[lbo-talk] Reflections on crisis, fear and behavioural Marxism

Peter Fay peterrfay at gmail.com
Thu Feb 24 20:00:34 PST 2011


Very interesting defense by the author of the paper that was presented to Harvard Law and Kennedy schools.

Kliman's criticism <http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/economic-crisis/value-and-crisis-bichler-nitzan-versus-marx.html>of the author's hypothesis is truly devastating. One wonders how such a hypothesis based on obviously erroneous evidence could ever get published, let alone presented to Harvard Law and Business schools... no, scratch that.

Let's just say it couldn't possibly have been peer reviewed prior to publication... no, scratch that also. One could say, though, that the empirical evidence for the hypothesis was, well, shockingly absent.

The apologia of their error by the authors is somewhat laughable, comparing their errors in their investigations to those of Pythagoras, Kepler and yes, even Einstein. I'm not sure Einstein would have presented "evidence" without examining the data first. Likewise, not to be outdone by those giants of science, the authors create their own words - "creorder" ('creates the order') and terms "capitalist mode of power" ('capitalist mode of production') - which I assume is a necessary prerequisite to being invited to Harvard.

After a long-winded effort to patch together some revised semblance of a hypothesis, they then turn their sites on the real enemy: Marxism, all Marxists and most importantly, Marx's labor theory of value. They state,

"At the analytical heart of these specialized endeavours [to defend Marx] stand the experts on Marx’s labour theory of value and surplus value. Most Marxists are unfamiliar with the intricacies of this theory, and most ‘productive labourers’, however defined, would probably find it impossible to understand – that is, assuming they even tried."

This is a curious statement from a professor - that he believes workers would find the labor theory of value impossible to understand, or even that they would try. My experience, and that of most others that I know, is the opposite: workers the world over are drawn to this explanation of labor and value by Marx, and quite naturally understand what they have intuitively experienced their whole lives on the shop floor. On the other hand, it is true that professors or other intellectuals may have a harder time understanding such a concept.

Next, "Marx wrote somewhere that value is revealed by price (or vice versa), and Kliman insists that reiterating this claim not only renders it true, but also cures Marxism of many of the chronic illness that have weakened it for years." Again, this is a strange statement from someone who knows Marxism well enough to attack it for a living. I don't believe Marx anywhere wrote that value is "revealed by price", but everywhere that the reverse relationship is true, for example,

"Price, like relative value in general, expresses the value of a commodity" which in no way implies that price "reveals" value.

Finally, we read that, "[Marxists] offer no serious challenge, let alone an alternative, to the current capitalist mode of power."

If Marxism offers no serious challenge to capitalism, why is capital, 140 years later, still so obsessed by Marx's Capital? Why is it still paying people to spend their lives trying to discredit Marxism? One wonders whether in 140 years future generations will be spending their hours debating instead of Marx, the finer points of those titans who discovered "creorder", and "capitalist mode of power".

-PF

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 3:43 AM, Jonathan Nitzan <nitzan at yorku.ca> wrote:


> Systemic Crisis, Systemic Fear: An Exchange
> Andrew Kliman and Shimshon Bichler & Jonathan Nitzan
>
> Full Text: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/311/
>
> ***
>
> Recent additions and updates to the Bichler & Nitzan Archives:
> http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/perl/latest
>
> Free to repost and circulate with due attribution under the Creative
> Commons License (attribution-noncommercial-no derivative). To unsubscribe,
> reply to this email with "unsubscribe" in the subject field.
>
> --
> Jonathan Nitzan
> Political Science | Social and Political Thought
> York University
> 4700 Keele St.
> Toronto, Ontario, M3J-1P3
> Canada
> Voice: (416) 736-2100, ext. 88822
> Fax: (416) 736-5686
> Email: nitzan at yorku.ca
> Website:http://bnarchives.net
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

-- Peter Fay



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list