> Yes, I was thinking of his essays "pure economics" and "the ideology of
> political economy" in the book Spectres of Capitalism, which are well
> written (the whole volume is pretty interesting) but in the end do not, I
> think go beyond Keynes' scepticism towards the grand narrative of the
> equilibriating market system.
That's the one I've read, though I would have to review it to get a sense of his actual argument. How much further does can one go beyond this skepticism since the proponents of this view have such a lock on the public discourse--even among supposed leftists?
> It is a case in point, I don't think that the Marxists ever wrote a good
> critique of neo-Classical economics, preferring to surrender the field to
> the Keynesians, and piggy-back theirs. I would be interested to know.
I think the problem with Marxist in the Keynesian era was that it largely got taken into the fold of the Cold War/New Deal. It became accepted that the free market utopia that Marx was largely building on was unlikely to be resumed for obvious political (and seemingly economic) reasons. Thus, at least as Anderson puts it in /Considerations on Western Marxism/, using Sweezy as an example:
Blockquote: Sweezy's book, written in the environment of the New Deal, implicitly renounced the assumption that crises of disproportionality or underconsumption were insurmountable within thecapitalist mode of production, and accepted the potential efficacy of Keynsian counter-cyclical interventions by the State to assure the internal stability of imperialism. The ultimate disintegration of capitalism was for the first time entrusted to a purely external determinant – the superior economic performance of the Soviet Union and the countries which could be expected to follow its path at the end of the War, whose 'persuasion effect' would eventually render possible a peaceful transition to socialism in the United States itself. Within this conception, /The Theory of Capitalist Development/ marked the end of an intellectual age (23).
I'm kind of a sucker for anything Anderson writes, though, so maybe he's being hyperbolic here.
As for the dearth of other Marxist critiques, I think some of this reified notion of perpetual Keynesian state wore off and, since the 1970s there has been a bit of a new attempt. I think the early Regulationist School (particularly Aglietta's major book and then Lipeitz following him in economics; Jessop took this in a more political science direction, but retains some concern for the economic) made some improvements on Keynes in a Marxist direction. And Harvey's /Limits to Capital/, though I'll admit I am only part way through it, seems a significant Marxist improvement on Keynes. And though he's probably less radical than most, Pollin does a fair job most of the time of trying to synthesize Marx and Keynes (among others). And I think our own Michael Perelman's book /The Invention of Capitalism/ is a useful critique of many of the political movements involved in instituting (neo-)classical economics qua "political economy and the secret history of primitive accumulation." It's not necessarily Marxist per se, but it certainly seems sympathetic to those views. It might be a stretch, but one could even include a certain list manager in this. Then again, I suppose _Wall Street_ (which includes more explicit references to Marx and Keyenes than the latest) is much more a critique of current fashions and trends of his closest geographical neighbors rather than the neo-classical tradition per se.
Then there are people like Meghnad Desai who could be said to provide a Marxist critique of neo-classical economics, if, in fact, Desai believed that Marx would have any critique of the neo-classical tradition at all (cf. The Revenge of Marx). I don't think that really counts, but it is definitely an interesting exercise.
But after writing all of this, I'm feeling like maybe I'm having a lot of seepage between my categories and definitions so maybe none of this exemplifies what you're talking about, which, of course, would be a good thing to know.
s