Josef Schumpeterian creative-destruction vs. Karl Marxian base-superstructure: What history actually looks like as Marx’s 1859 vision promised imminent revolution followed by utopia, sketching six...
I think you'll find Tooze is more sympathetic to Marx than you. Check out his recent Ones and Tooze podcasts featuring pretty positive accounts of Marxist political economy.
I was rather surprised by you positively reposting Heath. Heath's post has a host of problems and is more about justifying Rawls than explaining Marx - and this only because the edifice of academic Rawlsianism is in decline. That is why he got more responses than anything else he has posted.
One very simple example of where Heath is at least misleading. He cites Marshall approvingly as having replaced the labor theory of value with the marginal utility theory. But he (deliberately?) overlooks that Marshall did NOT reject the classical labor theory of value at all. He simply said it applies in the long-term and marginal analysis in the short-term. This is why his economics is termed neoclassical not post-classical. If you go back and look at the classicals, Marshall's view is very consistent with what they say. The term "labor theory of value" does not come from the classical themselves, but only emerges as a contrast term for the marginal theory of value. Whether they even held a consistent theory of value and what exactly it was. What is clear is that Smith Ricardo and Marx all held subsistence theory of normal wages and not what came to be called a marginal productivity theory. If you hold a subsistence theory of wages you implicitly think the employer is using institutional advantages to cream off the difference between subsistence and marginal productivity. Smith is pretty clear about this and actually thinks this is the long-term norm (the natural wage-price). Conditions of high growth which would force employers to compete away their institutional advantages is the exception.
Ricardo's rent analysis follows the same logic of exploitation of both the manufacturing and working class.
Perhaps more astoundingly he says Piketty is not really Marxist. Piketty clearly says he sees his theory as empirical evidence supporting Ricardo and Marx. Recent Nobel prize winning Acemoglu cites Marx and Ricardo as sources for his theory of technology and wages. He seems to suggest that they are not actually Marxist despite what Piketty says, but it is odd to then use this as proof of the decline of Marx's influence in academia. More likely it is a decline in Heath's understanding of Marx.
I think Kalecki and many in the Cambridge circle would be surprised to hear that Keynes fundamentally overturns Marx.
Heath also doesn't mention Schumpeter's complex engagement with Marx, nor that the very in-vogue notion of creative-destruction is Marxist in origin. Again going by Nobel prizes (Acemoglu, Aghion) Schumpeter (and by extension) Marx is alive and well. You would at least have to say the unorthodox Austrian and Marxist approaches are doing better than the Neo-classical orthodoxy of the past-war to 2008 period.
This much too much for the pea brain to absorb in one sitting. I got to the 5 stages and the pea brain started wandering off wondering what comes after the state of socialist perfection.
Mohammed in religion just called an end to religious history. Did Marx call and end to how societies are organized? What follows? Planetary to intergalactic?
History does appear at times to have some sort of arc, although maybe not the one referred to in MLK's very non-Marxist portrayal of history as a pilgrim's progress. Sixty years ago I might have been hopeful that history, at least conceptually, was finally reaching some sort of apogee, but I was young then, and my knowledge of German hadn't yet revealed to me any of the more dismal historical events that had been busily giving the lie to Enlightenment optimism as I was being born. Nowadays, given the commedia dell' arte version of the Decline of the West being cosplayed with such ferocity by the unholy fools in the White House, I'm beginning to wonder if history's true arc isn't some lumpier version of a sine wave. If so, maybe people serious about what is to be done ought to exchange Hegel and Marx for the Ramayana.
IMO there may be a pattern in technological history because technological history shows a definite, and even predictable, line of progress. But political history is subject to too many random events to ever be predictable. So yes, a sine wave might be the the most accurate analogy.
Optimists hope that technology's ultimate ROI will be to help us smooth out our ups and downs as a species. Pessimists fear that there is no ROI, that technology just heightens the amplitude of the wave until it breaks, and whether it breaks at the apogee (the singularity) or perigee (annihilation by nuclear weapon exchanges or climate collapse) hardly makes a difference. They both have evidence to offer us. Me, I have doubts that the evolution of our technology aids the speed of our biological evolution much at all. Give an ape a bone, and he uses it as a club. Millennia later, give him a hypersonic nuclear-tipped missile, or an economy predicated on the burning of trillions of dollars worth of petroleum fuels and, sic transit gloria mundi. It's like Pogo said, "we have met the enemy, and he is us."
"A millenarian claim (made in 1859!) that the era in which human societies were societies of domination ... is now about to end." Did Marx ever admit to being wrong with any of his predictions? This is a rhetorical question. I can just ask ChatGPT.
I think you'll find Tooze is more sympathetic to Marx than you. Check out his recent Ones and Tooze podcasts featuring pretty positive accounts of Marxist political economy.
I was rather surprised by you positively reposting Heath. Heath's post has a host of problems and is more about justifying Rawls than explaining Marx - and this only because the edifice of academic Rawlsianism is in decline. That is why he got more responses than anything else he has posted.
One very simple example of where Heath is at least misleading. He cites Marshall approvingly as having replaced the labor theory of value with the marginal utility theory. But he (deliberately?) overlooks that Marshall did NOT reject the classical labor theory of value at all. He simply said it applies in the long-term and marginal analysis in the short-term. This is why his economics is termed neoclassical not post-classical. If you go back and look at the classicals, Marshall's view is very consistent with what they say. The term "labor theory of value" does not come from the classical themselves, but only emerges as a contrast term for the marginal theory of value. Whether they even held a consistent theory of value and what exactly it was. What is clear is that Smith Ricardo and Marx all held subsistence theory of normal wages and not what came to be called a marginal productivity theory. If you hold a subsistence theory of wages you implicitly think the employer is using institutional advantages to cream off the difference between subsistence and marginal productivity. Smith is pretty clear about this and actually thinks this is the long-term norm (the natural wage-price). Conditions of high growth which would force employers to compete away their institutional advantages is the exception.
Ricardo's rent analysis follows the same logic of exploitation of both the manufacturing and working class.
Perhaps more astoundingly he says Piketty is not really Marxist. Piketty clearly says he sees his theory as empirical evidence supporting Ricardo and Marx. Recent Nobel prize winning Acemoglu cites Marx and Ricardo as sources for his theory of technology and wages. He seems to suggest that they are not actually Marxist despite what Piketty says, but it is odd to then use this as proof of the decline of Marx's influence in academia. More likely it is a decline in Heath's understanding of Marx.
I think Kalecki and many in the Cambridge circle would be surprised to hear that Keynes fundamentally overturns Marx.
Heath also doesn't mention Schumpeter's complex engagement with Marx, nor that the very in-vogue notion of creative-destruction is Marxist in origin. Again going by Nobel prizes (Acemoglu, Aghion) Schumpeter (and by extension) Marx is alive and well. You would at least have to say the unorthodox Austrian and Marxist approaches are doing better than the Neo-classical orthodoxy of the past-war to 2008 period.
This much too much for the pea brain to absorb in one sitting. I got to the 5 stages and the pea brain started wandering off wondering what comes after the state of socialist perfection.
Mohammed in religion just called an end to religious history. Did Marx call and end to how societies are organized? What follows? Planetary to intergalactic?
History does appear at times to have some sort of arc, although maybe not the one referred to in MLK's very non-Marxist portrayal of history as a pilgrim's progress. Sixty years ago I might have been hopeful that history, at least conceptually, was finally reaching some sort of apogee, but I was young then, and my knowledge of German hadn't yet revealed to me any of the more dismal historical events that had been busily giving the lie to Enlightenment optimism as I was being born. Nowadays, given the commedia dell' arte version of the Decline of the West being cosplayed with such ferocity by the unholy fools in the White House, I'm beginning to wonder if history's true arc isn't some lumpier version of a sine wave. If so, maybe people serious about what is to be done ought to exchange Hegel and Marx for the Ramayana.
IMO there may be a pattern in technological history because technological history shows a definite, and even predictable, line of progress. But political history is subject to too many random events to ever be predictable. So yes, a sine wave might be the the most accurate analogy.
Optimists hope that technology's ultimate ROI will be to help us smooth out our ups and downs as a species. Pessimists fear that there is no ROI, that technology just heightens the amplitude of the wave until it breaks, and whether it breaks at the apogee (the singularity) or perigee (annihilation by nuclear weapon exchanges or climate collapse) hardly makes a difference. They both have evidence to offer us. Me, I have doubts that the evolution of our technology aids the speed of our biological evolution much at all. Give an ape a bone, and he uses it as a club. Millennia later, give him a hypersonic nuclear-tipped missile, or an economy predicated on the burning of trillions of dollars worth of petroleum fuels and, sic transit gloria mundi. It's like Pogo said, "we have met the enemy, and he is us."
"A millenarian claim (made in 1859!) that the era in which human societies were societies of domination ... is now about to end." Did Marx ever admit to being wrong with any of his predictions? This is a rhetorical question. I can just ask ChatGPT.
No. Very stubborn. Refused to the end of his days to admit that wage levels had started rising after the "Hungry Fourties", for example...