>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 08/31/99 05:24PM >
Marxists couldn't say GDP is unimportant or unscientific; it's how bourgeois social science represents its economy, which is based on money and accumulation.
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Charles: Marx used the bourgeois category of "profit" , but he showed that it is scientifically related to the communist category of "surplus value".
GDP no doubt reflects objective reality through a glass darkly and has a scientific aspect to it. But it also has an ideological aspect to it, doesn't it ? It tends to promote the bourgeois interests in the class struggle. The bourgeois use of the category pretends that it is only scientific. So what is measured by GDP may very well be necessary for a left economic understanding, but not without modifying its ideological component to have the opposite class perspective.
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Marxists love to play with the categories of national income accounting, but I can't imagine any who'd denounce the general project as fraudulent crap.
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Charles: Marx, Lenin all of them relied on the statistics and data collected by bourgeois governments for their left analyses. Marx used the Blue Books , etc., etc. Lenin got the category "imperialism" from a bourgeois economist. Left use of bourgeois categories is classcial, but not without radical reworking. There is no denial of the rational kernel that must be extracted from the propaganda husk. Without this change, the categories are part of a congame.
Seems to me Ju-Chang's questions get at the difference between the truth and the fraud in GDP.
Charles Brown