Re: AM & PE

[djones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (rakesh bhandari)]

One of the really stimulating people on this list asked:

>What have the Analytical Marxists said in the area
>of political economy that is either new or interesting?
>Or, indeed, both.


Roemer has had this to say:

Like many economists of my generation, I am strongly influenced by the
power of the equilibrium method: of examining a model when it is at
rest...in the sense that all the rules that describe how its parts work are
simultaneously fufilled.  What is distrurbing about the equilibrium method
is that it pictures the typical position of the system as a position the
system rarely or never enjoys....There seems to be a deep contradiction
between using models whose main analytical trick is to postulate a position
that is precisely at variance with the most most interesting and important
aspect of capitalist economy as described by Marxian theory--its incessant
contradictory motion.  There is therefore the danger that...the equilibrium
method will prevent one from seeing the most important aspects of the
Marxian theory of capital.  Knowing no other method, I use the equilibrium
method, with the vague thought that, when rereading these pages in twenty
years, its obsolescence as a modeling tool for Marxian theory may be clear.
(Quoted in Tom Mayer, 1994. Analytical Marxism. Sage: 304).

Luckily we won't have to wait twenty years.

In 1941 Grossmann had already explicated the conceptual and methodological
breakthroughs Marx developed to  isolate and then analyze the moments of
each capital in its circuit (what Shortall has called the
self-particularizing of capital) and then in the interrelation of
individual capitals in the reproduction of total social capital.  Grossmann
had already demonstrated that capital can never be in equilibrium; for
example, he analyzed the disequilibrium consequences of *value revolutions*
as they effect capitals in their self-particularization (from which Marx
had initially abstracted), of the tendency towards *overproduction of fixed
capital*, of the *constraints the technical sides to production* put on
equilibrium growth.

There is also the looming question of whether there is a "disequilibrium"
tendency of  *permament technological unemployment*, raised by Hans Neisser
also more than fifty years ago and revived (I understand) by Andrew Kliman
in an unpublished paper.

Today we have theorists who have uncovered the conceptions of VALUE and
TIME  which undergird equilibrium techniques--Alan Freeman and Guglielmo
Carchedi, eds. Marx and Non-Equilibrium Economics. Edward Elgar, 1996.

I hope this makes it to a paperback edition, as easily available as the
collections by rational choice theorists.  It's not in our library yet,
though I got to skim through it at the book faire at the allied social
scientists conference which was in SF this year.

Also, Postone has theorized the phenomological implications of the
incessant contradictory motion of capital, as explained by Marx's value
theory.

rakesh



     --- from list marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---

     ------------------