FW: Law of value

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: FW: Law of value

 for some reason, this dialogue never got onto pen-l, even though both JKS and I wanted it to be there.

-----Original Message-----
From: andie nachgeborenen
To: Devine, James
Sent: 6/13/2003 9:55 PM
Subject: RE: Law of value

This should have been posted to the list, don't know why it wasn't,
sorry. jks

"Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx> wrote:

 I wrote:>> The title "History of Marxian _Economics_" says a lot: Marx
would have rejected the division between economics and the other social
sciences as artificial (as would Smith or Weber, for that matter). <<
 
You ask:   >So, it is impossible to do a study of an aspect of Marx's
work?  <
 
No way. I said the title "says a lot" rather than saying that such a
task -- or any task -- was impossible. Since Marx saw economics as a
part of sociology (seeing, for example, each societal "mode of
production" having its own "law of population") H&K end up with a
one-sided story. It's generally a good book, but we have to be clear
about its limitations (and their clear neo-Ricardian point of view).
Critical thinking tells us to be clear about the limitations of all
books.
 
> One cannot write a book called Karl Marx's Theory of History (for
example), or Marx and Ethics (Morality), or Marx's Social Theory? <
 
people have written good books on those. Rader's book on KM's view of
history is great, while Cornell West's book on KM's ethics is highly
suggestive. Etc.
 
>  Must you always say everything about Marx every time you speak? Look,
that's silly.  <
 
Speaking is different from writing a full-length book, so there should
be different standards.
 
And for books, what I said is not silly. Obviously, if one must write a
book on "Marx's economics," other topics have to be short-changed. But
it's important to give the context by noting how his "economics" fits
into his general philosophical perspective and his materialist
conception of history. (Similarly, it would be a mistake to write a book
on Chicago without mentioning Illinois.)  H&K don't do as good as good a
job at that as they could.
 
One thing I've discovered is that many or most people discuss
"economics" without defining what it means, how it differs from other
social sciences. Some assert that Marx was an "economic determinist"
without defining what's meant by "economics" in that phrase. Marx
clearly didn't distinguish between economics and other social sciences,
though maybe he should have: his theory of commodity fetishism could be
summarized as saying that people take what is really a societal system
and interpret it totally in terms of narrowly-defined economics (the
market exchange of commodities).
 
> Among his other achievements, Marx did grouondbreaking work in what we
now call economics, some of it as part of what he called a critique of
political economy. He constructed formal models, formulated and tested
hypotheses, purported to prove theorems (or construct rigorous
near-formal arguments) about money, credit, wages, investment, economic
crises, and the like. He sometimes presented these models in a very pure
(nearly sociology-free) form -- see Wages Price & Profit.  <
 
I submit that Marx's achievements are based on his view that capitalism
is a specific historical social system. (His formal models and theorems
are pretty easy, usually tautological. He really doesn't follow
deductive logic -- the stuff of models and theorems -- as much as he
follows a version Hegelian dialectics, which frames his deduction. In
line with this, he also combined deduction with induction.)
 
> So it is not silly to look at Marx the economist, and the long
tradition of people who work in that vein -- Jim Divine comes to mind!
<
 
I stand on his shoulders.
 
> Nor is H&K's treatment of economoics so socilogy-free as all that.
After all, they say that the salvagable core of the LTV is the
qualitative observation that there is exploitation going on -- a view I
believe to be maintained by JD as well . . . . <
 
Their interpretation of what the "LTV" is unfair to Marx, who had a more
sophisticated theory than the Ricardian-style stuff that Bortkewicz made
popular.
 
As far as the standard LTV/transformation problem literature is
concerned, it never shows that "exploitation is going on." That's an
assumption, originally based in Marx's socio-economic analysis of
capitalism.
 
why am I being discussed in the third person? Your message didn't go to
pen-l or to anyone else but me.
 
Jim

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