Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 04:19:03 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: Re: Marx without equilibrium


An attempt to contexualize Alan Freeman, "Marx without equilibrium",
Capital and Class 56 (Summer 1995): 49-89:

How are we to understand the development of the capitalist system through
time? What are its laws of tendency, its economic laws of motion? 

 Marx and Engels were confronted with the problem of how to gain
theoretical understanding which they developed, interestingly,  in the
course of severe critiques: Poverty of Philosophy (Anti-Proudhon), Critique
of Political Economy, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy,
Anti-Duhring, the Critique of the Gotha Program.  

In the *Incomplete Marx* Felton Shortall shows how Marx developed many of
his ideas in the Grundrisse as he critiqued certain monetary theories of
crisis. 

Grossmann would develop his ideas as a critique of the  idea of the
possibility of limitless accumulation.  He had to advance the debate beyond
Rosa Luxemburg's initial attempt.   

Later,  Mattick would  critique those state and academic managers who after
WWII triumphantly thought they had figured out a way to control the
business cycle from above  and that workers wouldn't have to take their
emancipation fully into their own hands. 

Mattick thus analyzed the ideas of Keynes, including the illusion of the 
worker-friendly nature of the intervention he justified(see for example
Mattick's analysis of the class-biased inflationary consequences of the
Keynesian panacea)--to say nothing of the ultimate limits of the mixed
economy to integrate the working class.     

Throughout his work Mattick put critique in the service of the theoretical
clarification of why the emancipation of the working class would have to be
its own conquest; why workers themselves would have to overthrow this mode
of production(he shared this commitment with Maximillen Rubel among
others).  

Mattick returned to Marx the critique of all political technocratic
mediation.  I came to Mattick with no grounding, as is evident, in economic
theory but political-theoretic ideas about radical democracy, participation
and counter-subversive ideologies.  As he assimilated Rosa's ideas about
democracy, Mattick would be  at odds with the role of leadership in
Stalinist, Maoist, Trotskyite and Leninist parties alike.    

Alan Freeman is also attempting to lay bare the inner structure and
tendencies of the system at a very high level of abstraction.  He does so
by critiquing  not only bourgeois economics but many forms of Marxism, as
did all the above theorists.  

Like Grossmann, he attempts to show that the aim of Marx's value theory is
not only explanation of the mechanisms of distribution of social labor to
respective tasks in an anarchic system or even the hidden mechanisms of
exploitation but also the overall dynamic tendencies of this system. 

For example, why is it that we witness rapid technological advance along
with the persistence, if not accentuation, of working class misery and
uneven global development? 

Freeman is united in this analytical task to a considerable extent with
Moishe Postone (Time, Labor and Social Domination) and of course the
theorists whom he mentions in this article.

What is central to this essay is  Freeman's critique   of key
*methodological* assumptions which economic theorists, Marxists included, 
have thought necessary in order to analyze capitalism as a self-reproducing
system.  

What Freeman shows is that in making assumptions about, for example time,
money, invariant technology, and market-clearing capacities; theorists have
simply failed to explain many of the  distinctive features of capitalism as
a directional socio-historical system, some of which are plain to see
(technical change, global uneven development, cycles and  crisis) and
others which work below the surface (global transfers of value, a fall in
the average value rate of profit).  

In short, abandoning certain methodological assumptions allows Freeman to
grasp as necessary those aspects and tendencies of capitalism which
mainstream theorists, with or without apologetic intent, simply cannot
theorize as essential because of the assumptions made. 

(Don't get the impression however that Freeman is only interested in the
'economics' of capitalism; see for example his review of Melvin Leiman's
*The Political Economy of Racism* in the Spring 1995 issue of *Capital and
Class*.)  

Now while Freeman has written this work for the non-mathematical reader, it
remains difficult.  It has been months since I have read this essay and I
did have trouble with some of the sections.  I think that one has to be
convinced of the soundness of a research agenda to some extent before
developing the analytical skills and patience  required to master its
contributions, much less contribute to them. 

(Of course, there is always the pressure to commit to a research agenda
because of the legitimacy or authority it has, no matter its irrelevance to
the most pressing problems concerning humanity today; in part Freeman is
showing that Marxists have routinely smuggled in the assumptions of
economists and thus presented an unrealistic and overly optimistic
understanding of capitalism.) 

At this point, I am in the beginning stages of learning some of the
analytical techniques, so I hope that I have not distorted the strategic
thrust of this essay.  

One could perhaps also argue that because of many of these assumptions, the
available theoretical models are incapable of theorizing the environmental
consequences of capitalism (Freeman does not deal with this problem).  But
this is a different argument, and I have not got to Elmar Altvater's *The
Future of the Market* which was mentioned by Jerry Levy.  

Rakesh 






     --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

     ------------------