>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 09/06/99 06:22PM >>>
Charles Brown wrote:
>Gee, is everybody on LBO a Marxist ? Coulda fooled me. I thought
>non-Marxist economics was discussable on this list.
Absolutely.
>I'm not even sure that Doug Henwood terms himself a Marxist economist.
I'm not an economist!
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Charles: Well , that's curve ball. Would it be impertinent to ask what you consider yourself to be ? Maybe political economist ? Let me guess: Writer.
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As for the Marxist label, my first instinct is to say "depends on who's asking." But if I had to make what the pollsters call a forced choice, yes or no, then yes, unlike Marx, I'm a Marxist.
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Charles: You heard it here "first".
> He certainly seems to discuss economics from the standpoint of
>Keynes sometimes.
As I've probably said too many times, I think Keynes is the best economist the bourgeoisie has produced in the 20th century, and he has to be taken seriously by anyone considering him-/herself a Marxist, just as Marx himself took Smith and Ricardo very seriously.
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Charles: By the way, isn't Chang's "regulated yet free market" a sort of elementary Keynesianism (and contradiction) ?
We'd be better off if today's economists stuck to Smith and Ricardo more, no ? They had a labor theory of value. Marx is only fully understandable by understanding the classicals, no ? Can't understand a science without understanding its historical development.
Speaking of ideology and science, seems to me the name changed from "political economy" to "economics" for ideological reasons in a double sense: 1) To pretend that it is an ideologically neutral science ;2) To pretend that economics in the actual world ( not the science) are not separate from politics ( if you follow me on the distinction), i.e. are ideologically neutral (i.e. hoodwinking).
Methinks the folks doeth protest Chang too much.
CB