Suresh Naidu — What Marx Really Meant

Since Brad Delong has attributed some thoughts on Marx to me, I thought it would be useful to publicly air what I understand to be the context. Brad DeLong has been a mentor and advisor for ten years now, and is one of the very few economists broad and open enough to know anything about what Marx wrote. I have met very few other people in mainstream economics departments who cared enough to read Marx, let alone enough to assign the Communist Manifesto and Wage Labor and Capital in a mandatory first-year economics PhD course. (Even I don’t do that.)

The context of the long-running conversation has been trying to establish a dialogue between Marx and modern growth theory. Inside the modern production function, there is a pretty undifferentiated view of “K” (which leads it into some troubles as bad as any in the labor theory of value). Marx on the other hand distinguishes (at least) machines, technology, and money-qua-productive-input as different from each other conceptually.

The fact that these are rolled into an aggregate production function by mainstream growth theory is not Marx’s fault. And so when somebody is trying to translate Marx into modern economics, the slippage between “what is ‘K?’” and “what Marx meant” can get confusing. I am still thinking about these issues, and won’t pretend to have figured it all out, but let me lay out some preliminary thoughts....

Jacobin
What Marx Really Meant
Suresh Naidu

(h/t Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism)