It is true that some of the brightest Marxists of the twentieth century spent most of their intellectual energies on two debates which produced little fruit: early on the calculation debate (which perversely helped entrench GET and later the LTOV which sapped the progress of Marxian analysis. More to the point, a critique of Neoclassical economics is subject to diminishing marginal returns. They are simply impervious to critique as any Marxian Ricardian or Keynesian can tell you. One should learn the various critiques and move on it is not about math or logical consistency it is about power. There is a reason Keynes was taken up and it is not because of the clarity of his thought.
Also I would take exception to the claim that Marx had no critique of neo-classical economics insofar as neoclassical economics is predicated at its heart on the formalization of Say's Law Marx does have a critique. In this sense Marx was the first to challenge the great meta narrative of neoclassical economics based as it is on a reading down of Smith's invisible hand.
I know the Keynesians think Keynes was the first to seriously attack/ reject Say's Law and equilibrium but that is not true. Anyone who has taken the time to read Keynes will also know that his claim to have never read Marx is suspect indeed. I have written a paper on Keynes Marx and Bourgeois political economy if anyone wants to read it let me know. ____________________________________ Travis W Fast
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Marx's critique of neo-classical economics
> On 4/1/07, James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > 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
>
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