> I'll be most readers - most educated readers - would find vol. 1 of
> Capital pretty rough going. And that was the vol. that Marx finished.
>
> He didn't just observe. He linked his observations to a theory, and
> the theory illuminated his observations. Even the most
> anti-theoretical person operates with some kind of implicit theory.
> Why the hostility to making it explicit?
The part that's relatively "simple" (though capable of endless Bedlamite redoing as algebra), the Ricardian long run increasing organic composition of capital falling rate of profit theory, is mistaken. Ironically, it's partly because, in constructing it, Marx, as I've claimed before, has forgotten the implications of the Hegelian ontological foundations of his approach, implications that severely limit (for the reasons elaborated by Whitehead) the applicability of deductive reasoning from fixed axioms (let alone "algebra") to the construction of a theory of the long run.
The "bourgeois" economist Keynes (if Jeet is in contact with Conrad, by the way, he might tell him that Keynes was a Cambridge, not an Oxford, economist) understands this point (a point overlooked by many Marxists and Keynesians). As Sardoni and Marcuzzo point out, he criticized Joan Robinson's attempt to extend the General Theory into the "long period," in particular into a long period theory of profits, on just this ground.
“In this section we examine the extensions to the General Theory which Robinson was busy pursuing in 1935-1937. They can be grouped under three main headings: the determination of the level of employment in the long period, in (a) an open economy and when the effects of b) innovations and c) technical progress are taken into account.
“Her first attempt Is contained in an article, completed before publication of the General Theory, originally published in Zeitshrift för Nationalöconomie, 1936 and reprinted in the Essays. Initially Keynes did not object to extending his results to the long period, although he had some reservations about her use of the elasticity of substitution, as we will see. However, when the issue of the long period came up again, in 1941, he commented on a manuscript she had sent to him with a sharp note.
“Broadly speaking, you are taking the view that profits, and indeed interest, generally, is, in the last analysis, an uncertain phenomenon, - a view I share with you. But, if so, I do not clearly understand what you mean by a long-term theory of profits. Why should not the answer be that the long term ignores uncertain phenomena, and consequently it is a contradiction in terms to talk of the theory of profits in the long term? Is that not perhaps the answer to your difficulties? Each alternative you adopt to lead you to a conclusion seems to me unsatisfactory. But you start off with the assumption that there must be such a theory. Why?” (letter 1860, 24 January 1941) Claudio Sardoni and Marina Christina Marcuzzo “The Correspondence between Maynard Keynes and Joan Robinson” p. 10 <http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/cjeconf/delegates/sardoni.pdf>
The Hegelian part of Marx, on the other hand, includes a very insightful ontological and psychological treatment of capitalist subjectivity, a treatment that draws on insights from, among others, Shakespeare, Goethe and Balzac as well as Hegel. These insights are more systematically developed in psychoanalysis and have been appropriated from there by Keynes (who also makes use of literature e.g. Tolstoy and Hardy at the beginning of Economic Consequences of the Peace and, in the General Theory, Ibsen to explain one of Hayek's Bedlamite arguments). On this basis Keynes constructs a theory of behaviour in financial markets that will explain the foolishness of the "Nobel" prize winning investment strategy of Long-Term Capital Management as, what amounts to, an elaboration of Shakespeare's insightful treatment of Antonio's similar strategy in the Merchant of Venice. This, I take it, is a "theory" in Chomsky's sense.
Ted