Date: Thu, 13 Mar 1997 16:43:11 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: game theory


Barkley:

>     1)  Although a lot of Roemer's presentations presume 
>methodological individualism, they don't have to.  Let the 
>"individuals" be groups or classes.  Then, let the "games" 
>begin.  The analysis works out.  Are not the capitalists 
>and the workers each trying to get as much for themselves 
>as possible?

Louis: "Let the individuals be classes?" "Aren't the workers trying to get
as much for themselves as possible?" These formulations are alien to
everything that Marx was about. And what if "the analysis works out" on its
own terms. This is not germane since it is highly likely that what Roemer is
modeling in his corn economy simply has no correspondence in history.
Marxists are focused on history, not laboratory conditions where
game-experiments can be conducted. Roemer's methodology doesn't explain the
rise of capitalism, nor does it identify the role of the class struggle in
history. Unless an analysis can do this, it isn't worth a dime for the
purpose of understanding or changing the world. 

>     2)  I see no reason not to view the conflicts in a 
>non-cooperative game as being awfully similar to a 
>"contradiction."  Why isn't a contradiction?

Louis: I have no idea what your use of the word "contradiction" means. I use
contradiction in the sense that the USSR was a contradictory society, or
that black nationalism has contradictory aspects, or that Bonapartism is a
contradictory phenomenon. What do you mean when you say "contradiction"? A
"conflict" between the bourgeoisie and the working-class in some kind of
Roemerian game is not an example of a contradiction. 

A much better example would be the Irish working-class in the US in the
1860s. This most oppressed layer of the working-class was coopted by the
ruling class in Northern cities in order to act as a bastion of racism. In
England, the Irish were treated like "niggers". Even Engels himself was
capable of the most loathsome racist epithets when he wrote about the Irish.
Then the Irish turned around and became like Ulstermen to the blacks in the
northern cities after they migrated to the US. This can not be modeled in
games. It requires class analysis rooted in the totality of social
relations, including race and gender. AM is the perfect place to hide from
all these sorts of messy problems, since everybody acts "rationally".


>     3)  It is certainly true that Roemer does not present 
>a Hegelian dialectical view.  But, non-cooperative game 
>theory has a dynamic version in its "repeated game" form in 
>which a sort of abstracted historical process can be played 
>out.  There are people out there running simulation models 
>of this sort of thing.

Louis: Good luck to them. This seems like a perfectly harmless activity.

>     4)  Of course a very basic aspect of this is the 
>question of the use of mathematics.  Many argue that 
>dialectical analysis is inherently unmathematical and thus 
>would rule out game theory.  Now, on the one hand, Marx 
>himself did not hesitate to use mathematics.  Indeed, Phil 
>Mirowski has argued that he was the first true mathematical 
>economist.  On the other hand, it is possible to interpret 
>dialectical analysis in a mathematical manner, the quantity 
>becomes quality being equivalent to a phase transition in 
>nonlinear dynamics.  I have even written a paper on this, 
>but will not name it or where it was presented or where 
>it is currently under review or who was in the audience for 
>fear of being dinged for self-aggrandizement and awful 
>academic elitism, blah blah blah.  But in that paper I 
>recognize that if one insists that dialectics cannot be 
>mathematical, then the whole analogy is out the window.  
>But why can it not be mathematical?  Too complicated for 
>Third World peasants to understand?  So is much of Marx.


Louis: I am sure that the list would appreciate a presentation on your
article just as it would one from Zarembka on Venezuela. There really is
nothing to be afraid of when you favor us with such presentations except the
possibility that laypeople will tell you that you are full of shit. On the
up side, you might receive the adulation of the untutored mob.

You must remember, however, that many of us--myself included--haven't done
anything with math in many years and won't know what you are talking about
if you use mathematical notation. That is one of the reasons I get
frustrated with Roemer. Much of his text is riddled with mathematical
notation that I am convinced proves nothing. I am spending the next year or
so doing remedial work in math just so I can confront the sort of
mystification represented by Roemer's mathematics and satisfy myself that it
is grandstanding.

What would impress me more than anything would be an example of AM making
sense of the class struggle. I have yet to read a word in Elster, Cohen or
Roemer that explains anything going on the world. When Roemer does descend
>from the very rarefied world of the Oxford commons room and tries to speak
about the class struggle, he sticks his foot in his mouth nearly every time.
For example, he says that recent wars between socialist nations like China
and the USSR have "provoked a crisis in Marxist theory". Really? I have no
idea what makes him say this. A classical Marxist analysis of the relations
between the United States and China on one side, and the USSR and Vietnam on
the other, during the mid-1970s would explain a lot more than Roemer's
lifeless and mind-numbing excursions into corn economy and his calculus
cartwheels.



Louis Proyect
(www.columbia.edu/~lnp3)



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