'Enlighten' me on what these 'Sraffans' are about... In the introduction to 'Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa', Ernest Mandel sez: I. Rubin, the most brilliant of the Russian Marxist economists, answered that if one does not start from the *social relations of production* that underlie commodity production, one will fail to understand why value analysis is needed. In another passage, Mandel sez: Langston sought to break free of a crippling constraint imposed on the study of value-price transformation by von Bortkiewicz type models, as generalized by later authors, if used to model a real capitalist economy: namely that they abstract from economic movement in *time*. (above emphasis mine) What he is saying, is that the 'neo-Ricardians'/Sraffans/whatever are, _RIGHT_ from the beginning of their analyses, making (at least) TWO *cardinal* mistakes: 1) They are leaving human relations out of their equations and fixating on 'the economy' as the end-all and be-all of the matter, as if it were some kind of machine existing outside of, and unnecessarily related to human activity (machina ex homo?? :). This, in my opinion is 'positivist reductionism' (proper term? :) at its best/worst... 2) Their analyses, in the best bourgeois manner, fixate on some mythological 'equilibrium' of the economy and *totally* ignore the *fundamental* fact of _change in time_. Which is, of course, one of the fundaments of DIALECTICS (not to mention reality...). Am I far off the mark?? |> ______________________________________________________________________________ Jim Jaszewski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> WWW Homepage: <http://www.freenet.hamilton.on.ca/~ab975/Profile.html> ______________________________________________________________________________