On 10/5/07, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > BTW, at least in economics, Marxists don't have a very coherent > paradigm. Maybe comprehensive, but not coherent. It's like Beirut in > the 1970s...
But it seems to me that the Marxist approach, if it can really be described as such, is bascially to take a comprehensive view of orthodox economics, to show that, from a comprehensive view, it is not coherent, but instead full of contradictions. This is particularly the case in the way orthodox economics is pasted loosely onto the other ideologies that come out of the Enlightenment tradition, such that they appear to be the same thing. The only thing that makes the Austrians appear coherent is that they basically assume there are no contradictions here AND that in so far as anyone believes that there are, it is because of some massive propaganda campaign by villainous Socialists who simply deceive the masses with alternative views of reality: there is, in other words, no basis in material relations or enlightenment philosophy for this critique. It's just bad PR. Admittedly, this is also a problem with many of the Western Marxist critiques, but these are constituted precisely as non-economic theories of society and culture at large. But maybe I don't know what you mean by Marxist economics. I think that Aglietta's "Theory of Capitalist Regulation" is pretty coherent as an alternative description of post-war US capitalism, even if he did chicken out a few years later. And he's hardly a Marxist economist per se, he just tried to turn some of the basic arguments of _Capital_ into an scheme of equations that would be recognizable to more traditional economists. But this wasn't really the innovation in that method, which involved trying to describe the mode of regulation--i.e. the ideological and consumption oriented supports--that make capitalism sustainable over the long term. In this, his theory tries to be both more comprehensive and more coherent. Maybe it's not seen as relevant to the "real" economics profession or maybe it's not seen as Marxist. In any case, I'm not sure what is except if we are talking about state planning oriented theories, which one could only tenuously describe as Marxist. Maybe the work of people in the journal Re-Thinking Marxism would apply, but I haven't read enough of their work to know if they would apply as Marxist economists. Which, perhaps brings up the question of how you define an economist as much as it does how you define a Marxist. s
