Lebowitz?s critique brings into full focus our line of inquiry: why should Marxists accept the agenda? Why should the individualist principle hold, given the fallacy of composition, admitted in principle by Elster? Why should the abstract and historically contingent preferences of the Walrasian framework be taken as the ?essential? structure from which all mathematical work in Marxian economics (indeed all economics) must necessarily depart?
Hegemony and CritiqueWeintraub and Mirowski suggest a compelling reason for the widespread incursion of mathematical formalism into economics and the social sciences generally: ?mathematics represents for many the epitome of timeless truth? (1994, http). Roemer certainly considers the economic categories and tools of Walrasian equilibrium to be ?true? in the sense that they are free from historical interpretations; they are not ?in themselves ideological?. I suggest that Roemer?s argument is in itself ideological in the sense that: (1) the supposed commonalities are not perceived as social constructs that are available for scrutiny, and (2) the assumptions of those commonalities define the normative limits of acceptable theory and practice. These limits operate in such a way that they have the status of unquestioned ?truths? or ?facts? which are generally agreed upon (Gramsci, 1971).
Nowhere are the generally agreed upon facts more clearly in evidence than in Roemer?s statements on the labour theory of value: this theory is ?false?, and that is all there is to it. The claim plays an extremely important role in the theory and practice of analytical Marxism. Given that Marxian value theory is ?false?, ?trivial?, ?obscure?, and ?virtually devoid of content?, Marxian economics can be safely declared ?intellectually dead?, without ever engaging the classical critique (Elster, 1985, pp.161-5; 1986, pp.60, 192). At the same time, the validity of the original conclusion is placed beyond question, mediated by standards of ?rigor and clarity? that form the ?common sense? substance of neoclassical methodology. This method of criticism amounts to a ?preemptive methodological strike? foreclosing debate on the ontological question of the origin of value (Lebowitz, 1994).
The ontological question is one of determination. In justifying his preference for equilibrium analysis, Roemer remarks that analytic Marxists ?choose models to make the CECP true? (1982c, p.285). If Marxian theory must be inverted – if values must come to depend on prices in order to make the principle hold – then so be it. The actual correspondence to economic reality of Roemer?s value theory is beside the point since his derived theorems are consistent with the simultaneous solutions given by his axiomatic models. These simultaneous solutions then become the tablet of stone through which all of Marxian economics is interpreted. The ?falsity? of Marx?s value theory as a price theory is given a priori by its failure to permit Walrasian equilibrium-type solutions to Marxian equalities.
Fine points out that this so-called ?transformation problem? has ?invariably proved to be the grounds on which bourgeois economics has dismissed Marxism, preoccupied as this economics is with the precise calculation of prices, for which a labour theory of value is irrelevant? (Fine, 1988, p.333). According to Fine, the criteria of ?bourgeois? judgement is itself irrelevant. For Marx, the determinants of value are located not in axiomatic models of market exchange, but in real chronological time and expressed in a description of the circuit of capital through successive cycles of production and exchange. The value of a commodity, determined in the process of production, has no implications for the relation of value to price in the current circuit: today price may exceed value by $10, and tomorrow fall below it by $20 – so what? Likewise, inputs and outputs cannot be determined simultaneously, and to attempt to do so merely invents an illusionary correspondence of value to price. Marx attributed this illusion to the ?vulgar? economists (1978, p.186):
? ?value? says Bailey, ? ?is a relation between contemporary commodities?? This derives from his general misunderstanding, according to which exchange-value equals value? He does not in the least suspect, therefore, that value functions as capital only in so far as it remains identical with itself and is compared with itself in the different phases of the circuit, which are in no way ?contemporary?, but rather occur in succession (my italics).
Successivist determination is so central to a Marxian explanation of the genesis, growth and crisis of capitalism that it is difficult to see how anyone could judge the labour theory of value ?false? on the criteria that Marxian equalities fail to hold simultaneously. Yet, this is exactly what Elster does, declaring categorically that ?Marx certainly intended the labor theory of value to be a theory of prices and profits? (1978, p.70). The same assumption operates in Roemer?s claim that ?Marx thought? surplus values became monetized through the price system in a simple way because prices were assumed to be just proportional to the amounts of labor embodied in commodities? (1989a, p.384). This argument is completely untenable, and nowhere substantiated. While Marx certainly assumed that commodities are ?the material depositories of exchange-values?, he also perceived the central contradiction of capitalism to be precisely its inability to enable the realization of surplus-values in the realm of exchange.
The analytic Marxist claim that Marx intended his values to explain prices is seriously misplaced. It is, if I may, a vulgar bourgeois misreading of Marx. Freeman (1996) agrees, arguing that the ?transformation problem? originates not in Marx, but in Bortkiewicz (an early admirer of general equilibrium theory), who appears to have deemed it his mission to ?free modern economics? from the ?successivist prejudice? associated with Marx. Freeman provides an excellent account of the distortions that Bortkiewicz?s simultaneous approach introduced into a century of academic debate on the labour theory of value. His conclusion: the ?death of value? is inherent not in Marx?s method but, on the contrary, in the logic of ?Walrasian Marxism?.
Freeman?s crucial point is that the ?falsity? of the labour theory of value rests solely upon academic acceptance of equilibrium analysis and positivist methodology as ?appropriate? methods for doing ?economics?. These methodological conventions exercise hegemony in so far as they dictate the ?common sense? view of what constitutes good ?economics? and good ?science?; they are ideological in so far as they are concerned with the imposition of meanings. In the work of the analytic Marxists, parameters of meaning are defined by exclusion – through reference to professional specialization. Consider, for example, Roemer?s exclusion of Marxian political economy from the field of ?economics? on the grounds that its subject matter is more rightly fitted to the study of ?history?!
Intolerance of alternative methods and meanings is the hallmark of ideological hegemony, a powerful rational behind the century-long search for ?appropriate? micro-mechanisms to correct Marx?s mistakes towards the neoclassical system. A less ideological agenda is surely that of Steedman (1977) who fully recognizes the differences and incompatibilities between economic methodologies. Although Roemer appears less willing than Steedman to break entirely with Marx, his anti-value polemic is directed to the same effect; only with less honesty in its representation of the alternative view.
ConclusionIf economic ?world views? can be constituted as ideological orientations defined by their epistemological and ontological assumptions, then these assumptions have consequences for theory and practice that extend far beyond Roemer?s ?belief? in the stability versus transience of capitalism criterion. Indeed, scientific world views imply foundational ?realities? pertaining to the way in which human behavior is defined, explained and predicted.
In this respect, analytic Marxism, represents less a ?modern? approach to economic science, than a restatement of the 17th century view of the universe as rationally ordered, and empirically understandable. In contrast, Marxism as a body of economic knowledge, is founded upon a conception of ever-changing material and social realities, and a view of the economic world as a place in which money and labour are real commodities defining social relations of power. In seeking out the generative mechanisms that underlie the social relations of power, Marxism is committed to a process of holistic explanation in which there are no a priori assumptions concerning individual behaviour, or market clearing, or the simultaneous equation of value to price. Failures of understanding at this level of ontology explain why Elster makes non-sense of Marx, why Roemer believes that his model is consistent with Marxism, why both of them regard any defence of the labour theory of value as ?fundamentalist?, and why their own contributions to economic thought are motivated by an arrogant and unsubstantiated dismissal of a method of critique founded precisely on the critique of method.
Ironically, in replacing the method of critique with the tools of a hegemonic economic theory, the analytic school have effectively deprived themselves of any opportunity to influence Marxian thinking. Within the conceptual framework set down by methodological individualism and neoclassical general equilibrium, ?unequal endowments? are privileged as the core of an idealized world of agents seeking equilibrium in an idealized market untainted by monetary influences. In such a market, the correspondence between exploitation and class is reduced to the role of a postulate, directing attention away from the study of disorder and crisis, and towards theoretic models that allow the principles to hold. In short, Roemer?s models violate the essential Marxian requirement that science move beyond reductionist interpretations of the world defined by fixed states, where determination exists without time.
In evaluating the contri
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