MIKE BEGGS: Zombie Marx: (PARTIAL) READING
Ah. Now I remember this! Mike Beggs rejecting the arguments of those jeering leftist morons who claimed Keynesian policies would not work in 2008-2010 but keeping the jeer. Still, I do want to have a few passages from this to hand should there ever come time a lock and load on this again…
Linkrot again!
I must say, that if you reorganize your website, break links massively, and do not redirect, at the very least you should not be smarmy in your error messages—apologizing would be a good first step, not this, Jacobin:
And then when you have blocked the WayBack Machine from giving anything but the same error message, that is downright antisocial
So I eventually did find it at the WayBack Machine:
Mike Beggs: Zombie Marx <https://web.archive.org/web/20220612170732/https://jacobin.com/2011/07/zombie-marx>: ‘In 2009, UC Berkeley Economics Professor and former Clinton adviser Brad DeLong took a potshot at David Harvey on his blog. Headlined “Department of ‘Huh?’,” and beginning “Why neoclassical economics is an absolutely wonderful thing,” the post quotes eleven straight paragraphs from a Harvey essay, which DeLong proceeds to ridicule. For DeLong, the essay is contentless waffle…. Harvey responded with some anger at “the arrogance of the neoclassical economists”: “I would have thought that in a profession dominated by neoclassical and increasingly neoliberal theory these last thirty years, that there might have appeared at least some sliver of humility…”… Many will already be laughing and mocking along with Harvey. And perhaps DeLong deserves no better…
That last annoyed me: Mike Beggs is a cowardly little ba———.
For here Beggs agrees that I was 100% right and Harvey was 100% wrong. And I was, and am.
The essay is not reproducing even though its original is linkrotted. But I do want to have at my fingertips the places in it where Beggs is right, as he rephrases and provides examples for what Joan Robinson <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/reading-joan-robinson-an-open-letter> said 72 years ago. He is here, I think, trying to be a St. Paul—to be the apostle to the gentiles (in this case, people who want to be radicals and also recognize that in order to be useful in being “radical'“ they need to understand how the economy works, and that being either a “Frankenstein Marxist” or a “Zombie Marxist” is not a good way to go through life:
Mike Beggs: ‘Frankenstein Marx [is the stitching together of an argument from authority by stringing together famous quotations torn out of context…. Zombie Marx… is the reconstruction of Marxist economics as a coherent body of thought…. That this work is dogmatic is not my complaint…. Academic economics is very dogmatic about its theoretical core…. It is unfair to single out Marxists.
Rather, it is scholasticism that is the problem — the need to ground everything in a 140-year-old text…. It cannot be taken for granted that Marx was right; it must be proven anew with each generation, against both rival interpretations and the revisions the previous generation had found necessary to make…. The fundamentalist “back to the text” movement is the downswing of a familiar cycle… a pattern… that has… to do with the social conditions of its reproduction… [as] interpretation of a text has trumped interpretation of the world….
[The] problem in taking Capital as a fully-formed alternative to modern economics… [is that it] is a work of the 1860s, through and through…. Reading… Capital against modern economics… anachronistically defend[s] the concerns and framing of mid-Victorian political economy….
[For example] the real question was what determined the levels of supply and demand… [and] the marginalists’ apparatus of supply and demand schedules was a framework for answering this question. Marx could not be expected to have engaged with this literature in the 1860s, for the simple reason that it did not appear widely until the 1870s.…Marx believed Ricardo’s labor theory of value was a great advance…. But the labor theory of value had problems… [in] tak[ing] account of differences in capital intensity… [as] Ricardo and Marx were well aware… but it is hard to avoid seeing Marx’s “transformation” solution as ad hoc in the manner of Ptolemy’s epicycles…. There is little for Marxists to fear from importing the concepts of supply and demand schedules….
If we are to engage… what, if anything, makes our analysis distinctively Marxist? It is… to demonstrate the social preconditions that lie beneath the concepts of political economy… and… to demonstrate these social relations as historical, not eternal…. The way to apply them today is not to maintain the form and content of Capital… as if we are superior because we begin from superior principles…. It is to… ask critical questions:
What are the social conditions that make economic phenomena appear the way they do?…
Why are these the driving issues at this point in history?
What are the deeper social contradictions lying behind them?…
Fight from the inside, to make clear the social and political content of the categories….
[And] learn to think for ourselves again about how capitalism works, to be able to answer the kinds of question DeLong raised against Harvey, no longer lost without the appropriate quotation…
That is, as I said <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/reading-joan-robinson-an-open-letter>:
to pursue a classical economics-inflected study of the growth and distribution dynamics of an industrial society, focusing on the possibilities and likelihood of economic-technological transformations producing mammoth changes in the societal order in a relatively short time frame.
But, as near as I can see, nobody in the circles Beggs was addressing ever took up his challenge to actually think—at least, not in a way that would actually be useful.