TW writes:
>
> Much Marxist analysis, for instance, seems to take it as the
> self-evidently true starting point for the analysis of capitalist
> behaviour. Capitalists are assumed to control policy and and to base
their exercise of this control on omniscient fully rational
expectations of the consequences of policy. Everything from the
deregulation of financial markets to the invasion of Iraq to
"accumulation by dispossession" is interpreted in this way.
Travis: Ok, not to be sensitive but please actually attempt to give some specific citations of the Marxists you are talking about and please do include something from the last 20 years of Marxist scholarship. Whatever the critiques of rationality employed by Marxists working in the structural functionalist mode may be (these must be the Marxists your are talking about although I can only guess) and there are considerable critiques to be made, they are of a different species then those at play in neoclassical economics. These Marxists were not employing and probably were not even well acquainted with R. Lucas and Thomas Sergeant's Rational Expectations theory. This is a peculiar theory of rationality designed specifically by Chicago to (1) save neoclassical value theory (the postulate utility maximization and equilibrium); and (2), bury the Keynesians. Rational Expectations means something quite specific and it cannot be willy nilly attributed to those working outside the neoclassical paradigm, and not even to some of those working inside of it.
For a good read on the evolution of the economic agent and their rationality within mainstream economics see: Philip Mirowski, "Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science". (CUP, 2002). For a quick overview see: http://cepa.newschool.edu/~foleyd/ecagent.pdf
TW further writes: As is shown by Whitehead (Adventures of Ideas, Chap. VI: "Foresight"), the assumed omniscience is impossible on Marx's ontological premise of internal relations. This premise is also inconsistent with the conception of "rationality" underpinning the analysis. Marx's ontological premise is the basis of Keynes's concept of "uncertainty."
The concept of uncertainty you are talking about may be correct but it is not a workable model for planners. Again see Mirowski.
Travis