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[NOTE: This message is posted on behalf of Andrew Kliman, who wrote it. --
RBE]
Tony Brewer remarks that "it is important to distinguish between (a) what Marx
said and (b) what we might now think is the truth." His 1995 HOPE article
invoked the same distinction when he noted that much of what passes for
interpretation of Marx in fact has nothing to do with the *history* of
economic thought. Of course, the implications of this extend to other
thinkers as well and involve the thorny question of what is a "legitimate"
contribution to the history of economic thought.
In general, I agree with Tony's position on this. I've found that a lot of
Marxists do have the habit of going back and forth between (a) and (b), which
creates confusion and makes discussion of Marx's own thought quite difficult.
However, the fact that much "interpretation" of Marx actually consists of the
original insights of the authors does not seem to me to warrant Tony's
conclusion (in the 1995 article) that this kind of work should be excluded
from history of economic thought journals. That conclusion follows only once
one supplies the missing premise that the journals should have a purely
antiquarian bent.
I agree with Claudio Sardoni that defenses of the fruitfulness of Marx's
thought in a general sense do not constitute an adequate response to the
claims that his value theory is incoherent. This, however, does not mean that
Mike Williams' (and others') "value-form" work is not "Marxist," as Claudio
suggests. The Marxist tradition has always been very heterogeneous; Marxists
have always disagreed with one another and with Marx, even when he was alive.
Given that Marx himself drew quantitative conclusions from his value theory,
however, Claudio's main point remains valid: an adequate defense of Marx's
*own* value theory must be rigorous and quantitatively exact. (Whether it
needs to provide a deterministic account of *relative* prices, as Claudio
maintains, is another matter. It seems to me that Marx was concerned rather
to account for aggregate income ["total price"] and the economy-wide rate of
profit.)
As Mike graciously noted, however, I do think that research conducted during
the past 15 or so years has shown that the allegations of internal
inconsistency in Marx's value theory cannot be sustained. The inconsistencies
stem from Bortkiewicz's interpretation of the theory, not necessarily from the
original theory itself. What has come to be called the "temporal
single-system" interpretation rejects Bortkiewicz's attempt to model Marx's
"values" and "prices of production" in Walrasian static equilibrium terms as
well as Bortkiewicz's separation of "values" and "prices" into independent
systems of equations. Once these premises are rejected, it turns out that the
equalities of Marx's "transformation" can all hold at once; there are no
problems of negative "values" or positive profit and negative "surplus-value";
his law of the falling rate of profit is logically coherent (the rate can fall
even if capitalists adopt cost-reducing new techniques and the real wage rate
is constant); productivity in luxury industries affects the general (average)
rate of profit; prices and profitability are not necessarily determined
independently of the amount of "value" created in production; etc.
None of this research shows that Marx was "right," of course, but it does show
that an alternative interpretation renders his value theory logically
coherent. (It is, BTW, an "embodied labor" interpretation, though perhaps not
what Claudio means by embodied labor. Of course, the question is what Marx
meant by the term -- is it the same as Ricardo's "labor bestowed"?) One
recent collection, with several papers along these lines (as well as some
other lines) is _Marx and Non-equilibrium Economics_, edited by Alan Freeman
and Guglielmo Carchedi, published last year by Edward Elgar.
Andrew Kliman
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