Letter to the editorial board of RRPE (original) (raw)
Related papers
Historical Materialism, 2010
Andrew Kliman's Reclaiming Marx's 'Capital' sets out to refute the 'myth' that Marx's original presentation of the theory of the value is internally inconsistent. A century ago, Bortkiewicz purported to demonstrate that Marx's mistake was his failure to adopt simultaneous valuation. Thereafter, twentieth-century Marxian economics worked out a 'corrected' version of Marx's original theory, culminating in Steedman's 1977 Marx after Sraffa. Conclusions Marx himself deemed central were dropped, prominently including the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit. But simultaneous valuation is absolutely incompatible with Marx's first and fundamental premise, the determination of value by labour-time. On the other hand, if Marx's major theoretical conclusions do consistently follow from his premises, including the transformation of values into prices of production, then the quantitative dimension of his value-theory is internally consistent after all and stands in no need of correction on this score. Advocating a temporal, single-system interpretation, Kliman shows how 'two simple modifications' eliminate 'all of the alleged inconsistencies in the quantitative dimension of Marx's value theory': valuation is temporal, and values and prices are determined interdependently. Kliman's refutation is sound, but his claim to know Marx's intentions, in E.D. Hirsch's sense, is questionable.
An Analysis of Karl Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy
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Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2022
In the preface to the first edition of Capital Volume I, Karl Marx wrote ‘Beginnings are always difficult in all sciences. The understanding of the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will therefore present the greatest difficulty’ (Marx 1990: 89). It is no wonder then that in the face of this difficult beginning, Louis Althusser famously encouraged the first-time reader to put Part I on ‘Commodities and Money’ aside and only return to it after the end of reading the rest of the book. And even then, to do so ‘with infinite caution, knowing that it will always be extremely difficult to understand, even after several readings of the other Parts, without the help of a certain number of deeper explanations’ (Althusser 1977: 85). In the anglophone world, many readers reached for David Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital for such help. But this companion, its importance notwithstanding, exhibits what Nicola Taylor and Riccardo Bellofiore (2004: 4n4) call the ‘immaturity’ of English-language scholarship on Marx which to this day continues to remain in the dark about primary and secondary literature emerging from the historical-critical edition, the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2).
Marx's Capital – 'scientifically erroneous and without application to the modern world'
John Maynard Keynes reckoned Das Kapital was “an obsolete economic textbook which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world.” Marx’s work was a ‘poor version’ of Ricardo and needed to be knocked away. Was Keynes right about this? This paper will consider the logical consistency of Marx’s value theory and its empirical relevance to modern capitalist developments. It will deal with the differences of Marx’s theory as a critique of political economy to that of Ricardo and Keynes.
A.A. Popovici - Program of the new site marxianeconomics.wordpress.com (10.XI.2016)
The works listed here (nearly 500 books and articles) can be viewed and downloaded immediately. I wanted to offer everyone interested the chance to read the fundamental economic works of Marx and also a wide variety of old and recent works about the most important problems of Marxist economic science. I tried to represent all currents of thoughts from within the Marxist economic sciences, along with their mutual critics or about other currents (neo-classicism or “heterodox” schools) from the whole of the economic sciences. I think that, along with these, one should also have access to the main critical works against the Marxist economic theory. All voices must be heard in a dialogue, even if it is a polemic, and Marxists should be capable of coming up with a proper answer to those critics and not to deny them just because they belong to the enemy camp. True science can only benefit from this type of dialogue. I am not against a social role of economics, but against its politicization during research. The goal of science must be the truth, and this goal must reign over the others, which cannot be adequately achieved otherwise. This could be also expressed as a necessity of turning practical consequences of the Marxian economics not into political ‘weapons’, but into social ‘tools’. Psychologically, this would be a passage from a destructive, negativist, and sometime resenting approach, to a constructive, participative, and empathic one. We need neither science for science, nor science with (political) tendency, but SCIENCE FOR TRUTH.
the JSHET Annual Conference. Session: Revisiting Karl Marx as a Historian of Economic Theories, 2023
The editorial board of Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) Japan, to which the chair of this session belongs, has been involved in editing Section IV, Volumes 17-19 of MEGA, a “historical and critical collection”. In 2021, IV/19, jointly edited by German editors in Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and Japanese scholars, was published online . This volume is a compilation of Marx’s excerpt notebooks on Money Markets and Crisis, written in the late 1860s and early 1870s. In addition, this year, the editorial work of IV /17, has begun in earnest, led by Prof. Morishita (Hokkai Gakuen University). This volume contains eight subnotebooks on the manuscripts of Capital, known as 1861–63 Economic Manuscript, and is expected to uncover new insights into the Marx's reception of history of political economy. This session aims to reexamine Marx on the history of political economy by considering the latest results of MEGA research. However, it is distinct from the Marxian Economy’s approach. Until now, Marx's critique of the history of political economy has been understood based on the Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW), i.e., Theories of Surplus-Value, edited by Karl Kautsky. Indeed, all these manuscripts of Theories of Surplus-Value were republished in MEGA by 1982. However, the influence of political parties and Marxism-Leninism has not been completely dispelled in MEGA editions before the end of the Cold War, as are typical in the preface and index of personalities. Thus, the challenge remains for contemporary researchers to “historically contextualize” Marx's thought itself by using his excerpt notebooks.