The other day I posted an excerpt from an article that appeared on the
Adbusters website titled “Thought Control in Economics” that dealt with
how university economics department would not tolerate anything beyond
the bounds of neoclassical theory, especially Marxism:
These accounts are symptoms of a pervasive system of thought
control in economics. But no one knows more about how unwelcome ideas
are kept from being expressed in economics departments and tainting the
minds of curious students than Fred Lee, a professor at the University
of Missouri-Kansas City. He has documented over a hundred cases where
economists who wouldn’t drink the neoclassical Kool-Aid got pushed aside
? a problem that began over a century ago when the working classes
started to teach themselves Marxist theory.
“The leading economists of the day feared that if workers
understood Marxist theory, the working class would realize how badly
they were being exploited,” he says. “Fearing this might lead to
revolutionary fervor, economists sought to recast economic theory to
neutralize the Marxist critique. They limited their neoclassical theory
to looking at innocuous issues such as how prices change. They also
sought to prove that everyone gets paid exactly in accordance with their
net contribution to society, implying that workers aren’t exploited and
that is no basis for workers to claim a fairer share of the pie.”
Listening to Lee was making me realize that there is a time-honored
tradition in economics of avoiding questions about who gets the wealth,
who benefits and who loses with different economic policies. But there
have been times when it was possible to explore other schools of thought.
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/78/thought_control_in_economics.html
This led to the following comment on the Marxism list:
I don’t understand this. Capital needs to have good predictions and
models, for doing well. If non-mainstream economists came up with better
models (that made better predictions), why won’t capital fund these
researchers, given that it is in capital’s interest to have better, more
accurate predictions?
Also, notice that non-equilibrium, complex-systems approaches in
economics, which were very non-mainstream 30 years ago, are now quite
mainstream. So it’s not like tradition always prevails in the field…
Which prompted the following response:
Isn’t that a central contradiction of mainstream economics? On the
one hand, it has a strongly ideological character. It’s designed to
attempt to place capital and capitalism in the best possible light, as
efficient and just. On the other hand, mainstream economics is supposed
to be a science, and as such it is supposed to serve as a guide to both
businessmen and policymakers. What happens there is, as there often is
apparently, a clash between these two aspects of mainstream economics?
This exchange was in the back of my mind when I came across this passage
from Richard B. Day’s “Pavel V. Maksakovsky: The Marxist Theory of the
Cycle” in Historical Materialism, 2002, number 3. I discovered recently
that Columbia University now includes HM in its electronic archives,
with the exception of the latest 12 months. I consider this to be a very
important journal even if they are in the bad habit of making almost
nothing available online to the unwashed masses. Day writes:
Georg Lukács once remarked that bourgeois thought could not even
contemplate the dialectical movement of history, for to do so would be
to acknowledge a future beyond capitalism. According to Lukács,
bourgeois economists reason in terms of general equilibrium because the
`ultimate barrier to the economic thought of the bourgeoisie is the
crisis’. Looking at recent developments in economic theory, Maksakovsky
acknowledged that this conceptual inability to deal with crisis had
given way to a new concentration on the theory of the conjuncture. He
understood this term to encompass both broad movements of the capitalist
system over time and also the intersection of economic forces that
define conditions at any given moment. Gustav Cassel proposed that the
theory of the conjuncture should regard all fluctuations of capitalism
as `normal’ and look for ways to contain them within the existing social
order. If capitalism were conceived in dynamic terms, crises would be
ideologically and semantically neutralised; if adequate market prognoses
could be made, they might also be neutralised in fact. Maksakovsky saw
the political rationale of the new theories in an attempt to establish
`organised capitalism’. He summarised the ambitions of Western
conjuncture theorists this way:
". . . Every capitalist will have the ability to anticipate in
advance the consequences of his economic activities and consciously
avoid both errors of judgement and excessive enthusiasm. The powerful
[institutional] levers of the capitalist system - the state, trusts and
so forth - are to become equally powerful levers for implementing a
deliberate conjunctural policy in the interests of the national economy.
The aggregate effect of these co-ordinating efforts is to lead to
`moderation’ of the conjuncture, to curtail its amplitude and overcome
its specific phenomenon - the crisis - which is regarded as a blight on
an otherwise `wholesome’ system."
To Maksakovsky, the newly fashionable talk of conjuncture theory
showed that bourgeois economists were moving beyond abstract
mathematical ideals of equilibrium and theoretical models of comparative
statistics. In that respect, they appeared to be catching up with
Marxism. However, there remained fundamental methodological differences.
Bourgeois writers began with empirical data and then attempted
inductively to formulate a theory. Cassel wrote that he intended to
`proceed from the concrete to the abstract’, looking first at data on
industrial production and then turning to other data concerning prices,
incomes and capital markets, hoping to end their interconnections.
Maksakovsky replied that `The theory of the conjuncture must be
constructed mainly deductively.’ This did not mean ignoring empirical
indicators; it did mean that their significance could only be grasped in
terms of fundamental laws.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/08/20/pavel-v-maksakovsky-the-marxist-theory-of-the-cycle/
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
