Date: Mon, 26 Jun 1995 01:09:55 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jim Jaszewski <ab975-AT-main.freenet.hamilton.on.ca>
Subject: Sraffa 101



	Just to show (in a small way) that there's apparently a very real
bias at work here, personified in how certain people act toward others,
let me re-post a message I sent to PEN-L earlier. I received NOT ONE
reply. Not a one!!

	Considering how straightforward and cogent it is (to me, anyway),
I would have expected it to at LEAST become the genesis of a short thread!
It's not the only straightforward and meaningful thing I've posted which
has met with (stony?) silence -- far from it. And a NUMBER of people have
asked IMPORTANT, pithy questions in these lists -- yet I've seen NOT ONE
of them replied to... 

	This (to me) either speaks of a 'country club' atmosphere among
the resident clique here, who only deign to respond to each other's posts
(perhaps even purposely filter all but their friends out) -- or it points
(even worse, in my estimation) to the distinct possibility that these
resident pontiffs simply cannot tell important questions from those they
regularly disregard, or prefer to reply to... 

	That some of these same people instead _prefer_ to respond to the
most PETTY matters of protocol and 'manners', leads me to believe that
this is very much the situation. Consider that, in order to portray me as
a 'lumpen' troublemaker, it would be in the INTERESTS of these parties
(pun intended) to ignore what is BEST about my posts, and instead
concentrate on the petty details of supposed 'delitos' -- thus attempting
to skew the view others might make of me, and thus strengthen their
hand... 

	That this is going on in a supposedly 'marxist' milieu goes far,
in my estimation, in showing just how far the bourgeois mentality has sunk
its roots into the 'socialist' mind, and goes equally far in suggesting in
large part why socialists have failed miserably in their cause. 

	Now READ my post (which I had to find in the PEN-L archives...)

______________________________________________________________


	'Enlighten' me on what these 'Sraffans' are about...


	In the introduction to 'Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa', Ernest Mandel sez: 

I. Rubin, the most brilliant of the Russian Marxist economists, answered
that if one does not start from the *social relations of production* that
underlie commodity production, one will fail to understand why value
analysis is needed. 

	In another passage, Mandel sez:

Langston sought to break free of a crippling constraint imposed on the 
study of value-price transformation by von Bortkiewicz type models, as 
generalized by later authors, if used to model a real capitalist economy: 
namely that they abstract from economic movement in *time*.	

	(above emphasis mine)

	What he is saying, is that the 'neo-Ricardians'/Sraffans/whatever
are, _RIGHT_ from the beginning of their analyses, making (at least) TWO
*cardinal* mistakes: 

	1) They are leaving human relations out of their equations and
fixating on 'the economy' as the end-all and be-all of the matter, as if
it were some kind of machine existing outside of, and unnecessarily
related to human activity (machina ex homo??  :). 
 
	This, in my opinion is 'positivist reductionism' (proper term?  :)
at its best/worst... 

	2) Their analyses, in the best bourgeois manner, fixate on some
mythological 'equilibrium' of the economy and *totally* ignore the
*fundamental* fact of _change in time_.  Which is, of course, one of the
fundaments of DIALECTICS (not to mention reality...). 

	Am I far off the mark??    |>


__________________________________________________________


	Why don't my detractors respond to THESE kind of posts??

	I'm gonna REPOST this in PEN-L -- 'as is'.


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   Jim Jaszewski   <jazz-AT-freenet.hamilton.on.ca>

   WWW homepage:   <http://www.freenet.hamilton.on.ca/~ab975/Profile.html>

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