bio, roughly

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Tue Sep 7 11:11:49 PDT 1999



>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 09/07/99 10:46AM >>>
Charles Brown wrote:


>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.

Journalist. "Writer" is so pretentious.

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Charles: OK, but you do feature stories.

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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.
>
>
>((((((((((((
>
>Charles: You heard it here "first".

Hardly. The first text in Wall Street is an epigraph from Marx. I'd say that's what economists call a signaling mechanism.

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Charles: Maybe I should say you heard it explicitly.


>
>
> > 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.
>
>(((((((((((((
>
>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 ?

Doug: For sure. But Keynes is important in thinking about economies with complex, developed financial sectors. I think he got lots of it wrong, but productively wrong.

Charles: As you may recall, this thought about economies with, developed financial sectors seems to me to be corroborated by Lenin's characterization of the development in capitalism from dominance of the industrial sector to merger of industrial capital with finance capital to form finance capitalism with a financial oligarchy. Keynes' famous ideas about government fiscal policy also bear resemblance to Lenin's concept of state-monopoly capitalism.

Charles:
>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).

Doug: As the saying goes, there's no place outside ideology. You're using "ideology" as a synonym for deception or false consciousness, but that's only one sense of ideology.

Charles: Yes in this case, a la _The German Ideology_. But I don't confine "ideology" to the classical Marxist usage. I consider Marxism as the ideology of the working class ( and in that not a false consciousness). As you say, there's no place outside of ideology. I have said a number of times in debates with Max when he claimed I was being ideological that we are all ideological, but I acknowledge my ideology and seek to develop it from the standpoint of working class interests. As Engels says, the job of science is not to discover things-in-themselves, but to turn things-in-themselves into things-for-us. One criticism I have of "post-ism" is , not that it says there is no place outside of ideology, but they fail to give credit to Marxism for already knowing that; and most "postism" seems to take a step backward from Marxism by not seeking to know from the standpoint of the working class.

For example, Maurice Cornforth's _Materialism and the Dialectical Method_ begins "Every philosophy expresses a class outlook."

CB



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