Well, I mentioned one college text, _The Labor Relations_Process_, meant for MBA's, that does explain Marx, even his theory of alienation, the IWW, CIO, etc., and basically shows prospective bosses how to keep a union-free workplace under the pretense of understanding labor law. On the other hand, I don't know of many college textbooks that teach you how to organize a union, though I heard Harvard (!) has a program for it or something (?). The _Labor_Relations_Process_ MBA textbook does tell how a union can be organized, but its audience is business planners, not rank and file workers. I can scan pages from the thing if you'd like to see for yourself. You'll have to pardon the previous owner's heavy underlining of passages that talk about industrial sabotage and communism, something the previous owner seemed especially excited with.
Secondly, maybe I should have said that business elites are very class conscious, aware of their position in society, in a way that ironically reflects Marxian insight, and yet this same sort of class-consciousness is discouraged among ordinary schlubs. Class consciousness = bad for workers, but good (even necessary) for elites.
This is a passage from the Introduction to Harry Cleaver's _Reading Capital Politically_:
"While this might at first sound a bit far-fetched, even a brief review of the Marxist tradition will show important instances where Marx has been used not to further revolution but to contain it. Business cycle theorists, growth theory specialists, industrial organization experts, and other orthodox economists have often drawn on Marx's writings in the development of their work. Perhaps one of the best-known examples is that of Wassily Leontief, the father of the modern techniques of input-output analysis that are the basis of many contemporary capitalist planning models. The roots of his ideas, as he is quick to recognize, come partly from Marx's reproduction schemes in Volume II of Capital."
There's a lot more but I can't quote it all. In a footnote, Cleaver adds: "A number of bourgeois evaluations of the usefulness of Marx to bourgeois theory are included in David Horowitz, _Marx_and_Modern_Economics_. See especially essays by O. Lange, W. Leontief, J. Robinson, Fan-Hun, L.R. Klein, and S. Tsuru. Others who have explicitly drawn on Marx in their work have included William Baumol in his _Economic_Dyamics_ and Irma Adelman in her _Theories of Economic Growth and Development_."
Cleaver is a bright guy. and has been in UT's Econ. Dept for a very long time. He isn't just pulling all this out of his ass.
It's not all that surprising, really. Military scientist Andrew Krepinevich regularly references concepts like Mao's "Peoples' War" and Trotsky's "War Communism" in military planning documents for the US government. Military science doesn't care about the source of the strategy for war -- it can come from Mao, Trotsky, Che Guevara, or the planet Mars. If it's useful, they'll use it. Same with capitalists.
As I mentioned, Chomsky has also cited some sources, and famously has stated he reads mostly the business press precisely because it is so highly class conscious. I can find exact quotes later.
But I'm overposted.
-B.
andie nachgeborenen wrote:
"FWIW, I do not think this accords with the facts. If capitalist ideologues know anything about the world that fits with Marxism, it is largely because they have come to the same conclusions independently."