From: Paul Zarembka (zarembka@BUFFALO.EDU)
Date: Tue Aug 21 2007 - 10:25:22 EDT
Andrew provided the following response to me. I hadn't known of the
subtitle. Paul Z.
_______
"The title "Reclaiming Marx's 'Capital'" makes me uncomfortable.
"Is not the subtext for such a title itself a claim that the author
knows
exactly what 'Capital' is about?"
Nope.
I would have called it _Reclaiming Marx's "Capital" from the Myth of
Inconsistency_, but that was too long. So the latter part became a
subtitle. Early in Chapter 1, I explain the exact sense in which the
book
seeks to reclaim "Capital." The section (from pp. 2-3) is copied
below.
Please feel to share this message with the members of Levy's
Defamation Den.
Andrew
==========
1.2 What This Book Is (and Isn't) About
The specific way in which this book seeks to reclaim Marx's Capital
requires
some explanation. It will be helpful to first say what the book is not
about. Although it contains some relevant background material, it is
not a
primer on Capital or Marx's value theory. Its purpose is not to
provide an
overarching interpretation of Capital--the TSSI is simply an
interpretation
of two quite limited aspects of Marx's value theory. It does not
promote a
particular view of Capital's significance for us today or even defend
it on
the ground that it remains significant. (I do believe that Capital
remains
significant--I would not have written this book if I thought otherwise-
-and
I have reasons for this belief, but the way in which this book tries to
reclaim it is quite different.) I do not claim that Marx's value
theory and
his associated theories of profit and crisis are "fundamentally
correct,"
much less correct in every respect, nor do I argue in the present work
that
they are substantively or methodologically superior to the
alternatives.
Similarly, my goal is not to promote the TSSI over other
interpretations of
Marx's theory as an approach to economic understanding and analysis.
I am well aware, moreover, that the issues I discuss here are not the
main
themes of Capital or even of Marx's value theory. That value and price
are
determined temporally and interdependently is certainly not what Marx's
value theory is "really about." My intention is not to privilege these
aspects of his theory over others, nor even to argue that they are
important
in some broad sense. Similarly, the reason why this book focuses on the
"quantitative" dimension of Marx's value theory rather than its
"qualitative" dimension is not that I regard the former as more
important.
(I regard the two dimensions as necessary parts of an inseparable
whole,
within which the "qualitative" dimension is the more important one.)
So what does this book seek to do? Its aim is to reclaim Marx's
Capital from
the myth that his value theory has been proven internally
inconsistent. It
argues that the conclusions Marx deduced on the basis of his value
theory
are logically valid. I assess the standard interpretation of Marx's
value
theory, the TSSI, and other interpretations only in terms of their
relative
success in making Marx's own theory make sense, not as theoretical
approaches in their own right. In short, this book is purely and simply
about the question of internal inconsistency.
It is important not to confuse logical validity with truth. Logically
valid
arguments can have false conclusions (if they begin from false
premises).
Critics of the TSSI often seem to be confused about this. For example,
Veneziani (2004: 97, emphasis in original; cf. Laibman 2004) recently
asserted that "the literal truth of all [of] Marx's propositions is
claimed"
by proponents of the TSSI, even though we have frequently made clear
that
"We have never said that Marx's contested insights are necessarily
true . .
. . We simply say the claims that his value theory is necessarily
wrong,
because it is logically invalid, are false" (Freeman and Kliman 2000:
260,
emphasis in original).
***********************************************************************
*
(Vol.23) THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF 9-11-2001 "a benchmark in 9/11
research"
(Vol.24) TRANSITIONS IN LATIN AMERICA AND IN POLAND & SYRIA,
forthcoming
Research in Political Economy, P.Zarembka,ed, Elsevier
hardback
*********************
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka
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