Short summary of the of Das Kapital's continuing relevance. Clear and succinct.
Real-World Economics Review Blog
150 years of ‘Das Kapital’: How relevant is Marx today?Jayati Ghosh | Professor of Economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi
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Karl Marx, fake scientist
Comment on Jayati Ghosh on ‘150 years of ‘Das Kapital’: How relevant is Marx today?’
In the beginning, there was Political Economy. J. S. Mill defined it clearly as a social science: “The fundamental problem, therefore, of the social science, is to find the laws according to which any state of society produces the state which succeeds it and takes it place.” Or, a bit more specific with regard to economics: “The science which traces the laws of such of the phenomena of society as arise from the combined operations of mankind for the production of wealth, in so far as those phenomena are not modified by the pursuit of any other object.”
Economics started as a hodgepodge of sociology, history, folk psychology, and folk philosophy (a mixture of utilitarianism, Hegelianism, Malthusianism/Darwinism, Individualism/Protestantism). The two issues ‘how society works’ and ‘how the economy works’ were never properly kept apart.
Since Adam Smith/Karl Marx economics defined itself as science. It was obvious, however, that the subject matter of what was the epitome of science, physics and mathematics, was qualitatively different from the so-called social sciences. With regard to the subject matter there is no difference between Mill and Marx “My stand-point, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, …” (Marx)
This is the exact point where things went wrong because history is storytelling: “That is why Descartes said that history was not a science ― because there were no general laws which could be applied to history.” (Berlin)
Science, in contradistinction, is ahistorical and universal because it looks for laws, or more generally, for invariances (Nozick), i.e. for that which does NOT change but remains invariant below the surface of phenomenological change. Marx understood this in principle: “That in their appearances things are often presented in an inverted way is something fairly familiar in every science, apart from political economy.” Fact is, though, that Marx never rose above the level of storytelling and agenda pushing, which is the definition of political economics. The goal of theoretical economics (= science) is the true theory with truth defined by material and formal consistency.
Economics always claimed to be a science but never rose above the level of a proto- or cargo cult science. Feynman defined it as follows: “They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. ... But it doesn’t work. ... So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential.”#1
What is missing among economists of ALL political colors is (i) an idea what science is all about, and (ii), a commitment to the scientific standards of material and formal consistency. The lethal scientific blunder of Marx was to confound sociology and economics. This disqualifies him as a scientist. To recall, Marx’s cardinal facts are:
• capital is a social relation,
• ownership of capital gives power analogous to state power,
• capitalist production is characterized by commodity fetishism, alienation, unfreedom,
• capitalism as system is characterized by contradiction, competition, aggression, destruction, conflict, class war, Darwinian struggle, worldwide expansion,
• the capitalistic system is dysfunctional with recurring crises and a final big crunch.
See part 2
Part 2
All this is descriptively and commonsensically convincing as far as it relates to society. Fact is, though, that Marx never understood how the economic system works, or more specifically, how the profit- and price mechanism works:
• he got profit, the foundational concept of all of economics, wrong,#2
• he did not realize that what appears as exploitation is, in fact, cross-over exploitation,#3
• he got the breakdown of the market system wrong.#4
• he failed to see that there are no ‘natural’ economic classes and that class war is a sociological construct.#3
What economists including Marxians do not get until this day is that economics is NOT a science of Human Nature or individual/social/political behavior but of the behavior of the monetary economy.#5 Accordingly, the correct definition of the subject matter is objective/structural/systemic: “Economics is the science which studies how the monetary economy works.”
What Marx failed to understand is that economics is neither a social science nor a natural science but a system science. The scientific incompetence of Marxians consists in not having figured out until this very day what profit is.
Egmont Kakarot-Handtke
#1 What is so great about cargo cult science? or, How economists learned to stop worrying about failure
http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/05/what-is-so-great-about-cargo-cult.html
#2 Profit for Marxists
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2414301
#3 The abject failure of orthodox and heterodox distribution theory
http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/08/the-abject-failure-of-orthodox-and.html
#4 Mathematical Proof of the Breakdown of Capitalism
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2375578
#5 For details see cross-references Behavior
http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2015/12/behavior-cross-references.html
prof premraj pushpakaran writes -- 2018 marks the 200th birth year of Karl Heinrich Marx!!!
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