Doug Henwood wrote:
> Well that's what I'm trying to get all the FROP fans to clarify. If
> it's just a theory of the business cycle, that's not uninteresting,
> but it's also about as conventional a kind of economics as you can
> find. Every standard issue Wall Street economist does business cycle
> economics. I don't think Anwar Shaikh wants to be taken for a member
> of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee. But if it's a more
> long-term theory, then where is it pointing? You (a general you, not
> a specific you) are going to have a hard time convincing me that FROP
> theory isn't something that wants to be a theory of terminal crisis,
> even if its proponents have gotten shy about admitting that at this
> late date.
I don't follow the technical economics, and I would reject offhand any "theory of terminal crisis" (though Rakesh seems currently to be arguing, on other grounds, for such a crisis). But by sort of a loose analogy I can see how a historical theory (FROP or some other) might be both far heavier than a theory of the business cycle but not at all a theory of terminal crisis. I think if a rough and ready way one could say that the theory of gravity was a theory of the tendency of the universe to condense into one enormous black hole. But there are numerous "counteracting tendencies" (some of them generated by gravity itself) which give us an expanding universe instead. (I'm not at all sure whether the physics here are very accurate, but they don't have to be for the analogy to have some force.) But it would obviously not be very useful to repudiate the theory of gravity just because the tendency which it reflects does not operate in in empirical actuality. It is gravity which explains both why planes stay in the air and why they fall out of the air.
Now physics proceeds on the assumption (which may be demonstrated to be wrong some day, but it works pretty well so far) that the physical world is intelligible -- not a trash heap of unrelated entities impermeable to analysis and understanding. Is capitalism intelligible or is it a mass of *mere* contingencies? FROP seems one way of affirming that it is intelligible. No? Incidentally, Sweezy argues in one
or two of his articles, I can't remember which ones, that socialism will *not* be intelligible in the way that he assumes capitalism is. That is there will be in a social order based on planning (the will of the freely associated producers) nothing corresponding to the law of value (or I suppose FROP) under socialism. Hence there cannot be a "science" of a socialist order as there can be of the capitalist order.
In any case, looked at broadly, what seems to be at issue in the FROP debate is less a question of technical economics than a question of how we are to conceive of capitalism as a whole, how we are to see it as a historical complex???????
Carrol