'As Antonio Callari said years ago at a meeting of the International Working Group on Value Theory, they use it as a substitute for politics. No one on the room ever responded to Callari's critique. Instead, they obsessed over yet another iteration of VT by Ted McGlone.'
There's a good essay by Lucio Colletti on crisis theory (somewhere in the Telos back catalogue) where he argues that there are two sides to Marx which are not entirely compatible. The first is the *critique* of Smith and Ricardo's 'labour embodied theory of value', and the second is his modified value theoretic reconstruction of the relationships of capitalist production. I wouldn't draw Colletti's conclusions, but his approach is definitely right. Marx was indeed taken with the scientific task of plotting out the inner relationships of capitalism, a task whose sheer elegance of construction might lend itself to an interpretation at odds with its intent. I mean that the intellectual investment readers make into mastering these categories and their ordering tends to make those initiates in value theory cling to them, treating htem as if they were set in stone. That's a problem because Marx always meant to show their relativity, i.e. their transience.
There is an irony in the dogmatic assertion of Marx's crisis theory, namely that the very point of the crisis theory (which is of course just a component part of the whole critique of value theory) is to show that the economic categories are not permanent, but transient. Today, ironically, the very theory that seeks to show that all economic categories are transient has itself become ossified, made permanent, to last for all time. Anyone who dares to suggest that economic crisis might not be occuring (influenced perhaps by the good times their fellow citizens seem to be enjoying) is reprimanded with the awful accusation - you have betrayed Marx. But Marx never said that things would always be the same for ever and ever - he said the opposite, that things tended to change. What weirdness from the crisis mongerers! They think that you have to assert that crisis will always be with us, when that's the whole point about crisis, that it is a moment, that must pass (one way or another).
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