carnes@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP (Richard Carnes) (01/29/85)
D. K. McKiernan writes: > Marxists have indeed been long aware of Bohm Bawerk; that fact > notwithstanding, only the Austro-Marxists have made an honest attempt > to confront his work. Hardly. But forget the Marxists for a while. In an earlier posting Mr. Mc Kiernan recommends a work by Thomas Sowell for an understanding of price theory. Let us see what Sowell has to say, in another work, about the Marxist/Bohm-Bawerk controversy: "[*Das Kapital*'s] difficult method of presentation, the numerous myths about it which have grown up over the years, and recent tendencies to mathematicize popular conceptions of Marxian economics in lieu of digging into Marx's own writings have together made this work almost as little understood today as it has ever been. Bohm-Bawerk's famous "refutation" of Marx's "labour theory of value" continues to be reproduced, along with the economic "breakdown" of capitalism theory, the "dialectical" forces at work, and all the old familiar cast of fictitious characters. ... "In his *Theories of Surplus Value* Marx repeatedly made the same argument against Ricardo which Bohm-Bawerk was later to make against him, that profit equalization among industries with different capital-labour ratios was incompatible with prices being proportional to labour-determined "values." ... "Marx's disavowal of any attempt to "prove" his definition of value was in sharp contrast to numerous critics who have claimed that he had vainly attempted a "dialectical proof" in the opening chapter of *Capital*. [Sowell's footnote: "...for his system he needed a formal proof....So he turned to dialectical speculation...." Bohm-Bawerk, *Karl Marx and the Close of His System*, 151-2. Bohm-Bawerk made the claim, often echoed since, that Marx had attempted "a stringent syllogistic conclusion allowing of no exception" (ibid., 63), that Marx was making "a logical proof, a dialectical deduction" (ibid., 131). This "proof" continues in some unspecified way to be linked to dialectics or Hegelianism.]" These passages are to be found in Sowell's article "Marx's *Capital* after One Hundred Years", Canad. J. Econ. Pol. Sci. 33 (1967}, 50-74, which I recommend as an introduction to Marx's economics. The point of this is that even a conservative economist whom Mr. Mc Kiernan apparently admires has claimed that Bohm-Bawerk seriously misrepresents Marx's value theory. In fairness to Sowell it should be mentioned that this article was apparently written before Sowell's brain was damaged by studying economics at my university. Rather than getting into a long and boring debate on value theory, let me mention a few points about Marx's approach to economics that are often overlooked by mainstream critics of Marx. "Bourgeois" economists have taken Marx to task for giving poor answers to the economic questions they are most interested in, and have generally overlooked the fact that Marx was simply trying to answer a different set of questions by his economic theories. Since the marginalists of the 19th century, capitalist economists have generally taken the capitalist framework as a given and devoted themselves to working out the details of its operation. Clearly, such an approach removes the capitalist framework from the realm of history and removes such questions as the origin and possible disappearance of capitalism from its domain of inquiry. Marx's concern, however, was HISTORICAL. He wished to discover the "laws of motion" governing the origin, development, decline, and eventual replacement by something else of the "capitalist mode of production," that is, of the framework itself, and he adapted his theoretical tools to this purpose. Since he was inquiring into historical, qualitative CHANGE, he had to use a mode of reasoning appropriate to such inquiry, namely DIALECTICAL reasoning. In my admittedly layman's opinion, the chief weakness of orthodox economic thinking today may be the absence of dialectical thinking which is characteristic of it. > The theory of surplus-value does indeed have its subscribers; so does the theory that the Earth is flat. This is getting a little far-fetched. As long as we are dealing in offensive comparisons, here is a passage from Robert Kuttner's fascinating article in the February *Atlantic* on the current state of economics. I recommend this article to anyone who has great faith in the "results" of modern economic "science." "At a time when the other social sciences -- sociology, psychology, political science, history -- are letting many flowers bloom and many schools contend, only economics has such fear of dissension. `There is a profound weakness at the core of neoclassical economics [the dominant school],' [economic historian Robert] Heilbroner says. `It can't answer the most basic questions. What is a price? What is money? What killed full employment? What is the boundary between economics and politics, or society? It has become like medieval theology. Before economics can progress, it must abandon its suicidal formalism.' "Yet mainstream economics is doing nothing of the kind. Virtually all of the heretics I have talked to agree that if they were young assistant professors attempting to practice their brand of economics today, they would not get tenure. The most frequently repeated insight of Thomas Kuhn's is that a paradigm cannot be displaced by evidence, only by another paradigm. And no dissenting paradigm seems able to gain a foothold within economics. Thus the economic orthodoxy is reinforced by ideology, by the sociology of the profession, by the politics of who gets published or promoted and whose research gets funded. In the economics profession the free marketplace of ideas is one more market that doesn't work like the model." Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes