No mea culpas from me, sorry. I don't think AM failed, I think it was abandoned. Insofar as I still do political philosophy in a Marxian vein, it's still AM.
I'm not going to get into a debate about value theory, which I still regard as an immense waste of time (today); you'll have to wait till my book on Marx, in which I will repeat my cursory dismissal in a way that will still strike you as shallow, superficial, and missing the point. Btw not all AMs reject value theory; Davis Schweickart thinks it's defensible. I don't. I don't even think it's worth refuting at length. I think it's a near-total bore.
Insofar as figuring out why commodities exchange at equivalents was was "Marx's problem," I am not that interested in Marx's problem. If I thought that value theory, so understood, was the heart and soul of Marxism, I'd be much less interested in it than I am. So if you ask AMs why they didn't start they, you will get the answer that they found other things in Marx more interesting and valuable. I also don't care to debate this. You will not persuade me that I ought to devote a lot of the time remaining to me on this earth to value theory. In my bigotry and ignorance, I will not listen.
Unlike Doug, I think the collapse of Marxism as a movement is vastly more significant and important. Marxism as theory is as true as it ever was, however true that might have been -- and among the valuable truths in Marxism I do not include value theory or value theoretic analysis. The development of Marxism as a theory remains important, which is why I am going to write a book on Marx, at least one. But part of my argument will be that we can preserve what is important an interesting in Marxism as a theory without value theory.
So reconceived, it won't address all the same questions, and you won't consider it Marxism, but that's OK. I'm not a Marxist. I'm happy to let you have the term. I am interested in what is valuable, important and worth preserving in the materialist conception of history and the critique of political economy.
So, if you are reading this as a way of saying I don't want to talk about value theory because I think it is a boring, irrelevant waste of time, and I don't want to discuss at length why I think so, because it seems pretty obvious to me, you're right. And if you think I am a close-minded bigot on this subject, I don't care.
Ars longa, vita brevis. Sorry.
--- Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Marx had contempt for Bauer's militant atheism
> because in his
> mistaken impression it served no purpose to beat up
> on a dying man
> and time would be better spent understanding the
> secular roots of
> religion. Shouldn't you be contemptuous of
> compulsively writing what
> are meant to be "performative obituaries" on
> anything and everything
> Marxist? I take that to have been Doug's question
> which I don't see
> how you've answered.
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
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