From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Fri Mar 16 2007 - 23:08:10 EDT
Hi Jerry, Well that is probably true (though Freeman/Kliman were influenced at least to some extent by Althusser) but I meant really the idea of "ideological class warfare" or more simply "the battle of ideas". I The assumption being made in TSSI is that the lynchpin of bourgeois economics is the idea of self-equilibrating markets, and that this idea makes any sensible understanding of capitalist economies impossible. Ergo, if you attack and remove the idea of self-equilibrating markets, then a more sensible understanding becomes possible. But the problem is that the notion of self-equilibrating markets is deeply ingrained, it is a dogma upheld even when it flies in the face of the facts, or is shown to be theoretically incoherent. Supply and demand do adjust, sure, but equilibrium is at best only an ideal tendency that is never realised and this becomes highly important for economics. If five people have $40 each to buy five white shirts on offer for $40 each, and five people never have the money to buy five more white shirts they need that could be produced, you can say there is equilibrium at $40 a shirt because the market was cleared, but meantime five people remain with no white shirt at all, although they need one. What is "demand" in that case? $200? $400? Five people wanting shirts? Or ten people wanting shirts? I could introduce all sorts of more variables to make a more complex story, but I'll just leave it at this thought. So what do you do then? Well what you do is counterpose to it another economics with a different label, "non-equilibrium economics" and you have to ram that home to people or at least impress them with it. You have to tell them what they don't want to hear, and you might have to repeat yourself. And that may seem tedious. I am very reluctant though to cast aspersions on TSSI supporters like you do. I've met Alan Freeman, Mino Carchedi and Paolo Giussani, and believe me they are or have been involved in a lot more than a "small world of Marxian economists". They would argue (1) that if only "a small proportion of economists and graduate students know or care what the "transformation problem" or the "Okishio Theorem" is" - I don't think it's true - the reason is that these items were previously taken as convincing proof that Marx's economics is a dead duck, just as Howard & King present it (with some very sloppy argument and discussion) in their massive overview of the Marxist discipline (in fact in Wellington in 1994 I discussed with economists of the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research who regarded Howard & King as the definitive nail in the coffin of Marxian economics). (2) If you want to revive Marxian economics, then you have to do it by solving the core problems that caused it to be discredited in popular opinion - the task of the intellectual is to solve the most difficult abstract and theoretical problems which are at the foundations of the whole theoretical edifice. You have to defeat the critics at their best, i.e. you have to take the most substantive criticisms and show that they can be rebutted successfully. As a sort of analogy, TSSI supporters suggest that economists travelled along a road and they took a wrong turn at a certain point, ending up in a place where they don't really know where they are anymore, and then the task is to route them back to the point where they took the wrong turn, and point them to the right direction. It's a traffic control operation. You are partly correct and partly wrong about the reasons why Marxism was discredited. People accept and reject ideas for all sorts of reasons, good ones and bad ones or no reason at all. But an intellectual focuses on the good reasons and the best reasons. Otherwise he would not be an intellectual, but a word-mongerer or a propagandist. Anybody can write or say something, but there has to be quality control. Without intellectuals, there is no quality control. The intellectual seeks to grasp the internal dialectics of ideas at the highest level of abstraction, i.e. the high road of human thought, rather than the low road. Well, who says what are the best reasons? That's an ongoing argument, and if you are not even making the argument then you cannot change anything. II Marx is still important to us because the road to hell is paved with capitalist good intentions. Capitalists can have very good intentions, at least as long as you work for them and they don't work for you. Otherwise they would not be capitalists. Well, they wil even work for you, of course, but there's always that "pound of flesh" that must be submitted in the end. That's business power, and if it isn't business, then it's just warm fuzzies. You often cannot fault their intentions, but it is the aggregate effects of what happens that are of concern. And those aggregate effects might be the opposite of what is intended. The task of a socialist is to look a bit beyond what people intend, to what actually happens, what the overall result is. This is collective, social thinking beyond individualist thinking. If people create hell on earth, that is no reason to reconcile yourself with that hell. You can band together with those who seek a way out of that hell, and fight the hell. The task of the intellectual is to show that there are smart and dumb ways to fight, or, that there are quick routes and long routes out of the hell. If they cannot do that, there's no point in intellectuals, because they have no added value in that case. Anybody can have an idea, what is needed is a strong idea of good quality that modifies behaviour for the better. Piero Sraffa is important to us because (1) he was a genuine socialist, (2) he provided a much better understanding of the importance of David Ricardo's economic writings (3) he shows that marginalist capital theory confronts severe problems of internal incoherence (4) by implication, the problems of Marxian economics are really no worse than those of neo-classical economics, (5) he helped to rehabilitate surplus economics generally, which is an important element for understanding economic growth and the exploitation of that growth. In one slim volume, (6) he struck a blow at economic orthodoxy that set a lot of economists thinking for a very long time, and he did it by using their own language. Sraffa says, okay, so you don't like value theory. Well here is another way of looking at it and you get fairly much the same result. Sraffa affirmed that there was not just one critique of economics possible (Marx's), you could have many different critiques, you could make your own critique, and that was a tremendously liberating idea. You could write your own Das Kapital in your own style, as it were. III I do need more time, I just haven't enough time to do all I want to do. It is not my intention to "take a position" on TSSI, my intention is to learn from it what can be learnt from it. You have to skip the Marxist rhetoric, and concentrate on the content. I am somebody who thinks that theoretical foundations are very important, and I believe that we live in an epoch in which the old theoretical have crumbled or are crumbling, and we need some new ones. And I do not get very far by dismissing the old foundations as mere rubbish. IV Genuine theoretical development occurs through a dialectic of tradition and innovation. Why dialectical? Because they are a unity-in-contradiction, i.e. opposite yet mutually dependent, and move in tandem in such a way that one prevails over the other in the end. You cannot innovate unless you are thoroughly familiar with what came before. Otherwise you just think you are doing something new, whereas that idea had already been mooted or worked out before. You think you are making history, but you are just replicating it. That is not scholarship. If you want to free yourself from a tradition, you have to understand what it is. Otherwise you imagine you are freeing yourself from it, while you are replicating it. We are all a lot more traditional than we might think. Consciousness is rooted in memory. A tradition is usually a practice or way of doing things which arose out of a long evolution, i.e. lots of people faced the same problem and reached the conclusion that a particular practice solved it, and therefore that practice became embedded and institutionalised in human action, it becomes habit. It becomes akin to a "truth". Its strength is in the fact that it works, and that the practical experience of a lot of people is behind it. But a lot of people can also be wrong, plus of course the world changes, people change. Tradition has to be critically re-examined in that case. What a radical then does, is to show there is a new way of looking at things or doing things which responds much better to how things are now, even if tradition rules it out as impossible or impracticable. Or he takes up a tradition again, against the inane mob that says "change is good" or some such banality. The radical is basically an innovator however, instead of a traditionalist. He doesn't fetishize tradition, and he doesn't necessarily "go with the flow". He is creative, rather than conformist. If however a new way of looking at things or doing things is not to be just a "flash in the pan", it has to derive from a very thorough understanding of what came before. The challenge to tradition is then not based on where the tradition is weak anyway, but precisely at its strongest points. And if the radical challenge succeeds, then the tradition is well and truly stuffed, and people will switch to the new way of doing things, for which the radical was the harbinger. If we are to return to an old idea, it has to be very clear about how this contrasts with the new, and why the old idea was better. That takes historical thinking. It is not that the radical just has the satisfaction that "he said or did it first", that is a superficiality, but rather that he opened up a new development and thus changed the world, some way. It happens all the time, people develop new products, new services, new ideas, new practices, new characteristics. Postmodernistically they also root around in the past and dig up new discoveries of old things. Capitalists can be very radical also. Sometimes it is all too radical, because it destroys a basic continuity which all people need to function, or the new way that people adopt is worse than the old way. This makes it necessary to distinguish between progressive and reactionary radicalism. V The tragedy of the true radical can be that in laying new foundations, to reach a new idea, he disregards his very own personal foundations. Thus he suffers for his own idea. He ignores, rebels against, or resists tradition to his own peril. Sometimes he is by nature congentially unable to follow tradition, he is forced to innovate or improvise in his life, because he cannot imitate, or he has no tradition or precedent or experience to fall back on. He might be astonishingly intelligent in some ways, and astonishingly dumb in other ways. This makes the radical predicament altogether rather complex: "I can will knowledge, but not wisdom; going to bed, but not sleeping; eating, but not hunger; meekness, but not humility; scrupulosity, but not virtue; self-assertion or bravado, but not courage; lust, but not love; commiseration, but not sympathy; congratulations, but not admiration; religiosity, but not faith; reading, but not understanding" - L. Farber, The ways of the will. NY: Basic Books, 1966, p. 15. We all need to be able to relativise things, but a volatile radicalism can explode, leaving only fragments. Jurriaan - PS an ironical popsong has these lyrics: Call out the instigator Because there's something in the air Weve got to get together sooner or later Because the revolution's here And you know its right And you know that it's right We have got to get it together We have got to get it together now
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