'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?? |>
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Jim Jaszewski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
WWW Homepage: <http://www.freenet.hamilton.on.ca/~ab975/Profile.html>
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