[no subject]

[wpc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Paul Cockshott)]

Ajit writes <<<<<<<< I think, F & M's baby is still born. The problem may
be that they are intelligent mathematicians who do not understand the nature of
economic theory. Economic theoreticians are not interested in prices as any
merchant or trader would be. For economic theory, price is just a character
(sometimes important and sometimes not so important) in a story, and is of
interest only as a character of the story. E.G. During the preparation of his
PRINCIPLES, Ricardo, on December 30, 1815, wrote to James Mill, "I know I shall
be soon stopped by the word price"; i.e. his story had come to a halt without
this character. In the surplus approach economics, prices play a role of
DISTRIBUTING the SURPLUS PRODUCT (which is determined independent of prices)
among the exploiting class according to certain rules (uniform rate of profit
being one rule). In the neo-Classical economics, prices play the role of
DISTRIBUTING (or allocating) the SCARCE RESOURCES to various ends to satisfy
human wants. In THE LAWS OF CHAOS, prices are taken as empirical facts and the
authors attempt to predict the empirical prices by using the method of
mechanical statistics. For them a prediction of the observed prices is the sole
purpose of the price or value theory, independent of any economic theory or the
larger story of which it is part and parcel of. Of course, they try to put the
old Marxist story as their larger story.

F & M's attack on the whole classical tradition, including Marx, for
postulating uniform rate of profit is also not very interesting. Who does not
know that if you look at the data of a year, most likely the rate of profit
will not be equal accross sectors. The rate of profit is affected by tech.
change, degrees of monopolization, international trade, changes in demand
patterns, govt. interventions, wars, and a whole host of things. The classical
theory of value or prices of production ASSUMES that these factors are either
constant or do not exist. If F & M want to discredit the classical position,
they must show that under the given conditions of classical theory, this is an
illogical position. But they don't do this. They only say that the "real world"
profits don't equalize. But this is no criticism. Theory is far from "real
world" and will always remain far from it.
>>>>>>>

Ajit's position seems to me to smack of post modernism and idealism. It
is not the task of science to narrate beautiful or edifying tales. Its
job is to uncover the causal laws that govern the real world. In the
epistemological break from ideology to science, explanations in terms of
subjective purposes and teleologies are dispensed with to be replaced with
explanations in terms of objective causal processes.

It is certainly true that political economy, by virtue of its position
within the ideological formation of bourgeois society has since its
inception been heavily loaded with ideology and story telling. The
question is whether it should remain as such. Althusser and Balibar
argued that Capital represented a fundamental epistemological break
from the ideological matrix of political economy. With F & M's work
one can see that elements of that matrix were carried forward.
They are able to present the economy as the famous process without
a subject that historical materialism claims to present history as.

F & M s work is a theory as well, but one whose objectivist foundations
are unfamiliar to economics, but as any good scientific theory should,
it offers empirically testable propositions. It is no accident that
they are trained in physics. Physics has long known that there may
be multiple internally consistent theories about the world, but it
takes obsevation and experiment to decide which one is right. A theory
that can only be judged on its internal consitency and is impervious
to its axioms being counter factual, will never rise above the
level of ideology.


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