Fred M., quoting me writes:
[Some references: "On Being Keynesian in the Short Run and Marxian in the
Long Run" Dumenil & Levy; "Wandering Around the Warranted Path" Shaikh;
"The Social Wage, Welfare Policy, and the Phases of Capital Accumulation"
Moudud & Zacharias]
Paul, I would say that none of these articles present a Marxian view of
fiscal policy. None address the question of the effects of
expansionary fiscal policy on the rate of profit. (By the way, the
title of Dumenil and Levy's paper is " ... and CLASSICAL in the Long
Run.")
Thanks to Fred for the comments and the tittle correction (after the
weekend I will try to post on his separate post and Jim D.'s). BTW, I
recommend to people interested in this subject some excellent related
articles written by Fred such as those on his website
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~fmoseley/#working (see the section on US Capitalism).
With e-mail it is hard to be sure whether Fred is a bit saying the articles
are not that much a Marxian view or rather just that they are not focused
on fiscal policy and profit rates. To me the first point has a relevancy:
in the last 15 years there has been a tendency to speak of a "Classical"
(as distinct from "Marxist") tradition. In some cases I think this is
simply an effort at a "big tent Church" philosophy. People such as Dumenil
& Levy have made clear how they see the Marxist tradition within the big
tent. In other cases, IMO, it does represent a political separation by the
authors (eg, AFAIK, Moudud and Zacharias would NOT specifically associate
themselves as part of a marxist tradition although there is nothing
non-marxian about what they wrote). Perhaps this parallels trends we see
in other areas such as the shift of some post-modern marxian philosophers
to the "radical enlightenment", the revival of interest in a left
interpretation of Adam Smith (Stedman Jones, Emma Rothchild), etc.
That aside, I am pretty sure that the Moudud & Zacharias article IS on
fiscal policy and the profit rate (i.e. the 2nd half of the article,
although I am not able to reread the article right now).
http://www.levy.org/default.asp?view=publications_view&pubID=f73a204608
For this purpose they draw on the overall model of Shaikh (Moudud being a
former student and sometime co-author) and I thought D & L provide another
access to that sort of model.
But Fred has a point that the Shaikh and Dumenil articles only imply the
framework. Shaikh does go into this specific point in "Economic Policy in
a Growth Context: A Classical Synthesis of Keynes and Harrod" (forthcoming
in Metroeconomica) ..http://homepage.newschool.edu/~AShaikh/ (but the math
in that article ..).
Paul
