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Justin had written: >>>You make too much of my neoSraffian remark, I just mean that like them, he [Brenner] sticks to what Marx officially regards as surface phenomena,and does hnot try to explain these phemonena in value terms, but in terms of their interrelations.<<<
I answered:>>why "officially"? Marx didn't define what was "officially" Marxist. In fact, he rejected the idea of orthodoxy ("je ne suis pas une Marxiste").<<
> The "I am not a Marxist" line is mine.<
I didn't know that intellectual property rights applied to Marx's statements.
>When I say Marx officially regards certan phenomena as surface, I means that when he talks value theory. he suggests that thesea re in need of value theoretical explanation. As Gil Skillman has (to my mind but not yours) shown, there is another strain in Marx that does not require invocation of value theory, what Gil calls historical materialist explanation. ... <
I still wonder about this word "official." If anyone is pushing the idea of "official" views, it's Gil, since he seems to want us to apply only the official methodology of the hegemonic school of economics, i.e., the methodological individualism of neoclassical economics (including game theory). (For something to be "official," there has to be an officialdom. The NC economics hierarchy is the most obvious officialdom among economists, rewarding those who toe the line (use the methodology, agree with the main propositions) with publication and tenure and punish those who disagree.) Gil, please correct me if I'm wrong in my impression of your methodological slant.
When Marx says "that surface phenomena are in need of value-theoretic explanation" (which is, in my view, an accurate portrayal of his views), he's saying that we can't simply look at supply and demand and other microphenomena (prices, individual profits, etc.) We have to look at them in the context set by the capitalist mode of production. In modern lingo, he's saying we have to look at the macrofoundations of microeconomics. If you look at just the prices, individual profits, supply & demand, etc., as NC economists do, you end up suffering from commodity fetishism.
I wrote:>>Again, we don't know that Brenner eschews value theory.<<
>Ask him. I believe that he does. You don't know for sure that Sen does either, since he has never said anything about it one way or another, but it's a reasonable inference that he doesn't. I have heard Brenner dance away from questions involving value, or reformulate them into non-value forms, scores of times over 15 or so years.<
I'm pretty sure that Amartya Sen doesn't use Marx's law of value (since he's never pretended to be influenced by Marx), but I don't think it's worth my time to ask Bob (since I hardly ever see him). I would guess that he suffers from an historian's empiricist bias, which leans away from abstract theory of any sort, including Marx's law of value. (This bias can be a good thing, since it steered Brenner away from Roemer-type silliness.)
Asking Brenner would distract us from a more important point: we have to acknowledge that academic research is not the individualistic process that it's often portrayed to be (for example, by individuals applying for tenure). There's a division of labor among academics, including amongst Marxist academics, so that each is dependent on the contributions of others. Modern Marxist academics -- including those who _explicitly_ eschew Marx's law of value (typically thinking of it as a theory of price determination and thus false) -- get a lot of their ideas (such as the Marxian theory of exploitation) from others, including from Marx himself, without actually having to do "value theory" (since Marx did it for them). Thus, the accurate parts of Roemer's theory, for example, come from Marx, even though he actively attacked Marx's method and many of Marx's conclusions. I doubt that he could have developed his theory without Marx's work (though if he had paid attention to the history of economic theory, he might have noticed that his theory is very similar to that of non-Marxists G.B. Shaw and Henry George). Indeed, his effort was a (failed) effort to translate Marx's theory into NC lingo.
Similarly, Brenner's BOOM AND BUBBLE book (all this alliteration!) is informed by Marx's analysis even though he never explicitly admits it. But he, like the rest of us, sit on the shoulders of giants rather than developing our views from whole cloth (mixed metaphor!). Perhaps Brenner could have been better informed of and by Marx's analysis, but that's another issue. I can't discuss that because I haven't finished the book. So far, I'd say that his book doesn't contradict Marx's analysis. Rather, it's a concrete application of one tradition that stems from Marx.
Brenner >>clearly agrees with the Marxian vision of history ("people make history, but not exactly as they please").<<
> So do I, and I think value theory is empty and intellectually harmful.<
That's probably because you define value theory as a theory of pricing behavior. As such, it's a bogus theory, while hardly being true to Marx. (By the way, I've noticed that the critics of Marx's law of value simply _assume_ that it's about explaining prices, eschewing any serious investigation of the purposes of Marx's method and value theory. One blatant example of this approach is Howard & King's HISTORY OF MARXIAN ECONOMICS, 2 volumes.)
>>Marx's value theory is simply an application of that theory [the materialist conception of history]: in Marx, it's people that make commodities as part of the historical process in the political economy, constrained and shaped by the social relations of production, so they don't do it as they please, but in an alienated way.<<
> Oh, if that's all there is too it ;> But it isn't, is it?<
I don't know how anyone could make that snide remark knowing that I was providing a quick summary. There's obviously much more than that. I go on & on & on in e-mails, so I try to sometimes be compact in my explanation.
I wrote:>>I'm sure that Brenner would agree that "surface phenomena" such as profits are not the result of natural scarcity, individual tastes, and the like, but are instead a product of human labor under the thumb of the capitalist mode of production. His discussion of serfdom vs. capitalism in the so-called "Brenner debate" suggests as much.<<
>Sure, I agree with him, and so far as you describe it, I am a value theorist too.<
Yes, you are sitting on the shoulders of a giant, too. Like Moliere's bourgeois gentleman, you've been speaking prose for years without knowing it. You seem to have learned from Marx, but you don't like the way he developed or presented his ideas theoretically.
>Unfortunately I don't think "a and "embodied labor" are very useful ways of talking abour exploitation, alienation, and the tyranny of markets. <
"Abstract labor" simply refers to the shared characteristics of all of the set of heterogeneous (concrete, empirical) labor in society. Unless one rejects abstraction _per se_, jumping directly to doing empirical analysis, it seems worthwhile to isolate the nature of "labor in general" (abstract labor) and that of "capital in general" (abstract capital) in order to get beyond empirical analysis, to try to dig through commodity fetishism. It's useful to be theoretically conscious rather than simply jumping into describing the world. (Of course, we don't want to get stuck at a high level of abstraction, either. Deductive, adductive, and inductive reasoning should all be used.)
BTW, NC economics has a similar approach in some ways: they abstract from the true heterogeneity of human beings in order to focus on the "abstract decision-maker" (homo economicus) who maximizes utility. I think that this effort is largely a failure beyond the obvious things (such as providing a rationalization for the downward-sloping demand curve in most industries). Unfortunately, they end up with a mish-mosh on the issue of how to relate abstract theory to empirical data.
>In particular, they [the abstract/concrete labor concept] do it explain thesephenomena. On your
vbersion as stated here, value talk mereexpresses these phenomena in more opaque language.<
While I'm all against opaque language whenever it can be avoided, most serious observers and practitioners of social science try to understand it and minimizing its role rather than dismissing it out of hand. For example, lawyers have all sorts of obscure language, often lifted from dead languages ("habeus corpus") and all sorts of arcane theory ("the intention of the founders"). Maybe the whole legal system could work using only common-sense lingo, but I doubt it. I'll let you be the judge, as it were.
I don't see the difficulty of reading as a sign of obscurantism (as critics of Marx often do) or as a sign of profundity (as adherents of Talcott Parsons or Jacques Derrida sometimes seem to do). When a subject is difficult -- such as trying to understand capitalism without falling for its official propaganda -- one often has to be a little obscure. BTW, NC economics would agree: they love silly abstractions such as the Cobb-Douglas Production Function or Arrow-Debreu-Walras general equilibrium theory. Whether or not these efforts are succesful -- whether or not the benefits of abstract language (or math) exceed the costs -- can only be determined by looking at the results. We can't simply say that it's wrong to incur the costs in the first place. To look at costs without benefits is absurd.
JD
