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>
> Yawn. Explaining price formation at the point of production and it's
> connection to class struggles is a different issue from forecasting
> price movements. All price theories have lousy track records on that
> [latter] score. For good reason, else a lot of good economics jokes
> would have to be tossed in the dustbin of history.
C Cox got it the most right with the explanation about Marx and political economy (and philsophy, too, which comes out of a Hegelian tradition that unfortunately few contemporary economists in the US are philosophically educated enough to grasp, a blind spot that is, how can I say it, metaphysical?).
However, the current focus of onlist controversy, LTV develops out of Locke, Smith and others, perhaps most importantly Ricardo, with Marx incorporating it into a much more comprehensive theory of political economy which, among other things, denies capital any actual productive role in the creation of value.
Whether LBOTers like it or not, Marx is one of the very few economists who has influenced non-academic or popular views about the economy and society. I would have to say Keynes and Friedman have influence don't come anywhere close to that sort of influence. If anything, theories from mercantilism seem to work more on popular thought about political economy (and the politicians) in the US than either Keynes or Friedman.
Marx is also one of those very infrequent 'fertile' geniuses who influences numerous other fields of academic inquiry and scholarly production in addition to his own (hence, Marxist literary studies and criticism, Marxist social theory, Marxist film making, Marxist politics, post-modern Marxism, etc etc). In the 20th century, Freud, Jung, Lenin, Gramsci and Freire come close (though my list is not meant to be exhaustive). If there is a really obvious pattern here, it is that none of these people worked within the sterile, even emphemeral social scientific research pseudo-paradigms of North American or UK academia (largely created in the US from 1945- anyway, with the proliferation of ever more programs and specialities in pursuit of 'research' with few actual theories).
Finally, as for the price of oil. It seems so obvious to me what is happening with the price of oil, so I don't really need some silly study about prices using such silly, inadequate models that barely correspond to themselves let alone prices of commodities in a huge economy.
What is happening to the price of oil is happening to a great extent away from aspects of production and is, rather, capital pursuing profits in a speculative bubble. I even suspect that huge corporations are now actively speculating on the price of oil just as they do currency movements, rationalising it as 'hedging against rapid changes in oil prices', but actually using such risky investing to increase their reported profits--and this will actually lead to a few more spectacular corporate crashes, and yet no one will notice that companies like GM or GE do more speculation for profit than they do actual exploitation of production.
So let me predict a crash in oil prices within the next three years.
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