Marx on Smith

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue Jun 22 13:06:39 PDT 1999


Fabian Balardini wrote:


>
>That a falling rate of profit is a real concept not just a theory,

Bourgeois measures of profit in the U.S. economy show a peak in the late 60s, a fall into the early 80s, and a rise through 1996, and a modest falloff since. You can translate that into a very important political story, explaining the troubles of the 1970s followed by the capitalist counteroffensive followed by a restoration of capitalist power. What different story do the Marxian measures tell? And which Marxian measures do you use, since everyone who tries to esimate them seems to disagree.


>that value and surplus value are economic categories that can be measured,
>not just "methaphysical" concepts used by stubborn leftists and that
>apologetic economists can no longer say that Marx is empirically false.
>Conventional stats on the other hand show you only those categories that
>serve their apologetic ahistorical view of capitalism.

I don't need any special equipment to believe that profit originates in exploitation, or that the phenomenal categories of interest and profit are based on the intracapitalist division of surplus value. I think these are fundamentally political questions, not technical ones.


>
>I've read Shaikh &
>>Tonak's book and I can't figure out the point of the exercise. My suspicion
>>is that the point used to be to prove the inevitability of crisis and
>>collapse, but all but the hardiest fundamentalists are shy about doing that
>>now, so that's receded into the background. And without that point, it all
>>seems like a scholastic exercise to me. But I'm willing, even eager, to be
>>proven wrong, so please convince me to the contrary.
>>
>
>According to Anwar that was their original intention, that people are not
>using it for that purpose just goes to show the sorry state of Marxian
>economics.

But there's good reason why people are pretty shy about predicting the terminal crisis, the death agony of capitalism - it hasn't happened, and sure doesn't seem likely to, regardless of what the theory says.


>This, however, is no proof that Marxian categories are not crucial. Or are
>you actually implying that the relevancy of a theory is a function of its
>popularity??

Heavens no. I traffic in some pretty unpopular theories myself.


>The way I see it, professional economists no matter how marxist they think
>they are, would never be able to do scientific and unapologetic analysis
>as long as they get paid by capital itself. Marx already proved it
>himself that the best economic analysis of capitalism can only come from
>starving intellects outside the academia.

Actually, most Marxian value theorists are within academia, but I don't hold that against them. I've read a bunch of the papers on the value club's website <http://www.gre.ac.uk/~fa03/iwgvt/> - hosted at a university, I might point out - and I'll be damned if I can figure out what the point of them is.


>So, Doug, no I can not convince you or myself that Marxian categories are
>useful because they are being activally used by social scientists, because
>they are not.

That's not my test of relevance - I'm asking what they explain about capitalism that I don't know already. It seems to me that value theorists are committing the same error for which Keynes criticized the whole enterprise of econometrics. As he said in a letter to Harrod, "[E]conomics is a branch of logic, a way of thinking; and...you do not repel sufficiently firmly attempts a la Schultz to turn it into a pseudo-natural science." Conceding that progress in economics comes from new models, he continued, "it is of the essence of a model that one does not fill in real values for the variable functions. To do so would make it useless as a model. For as soon as this is done, the model loses its generality and its value as a mode of thought." And here's a comment that will drive "scientific" Marxists mad: "Economics...is essentially a moral science and not a natural science. That is to say, it employs introspection and judgments of value."


>However, if you want to analyze capitalism using Marx's political/economic
>theory then you obviously need a proper accounting system for its relevant
>categories and to show results in a statitical fashion. The basic point
>remains that in order to develop the proper accounting system, the notion
>of productive/unproductive labor is the crucial starting point.

You've asserted that, but you haven't proved it.

Doug



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