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Date:
Fri Mar 31 17:19:18 2006
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[log in to unmask] (Ross B. Emmett)
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======================== HES POSTING ================== 
 
[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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