Vincent Clarke wrote:
>
> >
>
> I assume that you are not familiar with Mirowski's work. He argues that
> economists unconsciously deploy physics metaphors and do so by tearing them
> out of context. Marx's value theories - just like Smith's and Ricardo's - do
> this as well. Even Marx's philosophy reeks of this stuff - see his comments
> on the conversion of quantity into quality; these sorts of statements are
> purely tautological - they assume that everything can be quantified, yet
> provide no such examples. A similar move is undertaken by neo-classical
> economics when they claim to be able to quantify human desire (theory of
> marginal utility) - both attempts are farcical and ridiculous.
>
[Note: Charles would not agree with the following, so I am not
responding to your disagreements with him.'
I am no familiar at _all_ with Mirowski, even with who he is. But I assume you are not familiar with the wprl pf {pstpme. A;brottpm, or others giving similar interpretations (which I find persuasive) of Marx's Capital -- or with Bensaid's argument that the German word for science in the mid-19rh-c (i.e. Max's word) had a radically different meaning than does "science " (including the 'sicence' of "social science') in the 20tt-c.
Postone argues that Marx created a _critique_ OF Political economy, but NOT a Critical Political Economy, and the implication of this is that there is no such thing as "Marxist Economic Theory." Furthermore, as a friend put it, "Marx" is not the German translation of "Ricardo," and Marx's Theory of Value has an entirely different purpose than did Ricardo's theory. I know there are Marxists who try to argue that Marx differs from Ricardo only in emphasizing "exploitation," but this is sheer nonsense. The wrold did not have to wait for Karl Marx to tell us that working people are exploited in all class societes. The Theory of Value is NOT intended to "prove" exploitation -- that would reduce Marx to a triviality.
Marx's theory of value (and theory of commodity fetishism) expresses and is developed to explain the _historicity_ of cpitalism, as a unique from of production -- in fact, as an aberration in world history which but for a number of contingencies humanity might have escaped. The "laws" of capital as developed by Marx do not apply empirically to_any_ given form of capitalism (including the British capitalism of the 19th-c from which he drew his illustratory (not evidential) matierial.d They express the the _tendencies_ of a social order in which welath is a vast accumualtion of commodities. Those laws, therefore, cannot be used to control and predict the operations of the economy in any given historical embodiment of capitalist relations.
I agree with you on your critique of the meaning of "law" -- but so would Marx have agreed with you.
Carrol