[lbo-talk] Delong puts the smackdown on ol' Whiskers

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Wed Apr 6 07:44:28 PDT 2005



>
> CB: Marxists would differentiate themselves from
> this standard of "explain
> or clarify" for evaluating a tautological aspect of
> theory by adding that a
> theory must be useful in social practice.

As a pragmatist I can't disagree with that.

Marx's
> emphasis on human labor
> tends to empower the working class with a sense that
> workers are producing
> the wealth and are thereby justified in taking state
> power as a class.

Well, that's one on theory of justice -- not Marx's, because he doesn't havea theory of justice. Therea re other ways to argue the point, and other raesons to make labor crucial. For example, while you can have a corn theory of value if you want and measure vakliue in terms of SNACT (ther amount of time socially necessary to produce a given quantity of corn), labor si more salient because it is conscious and can resist.


>
> How do your alternative tautologies enhance social
> practice, praxis ?

Well, I am an antitrust lawyer, so neoclassical price theory is very useful in my line of work, which involves getting markets to work. This has an ethical dimension: antitrust violations are large scale highway robbery.

Hayalian models are useful if you want to understand the problems with not-marker allocations of resources. This is true even if you think that markets should be abolished. It is especially true if you think markers should be abolsihed. Hayekian analyis shows you the problesm to be overcome.

Transaction cost analysis (Williamson, Coase et al.) is useful all over.

Marxist analysis is not useful for either of those purposes. Marxist theory does predict the rise of monopolies, but not their behavior.

Oskar Lange once said: Marxist economics is the economics of capitalsim. Neoclassical economics is the economics of socialism. That is an oversimplification -- NCE and other bourgeois economics are useful, even for progressive purposes, in capitalism. And there is more than NCE that will be useful in socialism. But Marxist economics won't be useful in socialism -- unless it's a market socialism like the one I advocate.

jks

There

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