Re: [OPE] Great article from Jan Toporowski

I find it dificult to conceal the underconsumptionist basis of Foster's
interpretation of capitalism in general and the last crisis in particular.
If you add to that the effort they (Foster and Magdoff) put in incorporating
Keynes, Hansen, Steindl, Kalecki, Robinson into the picture leaving to Marx
the meager reference that "the real barrier of capital is capitalism" then
one is led to think that their main mentors are keynesians. Their concepts
are mainly keynesian: falling marginal propensity to consume of capitalists;
unemployment equilibrium as a natural state of the economy; the
transformation of Keynes into a cycle theorist ralized by the work of
Minsky; the theory of the two prices (capital as output and capital as an
asset) of Keynes developed by Minsky into a theory of investment without
absolutely no effort in the direction of developing Marx's theory of
fictitious capital. I do not really care about names except that things,
schools of thought, buterflies, all require identification. Underconsumption
keynesians fit just fine for it retrieves the marxian origin and add the
modern substance which is plain keynesian.
Paulo

----- Original Message -----
From: "GERALD LEVY" <gerald_a_levy@msn.com>
To: "Outline on Political Economy mailing list" <ope@lists.csuchico.edu>
Sent: Monday, October 04, 2010 9:42 PM
Subject: Re: [OPE] Great article from Jan Toporowski

>
> As far as MR goers, since when are Left Keynesians also revolutionary
> socialists?? If you think MR is Left Keynesian it either means you
> don't know the history or politics of the publication or your
> definition of Left Keynesian is overly broad.
>
> And even if it's true that some of the editors of MR have had
> an underconsumptionist theory of crisis since when did crisis
> theory define whether one is Left Keynesian or socialist? Let's
> recall that virtually all of the German-Austrian Social Democratic
> theorists from Marx's time through the 1930s as well as almost
> all of the Bolshevik theoreticians had an underconsumptionist and/or
> disproportionality theory of crisis.
>
> What is particularly galling about this dismissive characterization
> of MR is that it was written by someone who has repeatedly said
> that one should "refer to schools of thought by the name they prefer".
> Well, I'm pretty sure that MR would prefer not to be called a left
> Keynesian underconsumptionmist publication!
>
> And - another thing - articles related to crisis theory only comprise
> a very small % of articles in MR and it is thus a gross
> mischaracterization
> to *define* them based on the perspectives of several authors on
> crisis theory.
>
> In solidarity, Jerry
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Received on Tue Oct 5 15:59:29 2010