>In Canada, as Rod indicates, it has taken a very special meaning
>as indicated in this quote from Wally Clement and Glen Williams,
>edicated collection _The New Canadian Political Economy_.
>"while political economy is based on a tradition that investigates
>the relationship between economy and politics as they affect the
>social and cultural life of societies, within political economy there
>have been divergent tendencies. Broadly, the liberal political
>economy tradition has placed determinate weight on the political
>system and markets, while the Marxist tradition grants primacy to
>the economic system and classes. Such facile statements,
>however, underplay the complexity of positions within each
>tradition. Political economy at its strongest has focused on
>processes whereby social change is located in the historical
>interaction of the economic, political, cultural, and ideological
>conflict." [1989: 6-7]
Paul, I liked the definition. There is a lot of potentional in the Marxist
tradition to explore the dialectical interaction of economics, politics,
cultural and ideological. I don't know if the authors would agree with me,
but this is what Marx would do as a critical theorist. However,as you
know, there are some Marxists in the Marxist tradition who uncritically
subcribe to the notions of "orthodox" economics and free market
capitalism. This, I would charecterize as economic determinism, has
interesting commonalities with liberal economics since it treats
capitalism somewhat theologically and mechanistically. The typical "theory
of stages" argument says that we should let the market forces operate
untill capitalism unleashes itself. Any intervention in markets is seen as
postponing the collapse of capitalism. so as the argument goes, this
tradition still emphasizes the primacy of economic laws rather than
revolutionary unity of theory and practice, which is so central to Marx's
thinking. is such a distortion of Marx unique to economics dicipline in
general? I have not seen, for example, such a religious reliance on
markets in other diciplinary discussions on political economy of
capitalism
Mine
>Paul Phillips,
>Economics,
>University of Manitoba
