Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
> Catching up with more than a week of mail, I find myself surprised at
> Doug's summary of Paul Mattick's talk on Dec 18th at the Bertell Ollman
> Seminar on Marx at NYU. Doug's summary is below. Here are a few
> responses, though my brain is still floating in a punch bowl somewhere:
>
> 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?
Fetishism. Relations between people look like relations between things.
> 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?
How does Marx's account contradict empirical reality? A theory that contradicts empirical reality is false. Otherwise, how would one test,falsify or choose between theories? False theories are replaced by ones that, at least, approximate empirical reality. What is a theory, if not a description, explanation and prediction of empirical phenomena?
Marx, in his own words, explained at the level of essence and not appearance. The level of essence is not a thing-in-itself or an unobservable postulate used for explanatory purposes. Marx was a scientific realist and believed that the level of essence existed and was observable. The level of appearance is like a mirage where things appear to be real but are not. For example, the capital/wage relation appears to be a voluntary contract between individuals but is really coercive because the wage-laborer ,owning no capital, is forced out of circumstance, to sell her ability to labor in order to procure the necessities to reproduce herself.
>
>
> 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?
You have to have some idea of how capitalism works in practice before you can theorize about it. Marx did not, to my knowledge, make a priori arguments about empirical phenomena. I always thought he did a helluva lot of empirical research before trying to draw conclusions and generalizations about that research.
>
>
> 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.
Why is the theoretical linkage between price and value that important? How is the transformation riddle a problem for marxist theory? Is a solution to the transformation riddle a necessary condition for the internal coherence of marxism? If not, why bother? What will a solution to the trans. riddle show us?,that prices do indeed correspond to their values? Big deal. That the rate of exploitation corresponds to the level of productivity? We already knew that. In any case, why not use value added in manufacturing as a rough guide to the level of exploitation across the world economy? Seems to me that the debate around the trans. problem is a debate about the particular assumptions used to solve it. Any solution will be ceteris paribus, no?
>
>
> 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.
Historic limits? Arguably, capitalism is today at its strongest point in the 20th century. The historic limits of the capitalist mode of production are only shown by the level of class struggle, for only through class struggle can the cap. mode of production be superceded. The historic limits of capitalism will only be shown on the eve of its overthrow or its self-destruction.Hopefully the former rather than the latter. Capitalism is only one particular historical form of social organization. History shows that no social form lasts forever and capitalism is no exception.
>
>
> 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.
The retreat of the welfare state can be explained by many different or a combination of different factors; profit squeeze, Brenner's argument, collapse of the USSR, ideological factors. Mattick Sr's explanation is only one among many.
>
>
> 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.
It's both. The theory and the empirical work buttress each other and are examples of each other.
>
>
> 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.
The problem I've always had with the concept of crisis is; a crisis for who? Sure the Mexican peso crisis and the Asian crisis may be over from the point of view of the investor classes but these crisis' are very much intact for the millions who lost their jobs and have seen their purchasing power halved. The word "crisis" means different things for different classes. "Crisis" is a kind of indexical; it has different referents depending on its usage. As I understand it, the SSA approach is an attempt to explain why capitalism does not go into crisis. But for those who work long hours for very little, capitalism is always in crisis. Or am I just confusing the macro sense of crisis with the micro sense of the word? If Marx's theory of crisis cannot predict particular instances of crisis, what use is it?Sure, the world economy always tends toward crisis, but you only have to read the daily newspaper to see that. The more you critique bourgeois ideology the stronger it gets. The more crisis there are, the better the bourgeoise gets at managing them(i.e. shifting the costs on to the working class and the poor), both politically and economically.The crisis theory may explain in hindsight, but its predictive power is minimal, which still gives it an edge over its competitors e.g. neo-classicism which have no predictive and no explanatory power.
>
>
> 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, Rakesh3
To my mind, this is the last word on the so-called labor theory of value. Marx to Kugelman 9/11/68:
"Every child knows that a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows too that the masses of products corresponding to the different require different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labor of society. That this necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance is self-evident. No natural laws can be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws assert themselves." Marx-Engels Correspondance, Moscow. !953. p 251
Sam Pawlett.
"When in doubt, make a distinction" --John Dewey
>
>
> >
> > 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.