(was: Re: [PEN-L:21529] "The Rise and Future Demise of World-Systems Analys...)
>I do not think AM ran out of steam because of a defect in the conceptioon
>of the sort that Jim suggests, namely that research had to be
>straight-jacketed in conventional social scientific research models. I
>would put the idea, rather, in any case, as the claim that any social
>scientific research has to meet ordinary standards of scholarly rigor.
The question, of course, is about the meaning of the phrase "scholarly
rigor." Roemer, for example, defined it in terms of the Walrasian general
equilibrium model and game theory. Someone like Kautsky or Lenin or
Luxembourg would define it in different terms.
And to flog a dead horse, when Gary Dymski and I analyzed Roemer's theory
of exploitation (ECONOMICS AND PHILOSOPHY, 1991), it turned out not to
rigorous except in a very formalistic sense. It was not rigorous in the
sense of doing sensitivity analysis to see how a change in one of the
crucial assumptions -- i.e., the introduction of historical time (as
opposed to the unreal "logical time" of NC economics) -- changes the
results. It turns out that if you examine R's model in depth, it's just a
matter of him saying "here's a model, it's valid because it's logically
consistent given my unreal and often hidden assumptions," without
explaining the key assumptions of the model, such as the assumed scarcity
of capital and the implicitly-assumed inability of workers to become
capitalists (barriers to entry into the capitalist class). In the end,
Roemer's message was: "here, I'm using the type of modeling strategy that
NC economists worship and it comes out with some non-NC results," without
realizing that he had reproduced Henry George's 19th century
scarcity-rent-as-exploitation theory on a larger scale, to include the
ownership of _all_ productive assets, even though we can't blithely assume
that capital goods are scarce the way land and natural resources are. His
obeisance to the hegemonic paradigm in economics -- and his refraining from
criticizing that research program -- prevented him from seeing what he was
doing. He couldn't see the forest because of his focus on the trees.
Because previous schools of Marxism couldn't have been "analytical
Marxist," Justin implies that the AM school invented "scholarly rigor"
among Marxists. But that's just not true. For example, Baran and Sweezy or
the Althusserians tried as much as possible to be rigorous in their
thinking, as did the Frankfurt school, the Sraffian Marxists, and the
classical Marxists I listed above. (None of these people simply marshalled
quotes from Marx and Engels or relied exclusively dogmatic assertions of
Truth.) So I don't think "scholarly rigor" can be used to define the AM
school. To define "analytical Marxism" as being more rigorously scholarly
than other schools without any clear backing for that assertion is simply
_hype_, a form of product differentiation used by academics and capitalist
firms in efforts to sell their stuff.
Even though Justin calls me a "analytical Marxist," again I am not one of
those: I am a synthesist. In synthesis, analysis -- the defining word of
the phrase "analytical Marxist" -- is only a phase or moment. Analysis is
part of the criticism phase -- and not the only kind of criticism.
(According to my Philosophic Dictionary, "analysis" refers to "resolving
something into its elements." As Levins and Lewontin, put it, analysis is
like the dissection of an animal. But dissection is hardly sufficient --
since it kills the animal in question and misses how the organism as a
whole functions over time.)
Perhaps the phrase "analytical Marxist" is wrong. After all, Roemer didn't
really do a serious analysis as much as produce an abstract and unrealistic
model or two. The phrase should be something along the lines of "an effort
to reduce Marxism to a bunch of substantive propositions using an
uncritical acceptance of the mainstream social-science methods," along with
a rejection of Marx's own method.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
