Abstract
Marxian economics was at a very low ebb in 1957, and no one sprang to the defence of Marx against Samuelson’s strictures. The political climate remained profoundly hostile, with the Cold War and vestigial McCarthyite pressures still very strong in the United States, and the communist parties of Western Europe fracturing in the wake of the Hungarian revolution and Khrushchev’s revelations concerning the Stalin era. There were at this time few professed Marxian economists of any academic standing — as we saw in Chapter 6 above, Paul Baran was the only full professor in the entire United States who claimed to be a Marxist — and none capable of taking on an opponent as technically formidable as Samuelson. The evident failure of Marxism to explain the long post-war boom (see Part III above) had in any case weakened the ability of such theorists as Sweezy, Dobb and Baran himself to resist the influence of bourgeois economies.
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Notes
I. Steedman, (ed.), Sraffian Economics: Volumes I and II (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1988) contains many of the important articles which constituted the ‘Capital Controversies’.
J.B. Clark, The Distribution of Wealth (London: Macmillan, 1899)
M.C. Howard, Profits in Economic Theory (London: Macmillan 1983). Ch. 12.
G.C. Harcourt, Some Cambridge Controversies in the Theory of Capital (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972) provides an excellent account of the debate.
E. von Böhm-Bawerk, The Positive Theory of Capital (New York: Stechert, 1891).
Harcourt, Cambridge Controversies; M.C. Howard, ‘Austrian Capital Theory: An Evaluation in Terms of Piero Sraffa’s “Production of Commodities by Means of Commmodities”’. Metroeconomica 32, 1980, pp. 1–23.
A. Bhaduri ‘On the Significance of Recent Controversies on Capital Theory: A Marxian View’, Economic Journal, 79, 1969, pp. 532–9.
See also G.C. Harcourt, ‘The Theoretical and Social Significance of the Cambridge Controversies in the Theory of Capital’ in J. Schwartz, (ed.), The Subtle Anatomy of Capitalism (Santa Monica, Cal: Goodyear, 1977), pp. 285–303.
P.A. Samuelson, ‘A Summing Up’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 80, 1966, pp. 563–83.
Neoclassicals have also claimed that the chief results undermining Clarkian and Austrian theory — reswitching and capital reversal — are theorems of neoclassical economics. See R.M. Solow, ‘Testimony I: An Interview’ in G.R. Feiwel (ed.), The Economics of Imperfect Competition and Employment (New York: New York University Press, 1989), pp. 542–3
and F.H. Hahn, ‘Robinson—Hahn Love-Hate Relationship: An Interview’, in G.R. Feiwel, (ed.), Joan Robinson and Modern Economic Theory (New York: New York University Press, 1989), pp. 895–910.
It began with I. Steedman, ‘Positive Profits With Negative Surplus Value’, Economic Journal, 85, 1975, pp. 114–23
and was extended in I. Steedman, Marx After Sraffa (London: New Left Books, 1977).
Steedman was, however, anticipated in part by M. Morishima, Marx’s Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973)
and by B. Schefold, Piero Sraffa’s Theorie der Kuppelproduktion, des Kapitals und der Rente (Basle: private publication, 1971).
Only ‘by treating capital goods at different stages of wear and tear as qualitatively different goods, so that each capital good newly defined can serve only for one period, can we adequately deal with the age structure of capital’: M. Morishima, Theory of Economic Growth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 89; see also ibid, Ch. 6
and M. Morishima, Marx’s Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), Ch. 13.
Sraffa’s assumptions are not presented systematically but are scattered through-out the text and appendices of The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). They are listed in I. Bradley and M. Howard, ‘Piero Sraffa’s “Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities” and the Rehabilitation of Classical and Marxian Political Economy’, in I. Bradley and M. Howard, (eds), Classical and Marxian Political Economy: Essays in Honour of Ronald Meek (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 229–54. Some of Sraffa’s assumptions are subjected to critical analysis in Ch. 15 below
K. Marx, Capital, III (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972), pp. 167–7 (Ch. IX)
K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part II (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972), p. 190 (Ch. X, section A4)
R.L. Meek, Smith, Marx and After (London: Chapman & Hall, 1977), pp. 126–151
M.C. Howard and J.E. King, The Political Economy of Marx(Harlow: Longman, 2nd edn 1985), pp. 97–105; J. E. King, ‘Value and Exploitation: Some Recent Debates’ in I. Bradley and M. Howard, Classical and Marxian Political Economy, pp. 157–87.
N. Salvadori and I. Steedman, ‘Four Questions Concerning Joint Production’, Political Economy: Studies in the Surplus Approach, 4, 1988, pp. 223–9.
E. Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975), p. 207.
V.K. Dmitriev, Economic Essays on Value, Competition and Utility, edited by D.M. Nuti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 58–64, 214
and M. Desai, ‘The Transformation Problem’, Journal of Economic Surveys, 2, 1988, pp. 311–12.
S.J. Pack, Reconstructing Marxian Economics (New York: Praeger, 1985) pp. 43–9, 119–25
I. Steedman, ‘Robots and Capitalism: A Clarification’, New Left Review, 151, 1985. pp. 125–8.
J.E. Roemer, Free To Lose (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988) pp. 53–4; see also Ch. 14, section VIII, below.
This is one of the few cases where Sraffa’s claims were subsequently shown to be excessive. See C.F. Manara, ‘Sraffa’s Model for the Joint Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities’, in L.L. Pasinetti (ed.), Essays on the Theory of Joint Production (London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 1–15
and P.A. Samuelson, ‘Sraffian Economics’, in J. Eatwell, M. Milgate and P. Newman, The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics (London: Macmillan, 1987), volume IV, pp. 452–61. In section V of Ch. 15 below, other limitations of Sraffian analysis are considered, and we return to the problems outlined here.
Sraffa, Production of Commodities, pp. 20–2, 24–9, 31–2, 45–8, 53, 72–3, 75–8; Meek, Economics and Ideology, pp 161–78; A. Medio, ‘Profits and Surplus Value: Appearance and Reality in Capitalist Production’, in E.K. Hunt and J.G. Schwartz (eds), A Critique of Economic Theory (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 312–46
J. Eatwell, ‘Controversies in the Theory of Surplus Value: Old and New’, Science and Society, 38, 1973, pp. 281–303
J. Eatwell, ‘Mr. Sraffa’s Standard Commodity and the Rate of Exploitation’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 89, 1975, pp. 543–55; Howard and King, Political Economy, pp. 140–4.
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© 1992 M. C. Howard and J. E. King
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Howard, M.C., King, J.E. (1992). Sraffa and the Critique of Marxian Theory. In: A History of Marxian Economics. Radical Economics. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21890-5_13
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