Academic marxist economists

[RNL]

I was just wondering whether there's any coverage (interviews or otherwise) of how marxists who actually teach economics professinally try to resist or subvert the marginalist orthodoxy. How difficult is it for them to spend a bit more time on Marx, or to present marginalist ideas with a bit more skepticism, or to put more emphasis on historicising economic theory?

[RNL]

I'm specifically thinking of people like Ben Fine and Andrew Kliman.

[redasheville]

Anwar Shaikh.

[RNL]

Yeah? I know who he is, but I'm specifically looking for stuff on how academic marxist economists deal with being professionally obligated to teach orthodox neoclassical theory.

[Rowan Duffy]

Yeah? I know who he is, but I'm specifically looking for stuff on how academic marxist economists deal with being professionally obligated to teach orthodox neoclassical theory.

I've never taught marginalism but I have taught theories in physics that were superseded in some regime or just plain bad. Teaching it gives you an opportunity to point out where it is inaccurate or wrong. There is no better way to inoculate people against bad theories then having them learn in detail why they are wrong.

[RNL]

Right, but if you're a professional economist you're not employed by the university to teach students why neoclassical marginalism is 'wrong', you're there to present it as what it is: a scientific consensus. So, while I'm sure academic marxist economists present marginalist ideas more critically and skeptically than libertarian economists do, and while I'm sure that they present marxist ideas more favourably in the tiny window alotted to them (stuffed into one week's class devoted to "the history of economics"), I don't think they can simply teach their students that marginalism is 'wrong'. That's not what their students are there to hear, it's not what they paid their tuition for, it's not what'll get them jobs when they graduate, and it's not what the university pays the lecturer to do. So I'm wondering, how does an academic marxist negotiate all these problems? How do they deal with having to stand up there everyday and teach theories they believe are inadequate, wrong, nonsensical, unscientific, anti-marxist, etc? It seems almost like one of those faith schools employing an evolutionary biologist to teach creationism.

[grooverider]

It's hard enough for students to grasp basic neo-classical concepts. I've just completed my economics major. No way in hell will they be able to teach the "problems" with assuming perfect competition (despite the 1 sentence saying it's unrealistic), or the oppressive nature of labor negotiation.

No, there has to be a separate class for that, and it should have been required at my university.

[RNL]

There has to be some sense of a conflict of interests on the part of the marxists though. Something along the lines of what an evolutionary biologist would feel if she had to teach creationism.

I'm interested in knowing how they reconcile their day-to-day job of peddling marginalist dogma with their personal investment in marxism and socialism.

[Rowan Duffy]

No way in hell will they be able to teach the "problems" with assuming perfect competition (despite the 1 sentence saying it's unrealistic), or the oppressive nature of labor negotiation.

Firstly, I think that Marx did very well by demonstrating that with the *assumption* of perfect competition we have exploitation. There is no need to attack the question of perfect competition to attack neo-classical economics.

The biggest problems are relatively simple I think. The failure to understand the difference between micro and macro is fundamental to neo-classical economics.

An example which is largely conceptual is the severing of the tie between sale of labour power and purchasing power. These are coupled in the real economy for the working class. There is no sense talking about subjective preferences without mentioning limitations on purchasing power.

Related to this is the aggregation problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggregation_problem). This is also a serious problem which relies on highly unreasonable assumptions, is a lynchpin of the theoretical models and is also simple enough to present as a serious failing.

Pareto efficiency is also something which is deeply embedded in most neo-classical notions of efficiency and which is conceptually easy to present to students in such a way as to point out how "efficiency" can be a code word for conservation of the position of the ruling class.

[RHIZOMES]

Marxist economist academics are usually in non-economic departments. See: David Harvey.

[eyedrop]

My girlfriend had a marxist economist, Rune Skarstein, as an economics teacher. He is somewhat shunned for his views in the academical milieu though.

Doesn't other countries have the separation of business economics and social economics? Social economics is macro economics which has plenty of space for marxist economics.

[bezdomni]

Learn from Sraffa, he is the master of Marxian economics.

Any library worth its weight should have a copy of his pamphlet "On the Production of Commodities by means of Commodities", which is on the boundary where pure mathematics and political economy meet.

You should also look into the Cambridge Capital Controversy (wikipedia as a good article on it), which Sraffa basically resolved depending on who you ask. He completely destroyed the neoclassical marginalist paradigm.

Another suggestion is to browse over the marxmail (http://www.marxmail.org/) archives, I'm sure you will find a lot of useful information and references to modern figures in Marxist political economy there.

[Sun at Eight]

The professor for Intro Econ course was a Marxist of sorts at least at some time, from Uruguay, I think, and wrote his PhD on Marxist value theory and definitely stayed on the left, but I didn't know that when I enrolled. I was already a Marxist, so I picked up on it with my "Marxist-dar" in the first ten minutes (my face: :wub:), because of his emphasis on historicizing what he was teaching and noting that these were simply theoretical models, not actually "human nature", applicable to other societies, or even true of this society. After that he stuck to the the neoclassical textbook and mentioned a number of times how he'd prefer to be home gardening.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I've never taught marginalism but I have taught theories in physics that were superseded in some regime or just plain bad. Teaching it gives you an opportunity to point out where it is inaccurate or wrong. There is no better way to inoculate people against bad theories then having them learn in detail why they are wrong.

What's wrong with teaching Newtonian physics in high school? :confused: