I found Ian's [4533] very constructive.
His last sentence,
"I don't think Marx's excommunication will end with any concession
that he was not inconsistent in Vol II." (I take it this means Vol III?)
seems to accepts that there is such an excommunication.
However I think this excommunication is of a quite different order to that
found in other social science or humanities subjects - for example,
sociology. And the first important question to explore is the very fact
that this is so.
If what was at stake was for example Marx's indifference to demand, then
something has to be explained: why does the surplus approach school have a
respected and much-discussed place in academia, when it is actually a great
deal more adamant about the irrelevance of demand than Marx who in fact
devotes many chapters to it and by no means excludes it from his value
analysis - for example in the determination of social from individual value,
the formation of rent, of interest, and so on?
I think it is because the kind of argument that is deployed against Marx
is qualitatively different from an argument that he was 'merely' wrong.
The case against Marx rests on the claim that his numbers don't add up;
that he was inconsistent. This line of attack, initiated by Boehm-Bawerk,
has been an extremely coherent theme: the core of it is the idea that
a theory which is internally contradictory really has nothing to say. In
short, because Marx is internally contradictory on transformation, the
argument runs, we don't have to listen to anything else he says. Instead
the problematic becomes among his opponents to ignore him altogether
and among his supporters to 'correct' or find the 'rational kernel' in his
work. The dispute around the actual content of his critique of the concepts
of economics is then displaced into a dispute around who has the authority
to speak for him, as we have recently seen.
I think the excommunication as such is pretty well unchallengeable, so
I hope that what's under discussion is the reasons for it, and the way of
ending it. Nevertheless to present some evidence, let's begin with a
quite hostile witness: Brewer in the recent HOPE symposium,
(History of Political Economy 27:1 p111ff) who writes (p120)
"the neglect of Marx's work by the mainstream has been so complete and
so visible that it would be a waste of space to document it at any length."
The problem then becomes, why this is so.
Brewer says as follows: (p121)
"If Marx had any claim to have improved on Ricardo, it was that his
procedure allowed him to do properly what Ricardo had tried, and failed,
to do. If Marx's transformation procedure had been a success, this would
have been a valid claim, but it was obvious from the start that Marx's
analysis was inadequate"
"What really manners here is the view of the majority of mainstream
economists, who chose to say little or nothing about Marx. How they saw
the issue cannot be known with any certainty, but Marx cannot have come
out so well. By making it so easy to read his value theory as a simple
labour theory of price, Marx invited economists to dismiss his work as
obviously false. Those few who recognised the central importance of his
transformation would, presumably, have been able to see the
inadequacy of Marx's proposed solution"
But it seems to me that this entire argument hinges on the universally-
accepted falsehood (for such it is) that the transformation was indeed
inadequate. One only has to substitute the words that would Brewer would
have to use, if the economists in question had contemplated even the
possibility that the single-system approach in any form was what Marx
intended to do. What kind of explanation would the following furnish
for mainstream economics' refusal to deal with Marx:
"If Marx had any claim to have improved on Ricardo, it was that his
procedure allowed him to do properly what Ricardo had tried, and failed,
to do. Since Marx's transformation procedure was a success, this was a
valid claim, and it was obvious from the start that Marx's analysis was
adequate"
"What really manners here is the view of the majority of mainstream
economists, who chose to say little or nothing about Marx. How they saw
the issue cannot be known with any certainty, but Marx must have come
out quite well. By making it so easy to read his value theory as a simple
labour theory of price, Marx invited economists to understand his work as
obviously valid. Those few who recognised the central importance of his
transformation would, presumably, have been able to see the
adequacy of Marx's proposed solution"
Now I don't happen to agree with Brewer's reading of Marx's intentions
but that is not the relevant point here. The point is that without the
universally accepted 'inconsistency' of the transformation, nothing
is left of the argument. In fact all that emerges is that the mainstream
economists come out with a lot of egg on their faces. I actually think this
is one of the reasons for the systematic writing-out-of-history of the
quite large number of writers (listed by Andrew) who have demonstrated
the full consistency of Marx's approach; it is quite notable that Brewer
was able to conduct his entire symposium without once referring to any
element of this tradition.
Moreover there is a further point which I would be interested in Ian's
reaction to, which I have tried to deal with in my EEA paper but can
briefly resume here: the fact that the economists got this so wrong
tells us something about the economists. I think we have to ask,
irrespective of whether we are listened to, why and how they made
such a godalmighty cockup. This was certainly the first question that
occurred to me, the minute I became convinced that there was indeed
a fully coherent solution to the transformation problem that accorded
with Marx's own written works.
I think what we confront is some sort of necessary and special resistance
of the profession to external criticism. I think on the whole the
economics profession is a sort of hermetically-sealed world that really
doesn't have much contact with reality; and to be blunt, I don't think
it can take the heat.
Now oddly enough, this means I probably agree with your statement:
"I don't think Marx's excommunication will end with any concession
that he was not inconsistent in Vol II."
The excommunication is in some sense a survival instrument for
economics. I think it is one of the principal means that economics guards
itself against any critique of its concepts. I think it will probably fight
very hard to keep it. However, this does not convince me that we should
simply lie back and enjoy it.
In particular I don't think we should give our consent to it, any more
than consent to racism because it is an unavoidable byproduct of
imperialism. I think we should make it vocally plain that there is no
rational basis for it, campaign vigorously for it to stop, and do
everything we can to expose it.
I also think it would generate a sense of common purpose against
evident injustice that could go a long way towards restraining animosity.
Alan