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predecessors, most of the points later investigated separately in their logical
connection in the manuscripts for Books II and III. (Engels, Preface to II).
By «critique» Engels here means that the categories of political economy
were to be subjected to criticism not by formally comparing them with some object
lying outside them but by drawing out the contradictions in these concepts and
showing how, in practice, these contradictions had been resolved. This was a task
which could be carried out only by somebody conscious of the fact that these
categories were themselves a product and a manifestation of the actual emergence
of the social relations of capitalist production.
To make more specific Marx’s notion of the ahistorical, let us take an
illustration – the law of value. At one point Marx draws attention to the fact that
for thousands of years – ever since the appearance of commodity production in the
ancient world – men had striven to discover the nature of value. It was only in the
eighteenth century that they were able – in the shape of political economy – to
make significant progress along this road. And this progress was made possible
only because the social conditions in which political economy operated – the fact
that commodity production was becoming predominant – made possible the
clarification of issues which previously had, of necessity, remained obscure. Now
when Marx criticised the political economists for the ahistorical nature of their
work, he meant that they could not grasp that their own science had emerged and
developed only under these determinate conditions. Political economy laboured
under the serious misapprehension of all bourgeois thought that the categories of
its subject (value, capital, money, labour, etc.) were not only the product of merely
individual minds but that the laws which these minds had (inexplicably) discovered
were valid for all epochs. They conflated the laws specific to a determinate mode
of production with laws they thought to he universally valid; they confused social
with natural law. Political economy was fond of the parable of Robinson Crusoe.
Marx did not object to the indulgence in this type of story as such. He did object,
however, to the fact that the modern (eighteenth-century) individual was projected
back into history. The individual was not conceived as developing historically
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through definite social relations, but as posited once and for all by nature. History
was confused with nature; pre-capitalist economic forms were treated with the
same disdain as Christians treated pre-Christian religious forms.
Now in drawing attention to this ahistorical outlook of Ricardo and others,
Marx was not making a general criticism about the starting point of these thinkers
which, once having been made, could be left behind, as it were. Marx’s Capital is
not political economy plus some different sociological-cum-historical
«framework». For Marx, the ahistoricism of political economy is a fatal weakness
which ultimately permeates every aspect of its work and is the ultimate source of
its disintegration. But before trying to demonstrate this, let us briefly review the
history of political economy to illustrate Marx’s conception that its categories were
the product of a definite historical development, and, in this sense, objective.
EXERCISES
1. Sum up the main ides of the text and retell it in Russian.
2. Fill in the missing words from the box into the text below.
writers notion will value narrowness constituted feudalism investigation
place total directly commodities operating surplus labour changing times
developed
For Marx, Physiocracy was the first genuine school in political economy. It
consisted of a group of 1)_______ all of whom sought to provide a critique of
mercantilism, a system which had imagined that value and its magnitude resulted
from exchange. Against this the Physiocrats counterposed the 2)_______ that
forms of production were physiological forms arising from the necessities of
production and independent of 3)_______ and politics. They thereby turned the
attention of economics towards a study of the social conditions of production. We
know of course that the decisive weakness of this school lay in the fact that this
production was seen only in its immediate, concrete form; for according to
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Quesnay and his followers labour on the land was alone productive of 4)_______,
a conception which persisted with Smith, although in the case of the latter it
occupies only a subordinate position. This 5)_______ in the Physiocratic view
was, Marx held, a reflection of the then limited stage reached in eighteenth-century
French economy which remained predominantly based upon agriculture. Despite
this limitation, the work of the Physiocrats none the less 6)_______ a decisive step
forward for all the work that was to follow in the investigation of capitalist
economy. This was so because the source of contradictions in the Physiocratic
system stemmed from its efforts to analyse 7)_______ from a consistently
bourgeois standpoint.
When Marx turns to deal with the work of Adam Smith he again stresses
that the advances which this work involves have their ultimate source in the
economic changes taking 8)_______ in the latter half of the eighteenth century.
The Physiocrats had been able to begin the 9)_______ of surplus value (the
difference between the value of labour power and the value created by it) only
because it appears most palpably in the sphere of agriculture, the primary branch of
production. The 10)_______ means of subsistence which the labourer consumes is
smaller than the total means of subsistence he produces. However, in
manufacturing – which was emerging much more rapidly in Britain than in France
during this period the worker does not 11)_______ produce either his means of
subsistence or an excess of them. Under manufacturing the process is mediated, is
an indirect one, 12)_______ through the various acts of circulation of all
13)_______ within the capitalist system. The development of the value concept,
which is the most important single feature of Smith’s work – a concept missing in
Physiocracy – was an expression of this indirect, mediated form taken by
production under capitalism. And this was equally true in the case of surplus value;
while this surplus appeared in the form of a 14)_______ of use-values (agricultural
products) no abstract conception of its nature was either possible or necessary for
pre-Smithian economics.
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Here, Marx considered, lay the true significance of Smith’s work – he was
the first to attempt an investigation of the abstractions of value and surplus value.
Specifically, the advance marked by The Wealth of Nations (1776) was to be
found in the fact that it grasped that 15)_______ in general (and not one of its
forms) is value-creating. Marx again draws attention in his commentary on Smith
to the material basis for this step forward. The notion of «labour in general» was
itself possible only in a rapidly16)_______ economy in which the traditional bond
between an individual and his labour was being shattered. The indifference to the
particular type of labour when considering value – Smith’s real, if at 17)_______
inconsistent, point of criticism against the Physiocrats – implied the existence of a
highly 18)_______ variety of concrete forms of labour, none of which
predominated and all of which were being dissolved by the rapid extension of the
market.
3. Read the following article and make a rendering of it in English.
Существует множество подходов к периодизации истории экономики,
то есть к выделению этапов, ступеней экономического развития.
Социалисты XVIII – XIX в.в. выделяли ряд ступеней истории
общества:
•дикость;
•античное;
•общество;
•феодализм;
•капитализм;
•индустриализм.
Французский философ Шарль
Фурье выделял три крупных периода в
истории человечества и фазы внутри них:
•периоды, предшествующие производительной деятельности
(первобытный и дикость);
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•раздробленное, обманное, отталкивающее производство (патриархат,
варварство, цивилизация);
•социальное, правдивое, привлекательное производство.
На этой основе в марксизме сложился и утвердился формационный
подход к развитию общества с выделением пяти способов производства,
различающихся характером собственности:
•первобытно-общинный (где отсутствует частная собственность, нет
эксплуатации классов и уровень потребления крайне низок);
•рабовладельческий (где общество
делится на рабов и рабовладельцев,
что создает условия для развития культуры и науки);
•феодальный (где земля находится в руках феодалов, а крестьяне за
пользование этой землей платят феодалам земельную ренту);
•капиталистический (где считалось, что на смену внеэкономическому
приходит экономическое принуждение);
•коммунистический (где упраздняется частная собственность и
высокоразвитые производительные силы
обеспечивают развитие принципа
«каждому по потребности»).
Основателем экономической истории как науки, считается немецкий
экономист Фридрих Лист, который выделил пять стадий развития хозяйства:
•дикость;
•пастушеская стадия;
•земледельческая стадия;
•земледельческо-мануфактурная стадия;
•земледельческо-мануфактурно-коммерческая стадия;
•коммерческая стадия.
Последователи самого Листа выделили три стадии в истории
хозяйства:
•естественное (
века;
•денежное (городское) хозяйство, существовавшее до XVIII века;
домашнее) хозяйство, существовавшее примерно до XIII
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•кредитное (народное) хозяйство, существующее с XIX века,
характеризующееся широтой и многообразием хозяйственных связей.
И формационный, и хозяйственный подходы страдают однобокостью и
искусственностью схем. Ведь рабовладение никогда не было преобладающей
формой производства, а коммунизм не что иное как утопия. В то время как в
одних районах Земли преобладало пастушество, в других развивалось
земледелие и т.д.
Part 2
NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMICS
by E. Roy Weintraub
Economists publicly disagree with each other so often that they are easy
targets for standup comedians. Yet noneconomists may not realize that the
disagreements are mostly over the details–the way in which the big picture is to be
focused on the small screen. When it comes to broad economic theory, most
economists agree. President Richard Nixon, defending deficit spending against the
conservative charge that it was «Keynesian», is reported to have replied, «We're all
Keynesians now». In fact, what he should have said is «We're all neoclassicals
now, even the Keynesians», because what is taught to students, what is mainstream
economics today, is neoclassical economics.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, English-speaking economists
generally shared a perspective on value theory and distribution theory. The value
of a bushel of corn, for example, was thought to depend on the costs involved in
producing that bushel. The output or product of an economy was thought to be
divided or distributed among the different social groups in accord with the costs
borne by those groups in producing the output. This, roughly, was the «Classical
Theory» developed by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus, John
Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx.
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But there were difficulties in this approach. Chief among them was that
prices in the market did not necessarily reflect the «value» so defined, for people
were often willing to pay more than an object was «worth». The classical
«substance» theories of value, which took value to be a property inherent in an
object, gradually gave way to a perspective in which value was associated with the
relationship between the object and the person obtaining the object. Several
economists in different places at about the same time (the 1870s and 1880s) began
to base value on the relationship between costs of production and «subjective
elements», later called «supply» and «demand». This came to be known as the
Marginal Revolution in economics, and the overarching theory that developed
from these ideas came to be called neoclassical economics. (The first to use the
term «neoclassical economics» seems to have been the American economist
Thorstein Veblen.)
The framework of neoclassical economics is easily summarized. Buyers
attempt to maximize their gains from getting goods, and they do this by increasing
their purchases of a good until what they gain from an extra unit is just balanced by
what they have to give up to obtain it. In this way they maximize «utility»–the
satisfaction associated with the consumption of goods and services. Likewise,
individuals provide labor to firms that wish to employ them, by balancing the gains
from offering the marginal unit of their services (the wage they would receive)
with the disutility of labor itself–the loss of leisure. Individuals make choices at the
margin. This results in a theory of demand for goods, and supply of productive
factors.
Similarly, producers attempt to produce units of a good so that the cost of
producing the incremental or marginal unit is just balanced by the revenue it
generates. In this way they maximize profits. Firms also hire employees up to the
point that the cost of the additional hire is just balanced by the value of output that
the additional employee would produce.
The neoclassical vision thus involves economic «agents», be they
households or firms, optimizing (doing as well as they can), subject to all relevant
177
constraints. Value is linked to unlimited desires and wants colliding with
constraints, or scarcity. The tensions, the decision problems, are worked out in
markets. Prices are the signals that tell households and firms whether their
conflicting desires can be reconciled.
At some price of cars, for example, I want to buy a new car. At that same
price others may also want to buy cars. But manufacturers may not want to
produce as many cars as we all want. Our frustration may lead us to «bid up» the
price of cars, eliminating some potential buyers and encouraging some marginal
producers. As the price changes, the imbalance between buy orders and sell orders
is reduced. This is how optimization under constraint and market interdependence
lead to an economic equilibrium. This is the neoclassical vision.
Neoclassical economics is what is called a metatheory. That is, it is a set of
implicit rules or understandings for constructing satisfactory economic theories. It
is a scientific research program that generates economic theories. Its fundamental
assumptions are not open to discussion in that they define the shared
understandings of those who call themselves neoclassical economists, or
economists without any adjective. Those fundamental assumptions include the
following:
1. People have rational preferences among outcomes. 2. Individuals
maximize utility and firms maximize profits. 3. People act independently on the
basis of full and relevant information.
Theories based on, or guided by, these assumptions are neoclassical theories.
Thus, we can speak of a neoclassical theory of profits, or employment, or
growth, or money. We can create neoclassical production relationships between
inputs and outputs, or neoclassical theories of marriage and divorce and the
spacing of births. Consider layoffs, for example. A theory which assumes that a
firm's layoff decisions are based on a balance between the benefits of laying off an
additional worker and the costs associated with that action will be a neoclassical
theory. A theory that explains the layoff decision by the changing tastes of
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managers for employees with particular characteristics will not be a neoclassical
theory.
What can be contrasted to neoclassical economics? Some have argued that
there are several schools of thought in present-day economics. They identify (neo)
Marxian economics, (neo-)Austrian economics, post-Keynesian economics, or
(neo-)institutional economics as alternative metatheoretical frameworks for
constructing economic theories. To be sure, societies and journals promulgate the
ideas associated with these perspectives. Some of these schools have had insights
that neoclassical economists have learned from; the Austrian insights on
entrepreneurship are one example. But to the extent these schools reject the core
building blocks of neoclassical economics–as Austrians reject optimization, for
example–they are regarded by mainstream neoclassical economists as defenders of
lost causes or as kooks, misguided critics, and antiscientific oddballs. The status of
non-neoclassical economists in the economics departments in English-speaking
universities is similar to that of flat-earthers in geography departments: it is safer to
voice such opinions after one has tenure, if at all.
One specific attempt to discredit neoclassical economics developed from
British economist Joan Robinson and her colleagues and students at Cambridge in
the late fifties and early sixties. The so-called Two Cambridges Capital
Controversy was ostensibly about the implications, and limitations, of Paul
Samuelson and Robert Solow's aggregating «capital» and treating the aggregate as
an input in a production function. However, this controversy really was rooted in a
clash of visions about what would constitute an «acceptable» theory of the
distribution of income. What became the post-Keynesian position was that the
distribution of income was «best» explained by power differences among workers
and capitalists, while the neoclassical explanation was developed from a market
theory of factor prices. Eventually the controversy was not so much settled as laid
aside, as neoclassical economics became mainstream economics.
How did such an orthodoxy come to prevail? In brief, the success of
neoclassical economics is connected to the «scientificization» or
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«mathematization» of economics in the twentieth century. It is important to
recognize that a number of the early Marginalists, economists like William Stanley
Jevons and F. Y. Edgeworth in England, Leon Walras in Lausanne, and Irving
Fisher in the United States, wanted to legitimize economics among the scholarly
disciplines. The times were optimistic about a future linked to the successes of
technology. Progress would be assured in a society that used the best scientific
knowledge. Social goals would be attainable if scientific principles could organize
social agendas. Scientific socialism and scientific management were phrases that
flowed easily from the pens of social theorists.
Neoclassical economics conceptualized the agents, households and firms, as
rational actors. Agents were modeled as optimizers who were led to «better»
outcomes. The resulting equilibrium was «best» in the sense that any other
allocation of goods and services would leave someone worse off. Thus, the social
system in the neoclassical vision was free of irresolvable conflict. The very term
«social system» is a measure of the success of neoclassical economics, for the idea
of a system, with its interacting components, its variables and parameters and
constraints, is the language of mid-nineteenth-century physics. This field of
rational mechanics was the model for the neoclassical framework. Agents were
like atoms; utility was like energy; utility maximization was like the minimization
of potential energy, and so forth. In this way was the rhetoric of successful science
linked to the neoclassical theory, and in this way economics became linked to
science itself. Whether this linkage was planned by the early Marginalists, or rather
was a feature of the public success of science itself, is less important than the
implications of that linkage. For once neoclassical economics was associated with
scientific economics, to challenge the neoclassical approach was to seem to
challenge science and progress and modernity.
The value of neoclassical economics can be assessed in the collection of
truths to which we are led by its light. The kinds of truths about incentives–about
prices and information, about the interrelatedness of decisions and the unintended
consequences of choices–are all well developed in neoclassical theories, as is a
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