My background is mainly in anthropology and philosophy, where Marx is still taken very seriously (especially in philosophy). I often notice that philosophers who critique orthodox economics as a field are accused of not truly understanding or thoroughly studying economics. That seems like a reasonable critique. At the same time, I often see criticisms from orthodox economists of Marx that are also inaccurate regarding what he claimed, claiming he defended the LTV, for example. Do y'all know of any orthodox economists that seriously engage with Marx, or any philosophers (probably of science) that have a solid background in economics? I often find the fields tend to both strawman and talk past each other, and some serious interaction would be pretty cool to see.
Thank you 🙂
An orthodox economist who seriously tackles Marx?
byu/fng_antheus inAskEconomics
Posted by fng_antheus
2 Comments
Grapple with marx in what sense? My impression is that the things Marxist economists read Marx for are only somewhat related with what anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, etc. read him for. Related to your later point, Marxist econs seem much more attached to the labor theory of value as an anchor point than Marxist non-econs (same with, like, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall).
Marx got engaged with pretty heavily by mainstream econ up through like the 1970s (Keynes, if I remember correctly, had some famously snarky comments about Marx, Samuelson wrote about the transformation problem, Schumpeter if he counts as mainstream, etc.).
He gets engaged with much less now. Brad Delong and branko milanovic come to mind as modern economists grappling with him. You can find lots of econ that has his fingerprints, but I’d be surprised if many economists had read much (or any) of him.
– https://cooperative-individualism.org/samuelson-paul_understanding-the-marxian-notion-of-exploitation-1971-jun.pdf
> claiming he defended the LTV, for example
u/RobThorpe? Is this the “Marx never mentioned a labor theory of value” argument? I’ve never really known what to make of it. I trust it’s “true” and yet there seems to be a whole lot of machinery that looks like a labor theory of value and a whole lot of marxists economists who act as if there’s a labor theory of value at the core of marx.
[Sam Bowles](https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/marx-and-modern-microeconomics) (as well as his frequent coauthor Herb Gintis) is not exactly “orthodox” per se but is probably at the rare intersection of “genuinely understands modern economics” and “takes Marx seriously” (and is alive). Their former student Suresh Naidu [has some discussions of Marx out there](https://jacobin.com/2014/04/what-marx-really-meant) but it’s not directly in his research necessarily.
There is also just a big style difference that makes this discussion a little tough—economics as a field is less enamored with the great thinkers of the past than the other nearby social sciences, so “tackling Marx” is not especially interesting unless you are specifically in dialogue with other fields (which you usually aren’t). You wouldn’t expect economists to explicitly “tackle” any of Marx’s contemporaries who hold less political controversy (eg Malthus or Ricardo).