Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 17:05:53 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: HoPE article



Jerry, you know more about economics than I do, but I thought the "minor
post-Ricardan" line was PAul Samuelson's. He also sneered as Marx for
being an "autodicact," as if there were graduate programs in economics
that Marx refused to attend (but which, apparantly, Smith, Ricardo, J.S.
Mill, or for that matter Walras, Marshall, and Jevons did). In S's favor I
will say that, what is rare among neoclassical economists, he thought
long, hard, seriously, and fairly sympathetically about Marx and published
some very deep criticisms in his scholarly work, as opposed to that absurd
textbook that so many of us were subjected to. 

What neo-Ricardans areyou talking about? Sraffa never considered Marx as
minor anything. (Actually friendsof mine at CAmbridge who were students of
S said that he was a moderately hard core Stalinist in politics in the
early 1980s, i.e., to his death.) Steedman certainly doesn't think Marx is
minor. Howard and Kinh don't. So who does?

--Justin

On Mon, 21 Oct 1996, Gerald Levy wrote:

> > Anthony Brewer provided a discussion in the form of a critic of the place
> > of Marx in the history of economic thought and his contribution to
> > economic theory, titled "A Minor Post-Ricardian? Marx as an Economist"
> > (Brewer:111-45); which nine Marxian economists responded to (mostly in
> > defense of Marx).
> 
> Two brief points:
> 
> (1) It has long been a postulate of Neo-Ricardianism that Marx was simply
> a left-wing Ricardian. This interpretation is based on an attempt to
> vacate and reject Marx's understanding of value and dialectical method and
> replace it with linear production theory. *If* one accepts that
> interpretation of  Marx (which I don't), then I can see how one can view
> Marx as a "minor Post-Ricardian" and an "economist."
> 
> (2) More generally, I see the above as an expression of the
> disillusionment among [non-anti-Stalinists] that followed the collapse of
> the USSR, etc.. A similar development happened after the Khruschev
> revelations and after Mao's death. Those who have illusions will
> eventually see them crushed -- unless they are so out of touch with
> reality that they cling to the illusions against all evidence to the
> contrary.
> 
> Jerry
> 
> 
> 
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