>At 10:29 AM 6/24/1999 -0400, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> >Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. I find the basic Marxian categories,
> >like the ones you name in the rest of your post, profoundly useful and true
> >- but mainly as political categories.
>
>Previously you said Marxian categories were primarily political rather than
>technical. You repeat the first part again here. Political? What do you
>mean? Useful to create some polemic? Not technical? You mean unimportant
>to creating an analysis of capitalism? Surely not that. But then what do
>you mean?
Political, you know, about relations of power between groups in a society. Or as Margaret Atwood once pungently defined it, who gets to eat whose lunch and get away with it.
What leaves me mystified is what is accomplished, analytically or politically, with trying to put numbers on the basic categories of Marxian analysis - the effort to translate the Keynesian NIPAs into Marxese. You keep saying this gives you all kinds of insight into the dynamics of capitalism, but you haven't yet given me a very convincing example of this yet.
>You said you could track profit rates over several decades--they go up here,
>down over there, back up again over here--and create an important
>*political* explanation (there's that characterization again)
Not a word a Marxist should be afraid of, is it? The more I read of this kind of stuff, the more convinced I am of Antonio Callari's claim that Marxist economists have used value theory as a substitute for politics.
> of capitalist
>development. And presumably have something important to say about
>capitalist dynamics, as well as the contradictions facing capital. I said
>you were kidding yourself on several levels, the most basic being that
>published profit rates do not help you understand profitability (the
>creation and distribution of surplus value), or the contradictions inherent
>in the different ways surplus value is realized today.
Please do tell me what special knowledge you've gleaned from your categories that I haven't from bourgeois statistics. I think you're kidding yourself with the pseudo-profundity of your analysis, but like I say, I'm all ears to be convinced to the contrary.
>On small case in point. You have asserted that you understand that profits
>and interest payments are divisions of surplus value, as if, I suppose, that
>were indicative of some kind of Marxian awareness. That doesn't even get
>you to first base in understanding the uses of surplus value today.
Which are? Slowly please, I'm understanding-compromised.
>I took some space to show how a grasp of the concept of productive labor was
>essential to understanding not only the origins of surplus value and
>exploitation, but the laws of motion as well. A couple of days ago, in
>responding to Rob, I went into some detail to show how there are different
>definitions of productive labor (all springing from a few basics) depending
>on the questions being analyzed (that was, I think, actually before you
>asked what the hell the term meant). Did any of this mean anything to you?
Frankly, no.
>
>I know you are a busy guy. But your reply to me was devoid of content.
I'm just a journalist, we shun content.
Doug