> Full disclosure: I am a student of Professor Nitzan's and one of the
> organizers of the 'Crisis of Capital, Crisis of Theory' conference. I can
> state that Kourkoulakos is not a student of Professor Nitzan and certainly
> was not asked to send the letter. His motivation was based on a presentation
> by Professor Nitzan at a Poli-Sci event last year that was not attended by
> any faculty and provoked no response from any faculty, despite the fact that
> Professor Nitzan was questioning some of the foundational bases for their
> analyses.
>
> Given the purpose of N&B's work, it seems worthy of some sort of response.
> They are trying to address some central issues and problematic concepts
> within political economy.
I went through a lot of the Bichler and Nitzan stuff a long time ago now - haven't been in touch with it for about six or seven years. I thought there was a lot of interesting stuff, Nitzan’s courses look great – but I’m not sure about the theoretical project. My impression is that at the core it’s Monthly Review school + Thorstein Veblen (and of course there was always a lot of American Institutionalism in the Monthly Review school). A major focus on imperfect competition and insofar as it involves a theory of prices or value, it’s all about cost-plus pricing, with a differential profit margin depending on market power.
It’s a legitimate position to come from, defend and develop, but it’s not particularly new. Bichler and Nitzan seem to have taken a very conscious ‘school-building’ approach, which involves a strong product differentiation effort. Again, there’s nothing illegitimate about that – it’s a strategic manoeuvre in the scholarly field with a lot of precursors. But as a strategic manoeuvre it has its downsides – such as a ‘with us or against us’ vibe which can alienate people who might potentially engage. The great risk with school building is that if your school doesn’t conquer a fair amount of territory you become a sect.
>
> To name just a few:
> Is Marx's value theory vital to his body of thought? Is that theory meant to
> explain prices? Is that theory meant to explain accumulation? Does it
> succeed in explaining prices and/or accumulation? If it does not, what does
> explain prices and accumulation?
These are all interesting questions and worth discussing – but it’s not like they haven’t been debated at great length for the last 50 years, within and without ‘Marxian economics’, with a great variety of positions. I guess Panitch came into this primarily because he was a close target, since all concerned are at York. (Maybe Ted Winslow should organise a sit-down.) But as Panitch makes clear, he’s not all that concerned about a fundamentalist ‘labour theory’ conception of Marx’s theory of value and neither are a lot of people in the tradition – these debates have moved on since the 1970s and this kind of value theory is not exactly the thing to beat anymore if you want to set up a new theory of value within the broad church of heterodox economics. It’s not exactly a straw man – but they’re talking about a subset of Marxian economics.
Mike Beggs