Date: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 11:17:47 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: Re: M-TH: Young Sidney Hook(fwd)-part 2


Phelps' essay is fascinating.

However, there may have been grounds for a critique of Hook's Towards...as
revisionist.

"Hook's economic contribution consists of the denial of the efficiency of
the theory of value, exactly like Simkhovich and other revisionists. These
all agree that Marx rises or falls by his analysis [prediction--rb] of the
catastrophic potentialities of capitalism and not by the economic system he
postulated with which to explore these possibilities."

That is, Hook "refuses to accept the concrete, abstract, use-value and
value distinctions of Marx's economic system", simply disregarding Marx's
"tremendous economic contribution from 1844 on, in practically all of which
the later system of Capital is suggested and out of which only his later
conclusions could possibly rise."

The real danger of Hook's so-called pragmatism is that it repudiates  "the
unity of *true* theory and practice," sinking Marxism ultimately into
academic dogmatism on the one hand and nominalism on the other." True
theory would refer to, as Gouvernour has brilliantly put it, the discovery
beneath all appearances of the reality of free surplus labor and on that
basis the understanding of the real movements of captialist society,
interrelating the various aspects of capitalist development.

These are some of the criticisms advanced by William J Blake in Marxian
Economic Theory and Its Criticism, p. 566.

Now, as I have mentioned, Mattick wrote a pamphlet length critique, The
Inevitability of Communism, which reads nothing like Jerome's excerpts.
Mattick's is the most profound reflection on the consequences of Hook's
failure to develop the theory of value as a theory of disequilibrium and
catastrophe.

Rakesh




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