And why not write a farewell to the clearly more spent movement of which you were part-- analytical (anti) Marxism?
It needs to be asked: how with the combination of analytical philosophy and Sraffian economic theory can one understand the first thing about Marx's Capital, viz. the answer to why any and all commodities could express their respective values in the commodity money and had to express so themselves. Call it the necessity of money thesis. Sraffian economic theory derives exchange ratios for a stationary economy of generalized barter as does neo classical economic theory. It's not possible to reintroduce money into these theories. It thus can't speak to Marx's problem, the understanding of the money form.
The first section of Marx's Capital puts forth the claim that the commodity contains within itself an immanent contradiction which is then externalized as a contradictory relationship between the relative and equivalent value form. What does Marx mean by a contradiction immanent to the commodity? What is that contradiction? Can analytical philosophy accommodate it? How does that contradiction express or result from the duality of labor which one could not tell from the exegetical texts Marx considered the pivot of his system? Why must this immanent contradiction be expressed as a contradiction in the value form? How are the relative and equivalent value forms mutually assuming and mutually exclusive? Does Marx's value theory here complete or revolutionize classical political economy? What are the relations between the two bodies of thought?
I don't know answers to these most basic questions about Marx's theory in analytical Marxism. Not in GA Cohen, Jon Elster, John Roemer, Justin Schwartz or even Allen Wood.
I am most willing to entertain the post Marxist thesis but the analytical Marxists will have to tear up the foundations of Marx first and show that they have a theory of equal calibre which can explain the value form in what Marx calls its universal stage, the stage of money.
Moreover, while Marx attempted to dissolve apparently stable and tangible things into the interconnecting processes of social labor activity and praised the classical economists for having done so--"The phantom of the world of goods fades away and it is seen to be simply a continually disappearing and continually reproduced objectivisation of human labour. All solid material wealth is only transitory materialisation of social labour, crystallisation of the production process whose measure is time, the measure of a movement itself"-- Samuelson and the Sraffian Marxists fabulate and hold fast to a world of never changing and frozen things which both serve as inputs and then re-emerge magically in the same exact form out of a black box as outputs; they tell us that in this magical world we need no recourse to universal social laboring time or value to make sense of what prices and profits represent. All we need are simultaneous equations once the distributional question is settled possibly with gains for all as long as technology progresses.
Empiricism--meaning here the ontologizing of things over processes--and the critique of the labor-ing theory of value have led the Sraffians and analytical Marxists out of this world, into a world where things must be frozen so these things produced in the same, unchanging way can at the same time be inputs and (presto!) outputs. They tell us that in this world--value, i.e. social laboring time--is redundant.
And so what follows from that? There are many imaginary worlds in which value would not exist.
And then we are told that it's simply impossible for the rate of profit to fall from viable technical change as long as technical change does not happen successively, i.e. as long as capitalism respects the methodology of comparative statics which makes possible the writing of solvable simultaneous equations And so what follows from that?
Or are we to content ourselves with what became of analytical Marxism--ethics or less charitably moralizing?
Rakesh