to me however that game theory in the social sciences, as opposed to the biology of a John Maynard Smith, is based on totally aribitrary and subjective values plugged in by the theorist, but I have no idea), and of course we benefit immensely from top flight journalism and descriptive accounts of the working of institutions. But in the way of theory I don't think bourgeois economists have had much to teach us Marxists since Richard Jones whose influence is all over that most crucial chapter in historical materialism in Capital, vol 3 as Marx attempts to differentiate labor rent, rent in kind, money rents, etc. Since WC Mitchell and Eric Roll more than fifty years ago, Jones's fundamental contribution to economic theorizing has been lost in the history of economic thought. Which means that since this then bourgeois economists have lost all real sense of the historic specificity of their object of study--the bourgeois epoch of production. Rakesh
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