Carrol Cox wrote: > Has anyone on this list read his _Time, Labor, and Modern Domination_? > Any comments on it?
I haven't read it, but I can comment on what you say. > In his Introduction he asserts that Marx produced a Critique of > Political Economy, NOT a critical political economy. And he spends 400 > pages discussing value without ever a single reference to prices or > other empirical matter. It's absolutely true that Marx produced a critique of political economy (crucially, that it suffers from commodity fetishism), but there's enough stuff in CAPITAL to give us the basis for developing an alternative political economics. Frankly, I think that Marx himself overstated the extent to which he was simply criticizing Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, _et al_. He also presented a lot of alternatives to the dominant political economy of his time. In volume I ch. 25, for example, he argued against the Malthusian view that higher wages lead workers to breed like rabbits, increasing the supply of labor-power, driving down wages. Instead, he says, (with labor productivity constant) higher wages squeeze profits, so that accumulation slows, reducing the demand for labor-power, reducing wages. In the 1873 "Afterword to the Second German Edition" of CAPITAL, he agrees with a reviewer that he "denies that the law of population is the same at all times and in all places [and] asserts, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of population." That's clearly more than a critique of Malthus; it's an alternative theory. I don't know why so many readers of Marx like to revel in the idea that Marx's theory is only a critique so that they avoid "reference to prices or [any] other empirical matter." Maybe it's because it's so cool to be academic, intellectual, obscure, pedantic, and abstruse. > If he is even partly correct, it would help > explain why so many Marxists or quasi-Marxists, as soon as they turn to > describing or analyzing current economic matters tend to turn into > Keynsians. I think the reason why so many (including Doug Henwood and myself) have turned to Keynes to complement Marx's theories is that Marx never finished his theory. He had no finished theory of crises, for example. Two out of the three volumes of CAPITAL are totally unfinished, while as Mike Lebowitz argues, he never really got started on his planned book on wage labor (which would look at the system from labor's perspective among other things). -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
