Heterodox
Infinite are the arguments of Marxists. This very selective survey needs references. A first difficult is that everybody knows Marx has something to do with the Soviet Union. Many come to reading Capital with certain preconceptions. A couple comments in the book, for analytical reasons, contrast capitalism and feudalism and a post-capitalist economy with common ownership. But the book is about capitalism. The book contains expressions of outrage, often ironical. But is capitalism criticized for being unjust? And the labor theory of value, for Marx, is not about what workers should be paid. I tend to read Marx as developing a theory for political economy, a theory about how capitalism works. But should such a thing as Marxian political economy even exist? "A critique of political
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Robert Vienneau considers the following as important: Karl Marx
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Infinite are the arguments of Marxists. This very selective survey needs references.
A first difficult is that everybody knows Marx has something to do with the Soviet Union. Many come to reading Capital with certain preconceptions. A couple comments in the book, for analytical reasons, contrast capitalism and feudalism and a post-capitalist economy with common ownership. But the book is about capitalism. The book contains expressions of outrage, often ironical. But is capitalism criticized for being unjust? And the labor theory of value, for Marx, is not about what workers should be paid.
I tend to read Marx as developing a theory for political economy, a theory about how capitalism works. But should such a thing as Marxian political economy even exist? "A critique of political economy" is the subtitle of of Capital. Maybe Marx is not offering a different theory to put in place of the existing theory. A similar argument arises over Sraffa. The subtitle of his 1960 masterpiece is, "A prelude to a critique of economic theory". Perhaps the formalism should lead to more concrete, institutial, and empirical studies. On the other hand, Marx says he is investigating the "laws of motion" of a commodity-producing society.
I take my next difficulty from some comments in David Harvey's Companion What arguments are logical, in some sense? What are describing history? It is obviously not all history, since otherwise the section on primitive accumulation would be towards the start. But the sequence of chapters on co-operation, manufacture, and modern industry are set in history. I do not mean formal logic or syllogisms by 'logic', but rather something like the unfolding of concepts.
Marx often postulates an ideal system, so as to address bourgeois political economists and Ricardian socialists. On the other hand, he often describes practices that deviate from such ideals. Which is which at any point in the text?
Does Marx ever present a complete description of his method? In the introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx distinguishes between the order of presentation and the order of discovery. In some of his correspondence, he outlines his book.
I tend to present (some variant of or critique of) Marx's political economy with mathematics. How much are those who have done such true to this approach? Some of the mathematics, such as Perron-Frobenius theorems, did not exist in Marx's day. Some find analytical marxists too willing to accept methodological individualism.
Then some background is very useful to understand what Marx is writing about. I might mention British political economy, Hegel's philosophy, and previous socialists.
There are some difficulties in the presentation. I have mentioned the last footnote in chapter 5. One then needs to read thousands of pages until Marx explains the transformation problem in volume 3. One might find it difficult to accept that Marx intends volume 1 to be something like a is first approximation.
This post echoes some themes in a recent working paper by Fabio Petri. Some confusions are probably my own.