From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Mon Jun 05 2006 - 13:57:50 EDT
Ajit wrote > (some people out there who know >duddly da of Sraffa but think that they have all their >phoney baloney criticisms worked out should note that >Sraffa’s wages are ‘money’ wages and not >commodity-bundle wages) . What are we to make of your phoney baloney criticisms of Marx--that the theory of value is metaphysical in the face of I, ROBOTS and horses , that Marx is stuck on a transformation problem, that the first part of Capital is defined by a Walrasian problematic, that Marx had nothing of interest to say about money in that first part. This is real baloney and it comes from an dwindling academic cult in which few people are interested. The only way you keep yourselves alive is by trying to lead the attack against someone who achieved real scientific insight into the capitalist mode of production, including the necessity of its deceptive appearances, the dynamics of the organization of actual production, and developmental tendencies (globalization, concentration/centralization, cycles and general crises, speed ups and intensification). Now yes you are right in the above, though many neo Ricardians have have resolved the distributional parameter by specifying the wage in real, physical quantity terms and then declared that value is a detour. This is how Samuelson and Steedman proceed at times if I remember correctly. And our own Steve Keen too, but perhaps he'll clarify. I did mix up Sraffa with his followers who use him in parts to attempt to annihilate Marx's theory of value. But yes you are correct: Sraffa himself treats the wage as a share of entire output (but, as Cutler et al ask, what do workers do with their share of iron in chapter 2 or basics that are not means of consumption? and should the necessities of consumption be relegated to the limbo of non basics? is it truly impossible, as implied in the Sraffian but not in my reading Marx's model, that workers' consumption decisions could determine the structure of demand itself?) Yet the theory of the wage and workers' consumption is not the main problem. But as is obvious I am not interested in Sraffa, only in the Sraffian criticisms of Marx whose work I do know well. And the criticisms coming from your school are off base. Among economists Marx had two great critics--Bohm Bawerk and Schumpeter. von Bortkiewicz, Sraffa and Samuelson do not have much of importance to say in their criticisms, explicit and implicit, of Marx. In fact Meghnad Desai is a more interesting and relevant critic than these narrow economists. He leaves for a box in the footnotes the transformation problem. Rakesh
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