so for Krugman to say the value-free
"job of economic analysts OUGHT to be, to assess the policies, without regard to who makes them",
The real question is whether he can assess the policies, without regard to who makes them, and I could drag out quite a few quotes which indicate that he does have regard for the people making the policies in his assessments. If Pinochet's army and police butchering of leftwing people is somehow treated as an "extra-economic" event of no relevance to economic policy, then I think we'd have to say we are dealing with a case of professional cretinism. I think Krugman is trying to say "I am interested not in the rhetoric or the personalities, but in what objectively speaking actually gets done, and what real effect it has." It is just that in the real world, butchering people and political repression was part of the policy, and objectively part of what got done, and to say it had nothing to do with economics or is somehow disconnected from economics, is a reification - in that sense I agree with you.
As regards the formula "self-expansion of capital", Marx never really used that _expression_, except possibly in some specific contexts where he is talking in a Hegelian way about the ability of the capitalist mode of production to reproduce its own initial conditions on an increasing scale. "Self-expansion of capital", is actually a mistranslation from the German "Kapitalverwertung", which means the valorisation of capital. Marx never believed that capital could "expand itself by itself" or could automatically realise itself in the market, but rather that living human labor was essential for this expansion and realisation, and that was more or less the whole point of his story: human work became capital, began to function as capital and was treated as capital, resulting both in the economising of labor, the degradation of labor and the fetishism of capital as a thing that can grow in value of its own accord (disregarding the source of this increase in
surplus-labor).
Jurriaan