Date: Thu, 13 Apr 1995 00:35:12 -0800 From: jones/bhandari <djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu> Subject: paternalism Rahul M wrote: > I am as hard-headed a materialist objectivist as the next girl or guy. >This leads me to understand that nothing in the way of Marxist social >analysis or prognostication can actually pass for science. In a period of much greater faith in various Keynesian mechanisms to overcome the trade cycle Paul Mattick wrote Marx and Keynes: the limits of the mixed economy (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969). Recent developments have confirmed this work as one of the great predictions in social science, derived solely from the use of an abstract theory. In an earlier generation, Rosa Luxemburg, VI Lenin and Henryk Grossmann attempted to theorize the tendencies towards catastrophe in the capitalist system. I am wondering if Rahul thinks that this work, especially as it developed through criticism, simply cannot pass for science. Whether there are laws of tendency in Marx, what their status is and of what their content is are all very important questions in Marxian theory. Do Marxian laws of tendency laws work themselves with iron-clad necessity? What conditions are implicit in them? What exactly are these laws of tendency--the fall in the average rate of profit, the increase in the reserve army of labor, the concentration and centralization of capital, the increasing misery of the working class? It seems to me that the best introduction to these questions remains Daniel Little's The Scientific Marx (Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota press, 1986). Especially on the question of the status of marxian laws of tendency, see the work of David Hillel Ruben footnoted in Little. One of Ruben's most important pieces appears in Marx and Marxism, ed. GHR Parkinson. Cambridge Univ Press. I would be interested in what Rahul understood as more successful social scientific work than that of Marxians. Rakesh Bhandari --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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