Re: [OPE] Great article from Jan Toporowski

We seem to be talking past one another, Paolo.
 
For instance, I said that MR can not be accurately *defined* as a "left Keynesian
underconsumptionist" magazine. Nothing you said was in response
to that.
 
I said that it was inconsistent for someone who says that, wherever possible,
one should "refer to schools of thought by the name they prefer" and then
refer to MR as a "left Keynesian underconsumptionist" journal (clearly a
name MR doesn't prefer). You did not speak to that.
 
I said that it was inaccurate to refer to MR with that designation, not only for the
above reasons, but also because articles relating to crisis theory and articles
which contain underconsumptionist perspectives only comprise a small % of
the articles in that journal. Nothing you wrote spoke to that.
 
If you want to call Sweezy, Magdoff, and/or Foster underconsumptionists
that's one thing, but to refer to MR as a "Left Keynesian underconsumptionist" journal
is quite another.
 
I find this (mis-) characterization (by Kliman) to be curious for another reason: it
seems to suggest that the perspective that one has on crisis theory defines the
overall theoretical perspective of a school of thought. This is highly misleading and seems
to reduce the scope of interest of other theoretical perspectives to his own (i.e. value
theory, including crisis theory).
 
In solidarity, Jerry
 
> > 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.
                                               

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Received on Wed Oct 6 11:51:59 2010