Thanks!
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]On Behalf Of andie nachgeborenen Sent: Monday, November 26, 2007 22:16 To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Kliman on Marx
Kolokowski, back when he was a Marxist, actually argued that Marx had a flat-out pragmatic James-Dewey conceptions of truth as, crudely, what works, and Sidney Hook, when _he_ was a Marxist, argued the same in Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx. I think that's a mistake, although In the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx calls practice the "test" of truth. Long ago (1993! yikes!) I published a paper on the objectivity of Marxism and Marx's conception of objectivity, arguing that Marx and the pragmatists have a lot in common, with respect to the priority of practice (will send a PDF copy to anyone on request). I said then and still think that, unlike Lenin, Marx doesn't give a lot of thought to any philosophical conception of truth but operates with a pre-reflective correspondence notion.
Subsequently I have come to think that James and Dewey actually have a more "realist" conception of truth than is usually attributed to them -- I have a draft paper on this, based on reflections on the young Hook, someday I shall have to work it up and publish it.
Anyway I don't know why a traditional pragmatic conception of truth, even if you had it, would drive you to work for Goldman Sachs and dabble in Democratic party politics. Bleak as things are, surely you are not saying with Carrol that historical materialism is true but idle because we are all doomed anyway. Are you? Dewey was a small d-democratic socialist, and both James and Peirce hated Gilded age robber baron capitalism. (Which the Democrats of the day, William Jennings Bryan possibly excepted, did not any more than the Democrats today.)
But this is the thing with respect to value theory, and I think Doug and I are on the same page here. It absorbs an enormous amount of time and attention, it's very difficult and obscure, and it doesn't seem to make any difference. My own experience has been that you can state just about any non-value-theoretic proposition in historical materialism, and many propositions stated in value-theoretic terms. without using value theory. That goes for the thesis that there is a tendency of rate of profit to fall, or towards crises over overproduction or underconsumption, or that labor is exploited (I wrote a paper on that too), etc. To my way of thinking this has been pretty definitively shown by the work of Robert Brenner, who has probably made the most powerful statement of HM for our time, and Gil Skillman. The neo-Ricardans offer one (not necessarily the most useful) kind of highly abstract and theoretical explanation of why this is, likewise Okishio and Mishima, and in a different vein Samuelson, or in another, Roemer, but you don't have to accept these sort of critique to have doubts about the point of value theory.
Now the difference this makes is that, as the classical pragmatists put it, a difference should make a difference to matter. You don't have to think that truth can be reduced to practical success to wonder about the scientific purpose of positing a theoretical quantity (value) that doesn't make any difference in predicting or explaining the behavior of its supposed subject matter, even if you have a broad notion of explanation that includes, for example, theoretical unification. Kliman, Levy, Devine (a nice person), Rakesh (ditto), Shaikh, argue in different ways that value theory can be shown to be consistent, that we don't have to worry about the transformation problem (though Marx thought we did, see Cap. III, Chap. VIII, Sec. 6 and Chap. XV, Sec. 5), or other problems. Perhaps not. That still leaves the redundancy question, why posit value as a quantity? What does it do that we can't do without it? Because it's in accord with scientific practice to apply Occam's Razor to anything that does no work. Scientific concepts have to pay their way. Doug and I don't think that value theory does.
By the way, I came across this FAQ in value theory, which seem to me pretty good and nonpartisan in orientation.
HTTP://WNW.dream scape.com/riven/Economics/Essays/LT-FAQ.HTML
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 26, 2007, at 1:41 PM, Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
>
> > Doug thinks
> > there are no real world consequences. I don't
> > agree, but that reflects a pragmatist conception
> > of truth which I don't accept anyway.
>
> Yeah, and Jerry Levy used to call me a vulgar
> empiricist.
>
> In any case, I certainly don't subscribe to a
> "pragmatist conception
> of truth." Were that the case, I'd probably have
> applied for work at
> Goldman Sachs long ago and dabbled in Democratic
> politics on the
> side. It seems to me, though, that the value crowd
> used to want to
> prove that a rising OCC or something meant that
> capitalism had an
> inevitable date with the Reaper. Since that prophesy
> hasn't panned
> out, the pursuit has lost some of its urgency, to a
> point that's
> reminiscent of the session of the Wallace Stevens
> Society I dropped
> in on long ago that debated just what kind of jar it
> was he found in
> Tennessee.
>
> As I recall, Marx himself thought the point was to
> change the world,
> which suggests he subscribed to a pragmatic
> conception of truth in
> some sense. Temporal single system, atemporal
> multiple system,
> whatever. Is it any more relevant to the class
> struggle, or even
> understanding today's Financial Times, than studying
> the villanelle
> throughout history?
>
> Doug
>
>
> ___________________________________
>
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>
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