Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 01:42:58 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: Re: buchanan, crisis, labor party



Brad, great quote from Grossmann... 

 There is of course much to understand as to what are the requirements and
methods of a concrete proof procedure for the analysis of crisis. We'll
have to find a way to tap Jerry's pedagogical gifts on this!

  Grossmann  delves deeply into the methodological assumptions required for
analysis (for example price-value equivalence, demand equals supply,
constant value of money) and the process of successively relaxing those
assumptions. There are  people today who are advancing our understanding of
Marxian methodology in a way broadly consistent with Grossmann.  Two very
intellectually exciting examples would be the lead articles in the Summer
1995 issue of *Capital and Class* by Fred Moseley and Alan Freeman.  There
is also the work of Leszek Nowak (The Structure of Idealization: Towards a
Systematic Interpretation of the Marxian Idea of Science, Reidel Press).  

Before them, theorists such as Bernice Shoul, Manuel Gottlieb, Rudolph
Schlessinger, Abram Harris, Roman Rosdolsky, William J Blake and of course
Paul Mattick all discussed in depth the method by which Grossmann arrived
at his results.  And you will notice the substantial methodological
discussion in the Mario Cogoy essays which I also lent you--International
Journal of Political Economy, vol 17, no. 3 (from memory).  The books by
Walter Daum and Murray Smith should also prove quite illuminating on the
question of method. 

 I didn't quite understand what you were saying about Jim Miller.  Sometime
ago there was a heated exchange between him and Jerry and Steve, who both
felt that Jim's treatment of the recent literature and contemporary debates
was inadequate.  

I can say this however: from my perspective Jim is a brilliantly lucid
expositor, and he has archived for general discussion three articles: one
on the falling rate of profit; another on the history of the law of value;
and the last one on the transformation problem, which is the clearest
introduction I have yet read on the problems supposedly discovered by
Bortkiewicz and dealt with by Anwar Shaikh, among others. 


Rakesh






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