At 07:57 PM 06/21/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>see Daniel Little, the Scientific Marx, who explains how Marx's analysis
>in Capital depends on many rational choice presuppositions. It's not
>surprising, since he was analysing a market systrem where those
>presuppositions are more valid than not.
I think that a market environment encourages individualism, but the
application of rat choice came first with Smith, not Marx. And Marx, unlike
the rat choice types, saw "preferences" as endogenous. He also clearly
rejected methodological individualism, though he saw that something like it
was the ordinary consciousness of many people within the system, shaped,
constrained, and mystified by commodity fetishism and the illusions created
by competition.
>And in a a classic paper from the 30s, Wassily Leontieff credited Marx
>along with Walras with being a founder of general equlibrium theory. WL
>was a graet fan of CII in particuklar.
Leontief was wrong to credit Marx with this. Marx's volume II is a
non-equilibrium system, while the equilibrium interpretation has hobbled
Marxian political economy (showing up in absurd ways in the "transformation
problem" lit, seen for example in Sweezy's THEORY OF CAPITALIST
DEVELOPMENT). Marx did present "equilibrium conditions" for the
proportional relationship between sectors, but he did not think equilibrium
could be achieved easily. To the extent that equilibrium was achieved, it
was the result of crisis, which involved _forcible_ equilibration, which
was often quite destructive (small businesses going broke, working people
losing their livelihood, etc.) Instead of seeing the results of his
reproduction schemes as continually met -- as in input-output analysis --
Marx saw them as regularly being broken and then violently reestablished.
An extreme crisis --- like the Great Depression -- might require an extreme
solution -- like World War II, though of course the solution's rise is not
predetermined.
I'm afraid that Leontief wanted to link Marx to his own research, which
helped create IO theory. Back then, being associated with Marx was
prestigious, at least in some circles.
>What's wrong with those accomplishments? we are to eschew them because
>some use them apologetically?
I think we should eschew them because they weren't Marx's accomplishments.
That's enough. I can't participate in pen-l for a day, since I have
participated much too much during the previous 24 hours. Maybe I'll take a
week off....
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
