At the end of my reply to Colin Danby (previous message) I remarked,
"I would also submit that you are trying to make from Marx's writings a
'marxian economics', which is not at all how I read it."
On reflection, I realize that expanding on this one comment could have been
sufficient to answer Colin's questions in their entirety. Colin's questions,
posed as he put it "from the other side of the transformation problem", are
framed (it seems to me) by an intention to justify a "marxian economics" as
an analytical approach within economics, which is in turn seen as a positive
science. For marxian economics to make the grade, it must be capable of
generating predictions about the objects of economics -- price, cost, rate
of profit, rate of investment, growth in total output, etc.
>From my perspective, such an enterprise is paradoxical. My understanding of
Marxism is that it constitutes a historical world view incorporating a
critique of political economy. As an historical world view, Marxism has more
in common with, say, Buddhism, Calvinism, Positivism or Existentialism than
it does with Post-Keynsianism or neo-classicism. I should mention that I
don't consider myself a "Marxist" in the strict sense that I don't believe
the Marxist historical world view has somehow "surpassed" other historical
world views.
It seems to me that the path from being a critique of political economy to
becoming a positive economic science in its own right is a twisted one. If
the function of a critique is to show why the results of political economic
investigation are *necessarily* inconclusive, then it seems quixotic to
search, within the terms of that critique, for a method of analysis that
will produce conclusive results -- calculable predictions. I resisted using
the term "vulgar", because of its perjorative connotations.
"It depends on the circumstances of the class struggle" is not a prediction.
Yet this is the premise that underlies Marx's radical indeterminacy in
Capital and it returns as the result of his investigations. Political
economy is founded on the phantasmagoria in which relations between people
*appear* to be relations between things. Thus it is a fetish to attempt to
calculate the state of relations between things at time two based entirely
on the relations between things at time one as affected by some specified
vector of change. To the extent that marxian economics needs to bracket out
the fetishism of commodities, it cannot properly call itself Marxist.
In closing, I'd like to reiterate that the call for limiting the working day
is not based on economic theory, it is based on an historical argument. That
historical argument includes a critique of political economy that is useful
in showing the mendacity of "economic" arguments against limiting the
working day. But it cannot -- and doesn't need to -- generate economic
arguments in favour of limiting the working day. This would be like asking
Jonathan Swift what are the economic arguments against eating Irish infants.
If Colin Danby agrees that limiting the working day would be, intrinsicly, a
good thing but thinks it is nevertheless necessary to have strictly economic
arguments in favour of limiting the working day, I encourage him to develop
those arguments. As Colin said, "There are a lot of possible stories." I've
already decided what kinds of stories I believe are going to be fruitful.
Regards,
Tom Walker
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