1. Paul Mattick Jr's work cannot be found at the website Doug recommends. His writings--some of which I have excerpted here previously--can be found in books recently edited by Fred Moseley, Martha Campbell and CJ Arthur.
2. Paul explicitly said he felt guilty that his talk carried the title "Can marx's Theory Explain the Asian Crisis" since his paper was really on Marx's method in *Capital*. Indeed the paper carries the subtitle "Theory and Observation in the Critique of Political Economy"
3. The talk included sustained reflections on several of Marx's most pregnant methodological comments. What exactly was Marx invoking when he underlined that in the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents were of assistance and that the "power of abstraction" must replace both?
Or, What did Marx mean that economic theory clung to the viewpoint of business? Why do practical capitalists, imprisoned in the competitive struggle, have no way of penetrating the phenomena it exhibits and are thus incapable of recognizing behind the semblance the inner essence and inner form of this process? How does Marx's Galilean social science allow him to understand relative surplus value in a way that is not only incomprehensible but irrelevant from the perspective of an individual businessman? How is Marx's theoretical account distinct from and indeed contradictory to accounts of observable phenomena?
Why in his investigation of the origins and nature of profit did Marx abstract from profit making businesses in industrial and mercantile activity and study first capitalist production in the abstract?
If Doug thinks the careful analysis of such questions is "prevalent" among marxist social scientists, then I will smoke that too.
4. Doug forgets that it was not Mattick but Marx that abstracted not only from all non capitalist activities but from the existence of nation states, the economic and non economic activities of the govts, the varied effects on economic activity of the credit system.
5. Mattick Jr actually made a very complicated argument about the empirical confirmation of Marx's theory. He did not argue that the theory had not empirical consequences though he did make a rather complicated argument why the theory does not have the same clear cut empirical consequences a deductive nomological law does.
At any rate,
a. Paul raised several difficulties in cutting through price data to value magnitudes beyond the well known ones, e.g., 1. the florescence of credit instruments enables prices to come unhinged from values and 2. Marx theory applies to the capitalist system as a whole so data from national economies cannot be used to confirm or disconfirm the theory.
b. Paul argued that what was important are exactly those tendencies which indicate the historic limits of the capitalist mode of production more than exact predictions of the timing or duration of the business cycle.
c. he argued that the weakness of Keynesian measures, as well as the historic retreat from the welfare state, are empirical confirmations of the value theoretic analysis of state spending achieved by his father and, I would add, Mario Cogoy.
d. Doug misses Paul's argument that the inspectors' reports of factory conditions served as confirmation of tendencies Marx was able to theorize due to the power of abstraction he employed. The way Doug puts it, one would think Capital was simply a description of early industrial capitalism, not a theory of its laws of motion.
e. Paul's argument--as I understood it--was that while by itself Marx's theory provides little assistance in understanding why the crisis broke out in Thailand in a certain market on a certain date, it does illuminate the general limits and crisis tendency of the world capitalist system as a whole, though it cannot explain well the relative fortunes of single capitalists or even nations over the rest.
At this point, I will only add that anyone who reads through the journal Paul edits (International Journal of Political Economy) will find a perfect combination of rich empirical work with theoretical argument. From what I can tell, Paul is far from an anti-empiricist. He is also not lost in scholastic political economy debate. Indeed he is probably best known for his work in aesthetics.
Happy holidays, Rakesh
>
> I heard Paul Mattick Jr give a talk just last Friday in which he claimed
> that Marx's theoretical model is one without nations, states, finance, or,
> it seemed, even time. With this apparatus he purported to "explain" the
> Asian crisis. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is all to prevalent in
> Marxian political economy - and it can explain nothing other than a model
> that exists only inside heads like Mattick's. (For a heavy dose of this,
> see the value club's archive at <http://www.gre.ac.uk/~fa03/iwgvt/>.) The
> Marx I remember isn't much like this; sure he has his theoretical value
> model, but even Capital (the book, not the social relation) is full of
> factory reports, parliamentary testimony, quotes from The Economist, etc.
> Capitalist society reproduces itself every minute of every day, through
> institutions like schools, prisons, corporations (actual ones that people
> work for or do business with or suffer toxic emissions from, not The
> Corporation), not to mention domestic life.