The crisis of bourgeois economics

Post Reply
User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: The crisis of bourgeois economics

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 04, 2020 3:42 pm

meganmonkey
08-11-2009, 11:09 AM

of the econ majors. How a wayward soc/anthro major like myself got in there, I don't know. Given my decision-making process during the college years, it's likely because the class was taught after 1pm and it fulfilled requirements for both sociology and philosophy (my 'minor'). I probably never even read the course description. 'Social Theory' sounded good to me.

What I didn't realize until Anax spelled it out for me was that I was a 'victim' of an orchestrated attempt to get these neoclassical ideas into economics courses. From anax's Mr. Anonymous article:


http://socialistindependent.org/anax01.htm
Among the very first "front organizations" of the Volker Fund was the "National Book Foundation". While the Foundation's affiliation to the Volker Fund was not hidden, it was circumspect enough to suggest, even to most "Libertarians", that it was independent. The fund began modestly enough by distributing free copies Eugene Böhm-Bawerk's works to thousands of libraries and universities across the country. As the Volker efforts geared up, the Foundation began to distribute millions of books from dozens of authors, all coming from the Fund's stables. Many educational "incentives" were initiated such as "teach a course on Hayek, get 10 (or 100) textbooks for free"...

Don't remember if this little revelation occurred here or at PopIndy, or if you were part of that particular discussion..

To anyone else reading this - if you haven't read Anaxarchos' article linked above, I highly recommend it, especially if this current thread is interesting to ya...

And to be fair, I questioned my sociology profs just as much as I did the Hayek guy..I remember in an intro to sociology class I asked a question about scabs and wondered why, given everything else I was learning, I was supposed to blame the poor dude who desperately crossed the picket line so he could feed his family...LOL, you can imagine how that went over. Needless to say, he made his case quite successfully, despite the fact that I was a naive 17 year old suburbanite who spent my life in a bubble.

(sorry I'm getting all personal/first-person about this - it's just one of those things that shaped my thinking when I was too young/inexperienced to realize it was happening, and when I look back on it now it's still kind of shocking to me!)
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: The crisis of bourgeois economics

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 04, 2020 3:43 pm

Two Americas
08-11-2009, 11:17 AM

We have discussed Mr. Anonymous and the Not-So-Spontaneous Birth of the Libertarian "Movement" quite a bit. I could never understand why it didn't have more impact. Maybe people don't even read it?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: The crisis of bourgeois economics

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 04, 2020 3:43 pm

meganmonkey
08-11-2009, 11:45 AM

so I was able to kick it up rather than figure out how much effort to put into formatting it all pretty. :)
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: The crisis of bourgeois economics

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 04, 2020 3:44 pm

anaxarchos
08-11-2009, 01:23 PM

... to the publication of Hayek's Road to Serfdom by Reader's Digest. The Digest ostensibly abridged popular books "for the masses". In this case, Hayek had no readership whatever. The act was a blatant con by the radically right-wing Digest... and it worked.

Hayek's whole shpiel was that Keynesian "reforms" overturned the basis of the Democratic Revolutions and put the history of business on a regressive tack. What then about economic crisis? Hayek thought all that was needed was the political will to "tough it out"... that plus "police measures". This is what really connects these people to Leo Strauss. It is long forgotten that they criticized the Nazis, from the right.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: The crisis of bourgeois economics

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 04, 2020 3:45 pm

Kid of the Black Hole
08-23-2009, 01:12 PM

Bumping because it is easy to forget things once they disappear into the ether.

Lots here to discuss, and we haven't even mined the surface yet
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: The crisis of bourgeois economics

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 04, 2020 3:46 pm

anaxarchos
03-22-2010, 09:24 AM

There is a large body of academic Marxist political economy and many journals in which such issues were and still are debated, the most well known being Monthly Review. Some of the academics have been or are active, so some of the material is quasi-political, but much of it is similar to any other material in the Social Sciences. Consider Harman's piece above as a survey paper with "strong opinions".

I'm trained in this shit and nothing above is particularly controversial... though it seems to me to be very accurate as such things go.

Political Economy is similar to the other social sciences except that its centrality produces two large wings: an apologist wing whose role is obvious, and a Marxi-Socialist-radical-Keynesian wing which inherited the classical economists (too controversial for everyone else) and was reinforced by the existence of real, live Socialism. There is also a technical wing which conscientiously avoids all such subjects.

You have to read the primary material for yourself... though, you are in luck. People like Joan Robinson are very readable (if often wrong). You should try Walras - what an undecipherable tool.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: The crisis of bourgeois economics

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 04, 2020 3:46 pm

Kid of the Black Hole
03-22-2010, 11:18 AM

I will post something by him sometime. I am pretty sure it could pass as "post-modern art" these days.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: The crisis of bourgeois economics

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 04, 2020 3:48 pm

chlamor
07-09-2010, 11:38 AM

Image
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: The crisis of bourgeois economics

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 04, 2020 3:49 pm

Kid of the Black Hole
07-19-2010, 11:13 AM

There's something I don't get that might simultaneously illustrate an important point here. Namely, what is the reason/need to discuss/contemplate/master this material.

Take the following standalone excerpt from a professor named Hans Ehrbar (he is at a US university)


Allow me to paraphrase Marx's argument in modern terms so that it is
easier for someone living today to follow Marx's logic.

Marx basically says: today's extremely complex social production
apparatus is regulated by market interactions. On the market, the
mass of all commodities are treated as a one-dimensional quantity,
measured by price. This can only then be a successful way of
governing the economy if the underlying production structure can be
reduced to one dimension as well. This one dimension is labor.

What was said in this last paragraph is not yet different from
Ricardo. But then Marx's own contribution to the labor theory of
value begins. Some of this was implicit in Ricardo, but Marx lays it
out clearly and systematically. Marx says: labor itself is as varied
as the use-values it produces, i.e., labor itself cannot be the
one-dimensional skeleton of production. But all labor processes have
something in common: they are the expenditure of human labor-power.
And labor-power is quite homogeneous. 90 percent of the population
could do 90 percent of all the labors if properly trained. This
application of human labor-power, Marx calls it "abstract labor", is
what gives production its one-dimensional character. Basically,
commodity producers have to make only one production decision: they
have to decide which of the many products their labor enables them to
produce should be produced.

In every society labor is the expenditure of human labor-power. But
if the labor produces commodities, then this labor-power is not
used-up and disappeared at the end of the production process, but
society keeps track of it in the value of the product. I.e., the
abstract labor is invisibly still present. Marx calls it a value
quasi-material (Wertgegenstaendlichkeit), "Gegenstaendlichkeit"
meaning something which has similar properties to an object although
it is not really an object. Society acts as if there was some common
material substance inside the commodities, which manifests itself
in the exchangeability of the commodity (more developed manifestations
are the existence of money, the one commodity which can buy all
others).

Marx says therefore: in dealing with commodities, society acts
as if all commodities were pieces of the same homogeneous substance,
value, although in actuality they are the most diverse use-values.
Their common character of value is only actualized in money --
all commodities can and must be exchanged for money.

Although the value of the commodities is not physical -- it is only a
quasi-material and not a material -- one should not say it is a social
fiction. It has a physical basis because the process which creates
value is a physical process. This is how Marx arrives at what he
calls a pivotal insight in volume 1 of Capital: the observation that
the production process of commodities has a double character. It is
production of use-value but it also accumulates value. Both are
grounded in physical characteristics of the production process: one
in the skills of the laborer (concrete labor) and the other in the fact
that the laborer gets tired while working (abstract labor). Note
therefore: although value itself is not something physical but is a
social relation, the production of value has an indispensable physical
component, namely, it is the expenditure of human labor-power.

All this is not yet dependent on capitalism. It is true, at least as
a tendency, whenever there is commodity production. Carrol said for
instance that medieval craftsmen did not compete with each other.
Their prices and the access to their market was regulated so that all
of them could earn a fair income -- but they were also prevented
through the same regulations from becoming capitalists and turning
their apprentices into wage laborers. The guild system was an
institution which counteracted the tendencies inherent in commodity
production itself. If this is what Carrol means then I agree. But I
would not be surprised if those regulated prices turned out to be
roughly proportional to labor content. I am not a medievalist and
therefore I am pretty much guessing here. If others know more please
speak up.

Throughout antiquity and the middle ages there is also famous prose
and poems decrying the corrosive powers of money, some of it quoted by
Marx in chapter 3 of Capital. Again, a sign that the inherent forces
coming with commodity production were at work but society counteracted
them. Marx says that the production process acquires in fact a double
character as soon as commodities were produced for sale rather than
for use. This is long before capitalism. Money also arose long
before capitalism. There were also capitalists long before
capitalism: but they were usurers and merchant capitalists at the
periphery of the economy. The commodity and capital relation had not
yet conquered the core of the social production process.

Now with capitalism, things are intensified and there is certainly a
qualitative shift. The double character of labor, which in chapter 1
of capital is a necessary implication of commodity production, becomes
in chapter 7 (German chapter 5) the deliberate strategy how to exploit
labor. But money and abstract labor already existed long before
capitalism. Capitalism cannot arise without money, and capitalists
are so eager to buy the commodity labor-power exactly because of its
ability to create value. If you say that only wage-labor creates
value then you are giving the capitalists too much credit: you are
basically saying they are making labor productive by exploiting it.
The causality is actually the reverse: they are exploiting labor
because labor is productive of value.

Lets say for a minute that we can work with the above, regardless of whether it is a perfectly correct elaboration.

Then we come to this



Is all this relevant for today? I would say yes. Just three examples
how all this helps us understand what is happening today:

(1) The material basis of the social relation "value" in the
expenditure of human labor-power means that value cannot be produced
by political power. This is the big dilemma of the United States who
are politically, but no longer economically, the dominant power.
Eventually the US must fail economically, but like a cornered tiger
this is no ground for celebration but it makes the US especially
dangerous.

(2) Nowadays it is no longer true enough that production is
one-dimensional. Labor has become so productive that it has
eliminated itself as the most important factor of production. The
binding constraint is no longer labor but the binding constraint are
the earth's material resources, especially its limited ability to
absorb CO2. A simple extension of Marx's theory says that a
one-dimensional market system is structurally unable to do the right
thing about the environment because the economy is no longer
one-dimensional. The failure of the capitalist system to do respond
appropriately to the environmental crisis seems to confirm this
Marxian insight.

(3) It has been said that everything BP does regarding the oil spill
has two different, often conflicting, goals: (a) stop the spill and
save the environment and (b) diminish BP's financial
losses/responsibility. To a Marxist this is nothing new. This is
simply the double character of the capitalist production process.
It happens in all capitalist production, but with the oil spill
it is perhaps better visible.

All of this exceprt is pure drivel and/or reflects someone eyeballing things and backing it up with the seamy underbelly of "theory" (the type of theory that chiefly begs every question)

So how does this work? Why would anyone go through all of the trouble -- even someone as pedantic as Hans here -- just to use it as a prop for their own pet theories and inaneities?

I think it is also a caution, because its an easy trap to fall into for everyone, including us.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: The crisis of bourgeois economics

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 04, 2020 3:49 pm

anaxarchos
07-24-2010, 04:24 PM

A workable understanding of Marxist theory is combined with the most cockamamie ideas which shouldn't be able to co-exist in the same head. Got no idea...

Maybe it is like a prison guard who has one set of behaviors on the job, but tries not to bring them home with him at night.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

Post Reply