I could go on and on and on, but I want to make sure you're serious about discussing this honestly before I waste more time. I have my doubts about that, I must say, after your latest post ridiculing Alejandro Ramos' important work on the falling rate of profit, taking it all out of context so that it sounds like technical gibberish. BTW, Ramos is NOT an academic; he's a serious Marxist who understands the importance of ideas, theory, and abstraction to changing the world. You may also want to think about whether it is racist to ridicule an article for not being in popular English when its author is Costa Rican.
You see, there are militants who care by ideas, people who *rightly* will have their confidence shaken when they're informed that the foundations on which they base their ideas and actions have been disproven. But for you none of this matters, because your mind is made up -- there's supposedly something called "the" labor theory of value that no one on the left except some academic economists "question." (And where are you getting your "labor theory of value"? Perhaps from some popularizations of these same academic Marxists economists who, just like the Analytical Marxists, have "corrected" Marx's internal inconsistencies and "completed" his work?)
And so what if the academics do question "the" labor theory of value? No biggie. You still take "the" theory on faith and think others should do the same. If it gets challenged, then just pull a Jamie Owen Daniel and dismiss the challengers for their bias. No need to deal with their *arguments*. (I note that Daniel was not able to impugn even one single bit of the evidence in Christopher Hitchens' carefully documented discussion of the CP's voluntary appearance before HUAC denouncing Trotsky as a Gestapo agent and calling for his suppression -- she [sorry about the he] simply tries to dismiss everything that Hitchens reports on the ground that he is supposedly biased! And she's not?!)
If this had been Marx's attitude, he would dismissed everyone as bourgeois and written a short pamphlet entitled "Revolution in the 1860s -- Go For It!" instead of laboring decade after decade on _Capital_ and thereby dealing the bourgeoisie what he called a THEORETICAL blow from which they'll never recover. (I'll be happy to quote you passages in the _Grundrisse_ and even _Capital_ that are ten times as abstract and obscure to you as anything Alejandro Ramos has written.) AND MARX CERTAINLY WOULD NOT HAVE MADE THE THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN _CAPITAL_ PART OF THE DEFINING CHARACTER OF A MARXIST ORGANIZATION, AS HE DID IN THE _CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM_, GOING SO FAR AS TO REPUDIATE AND TO DENOUNCE AS *RETROGRESSION* A NEW ORGANIZATIONAL UNITY THAT DEPARTED FROM THOSE HARD-WON *THEORETICAL* RESULTS.
Your complaint is not really against "academics." Underneath that veneer, it is a complaint against ideas, especially ones that involve significant abstraction and are therefore not immediately accessible to you. I've read your stuff. You seem to think the world can be changed through politics in the narrowest sense -- programs, strategies, tactics. Anything ideas that get too abstract are suspect as a diversion from the class struggle.
As for my supposedly having complained about irrelevant discussion because I think the Okishio theorem is the most important thing, Louis completely miscontrues and distorts my point. I complained about the continual DIVERSIONS that quickly mutated the threads and subverted attempts to discuss matters *in depth* -- whatever they might be.
As for Mark Jones, I have to say that I have no respect for him or his views, because he's all too ready to lie about me. In the midst of a lot of other slander, he said things that cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered opinion, much less truth; they are outright falsifications. I refer to his statements that I have tenure and that I'm a Trotskyist.
But, unfortunately, others may be persuaded by his oh-so-erudite pronouncement, adorned with all his credentials, that, having read Kliman on Okishio (what exactly, please?), he finds that it doesn't advance "a jot or a tittle beyond the debates about Morishima." So I'm happy to discuss this. In fact, I challenge Jones to defend this statement seriously, or to retract it. For instance, I'd like to see him demonstrate that my work, and the similar work of John Ernst, Alejandro Ramos, and Alan Freeman, has not in fact refuted the Okishio Theorem on its own terms -- the irrefutability of which was taken for granted in the days of the debates about Morishima.
In pure disgust,
Andrew ("Drewk") Kliman Home: Dept. of Social Sciences 60 W. 76th St., #4E Pace University New York, NY 10023 Pleasantville, NY 10570 (914) 773-3951 Andrew_Kliman at msn.com
"... the *practice* of philosophy is itself *theoretical.* It is the *critique* that measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the Idea." -- K.M.