Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 21:56:54 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: M-TH: HoPE





I haven't looked at Schumpeter for a while, but as I recall in both CSD
and the HEA he discusses Marx's controbutions of mainsteam economics at
some length. Leontieff has a nice short article in Horowitz's Marx and
Modern Economics (right title?) collection in which he does the same. Bith
credit Marx with important contributions. Morishima makesa  case in an
otherwise ahistorical book that Marx is actually an important contributor
modern mathematical economics. 

But Brewer conceives the issue too narrowly. Marx, like the old and new
Institutionalists, has a wider conception of economics than the tradition
of NCE to which Marx is putported to have made no contribution. This
wider, mosre sociological and historical conception, is fundamental to
Marx's project as involving a critique of political economy (for ignoring
sociial reality and history); the project of economics Marx suggests in a
broad way has been very influential and to the extent that it hasn't in
econ departments, I submit that MArx's critique is well taken.

I agree with Brewer that value theory turns out to be a dead end. But I do
not think that is the core of Marxian economics. Gil Skillman, whom I'd
like to see on this list, has distinguished useflly between the value
theoretical and thistorical materialist strands in Marx, defending the
latter while critiquing the former.

Brewer's comments, as quoted, display a dismayingly low level of argument
and a particularly egregious instance of caving into the currently trendy
ideological fashions. They show no attempt at any serious appreciation of
what might be living or dead in MArxian economics. The claim is simply
made, as if that settles it, that the kind of economics that dominates in
contemporary econ depts pay no attention to Marx's work or work in the
Marxian tradition. Brewer should have had enough Marx under his belt, in
fact enough elementary logic, to see the fallacy in that. I am ashamed for
him. That doesn't mean that a tough-mided reappraisal of the
accomplishments and failures of Marxism isn't in order.

--Justin







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