[lbo-talk] Open Letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist by Joan Robin son

Angelus Novus fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com
Sun Jul 17 14:17:15 PDT 2011


SA:


> In other words, the important thing is to understand what Karl Marx
> said, not how an economy works.

Marx demonstrated how **capitalism** works, and I've yet to encounter anything that significantly improves upon Marx in terms of fundamentals.

Now, maybe you're using the vague, ahistorical term "economy" to indicate something other than "capitalism", but in that case you're like the classical political economists who thought the Neanderthal's hand-axe was his "capital".

Michael Perelman:


> I had been under the impression that the Value Theory of Labor
> originally came from Elson.

Heh, you know, I knew nothing of Elson or the "Sydney-Konstanz" school until I read the article in the most recent Endnotes on "Communism and Value-Form Theory", and I thought it was funny how you had these Australian economists keeping up on these German discussions.

Then a few nights after reading that article, a friend showed me that CSE Volume with the Elson essay and I thought immediately of that CLR James review.

FWIW, James's co-thinker Martin Glaberman was an admirer of Rubin's book on Marx's value theory, so it all fits.



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