Capitalism's Burning House: Interview with John Bellamy Foster by WIN Magazine
^^^ CB: Nice explanation of the end of classical political economy and the founding of neo-classical economics ^^ -clip- I think it is best to see this as a whole phase of capitalist development, which we could call monopoly-finance capital, with neoliberalism as its main legitimating ideology. Of course this period generated extraordinarily bad economics: monetarism, supply-side economics, rational expectations theory, new classical economics, etc. Even the name of the system was changed from capitalism to a vague and essentially meaningless ideological designation of the "free market." John Kenneth Galbraith in the title of his last book called all of this The Economics of Innocent Fraud. Like orthodox economics in general (not excluding the bastard Keynesianism of the Cold War era) it was a means of control and a way of justifying what capital found necessary. Orthodox economics is not innocent of class analysis; rather the class position that it represents requires the ideological concealment of class relations (class does not exist as a category in neoclassical economics). This, however, does not prevent them from constructing concepts (for example the "natural rate of unemployment") which are means of maintaining class power. In contrast, nineteeenth-century classical political economy was explicit about not only class but also the political nature of economics. As Marx explained in Capital, only when the bourgeoisie had conquered the state in the 1830s and '40s did scientific political economy turn into vulgar political economy. The new orthodoxy of marginalist or neoclassical economics (Marx's "vulgar political economy") was based on a class-analytic perspective that could no longer be openly confessed. Its interests were no longer revolutionary, as in the early stages of bourgeois economics, but had given way to the "bad conscience and evil intent of apologetics." It is no coincidence that this happened as soon as the working class began to become a conscious force and thus a threat to the status quo. Eventually, political economy was renamed economics. The latter was seen as "scientific" because of its non-normative and non-political character (that is, it succeeded ideologically in concealing its class character within its analytical frame). In order to struggle effectively today, we need, for starters, to change economics back into political economy, making the economy a political/public issue once again. Capitalism works by way of an "invisible hand": it needs to be made visible This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
