THE ECONOMICS OF KARL MARX ANALYSIS AND APPLICATION
Adecade ago theHistory of Political Economy published aMinisymposium entitled “Locating Marx after the Fall,” organized around the question: “with Marxian economics in disarray as a touchstone for actual economies (in Eastern Europe, the former SovietUnion, etc.), is it now time for historians of economics to reclaim their interest in Karl Marx?” (Weintraub 1995: 109). The concern, as set out in a letter to contributors defining the terms of reference, was to address “the need, if any, for historians of economics to readdress Marx, to reclaim Marx as it were now that the hold ofMarxist economics or views ofMarx is more confused, more of a problem.” I would say, rather, less of a problem. Marx’s economics had never been a true touchstone for Soviet-style systems –Marx was too appreciative of the pricing mechanism and the need for extreme caution before dispensing with it for that to have been the case. (We devote Chapter 13 to this issue.) And the Russian reversion to market capitalism, far from constituting an empirical refutation of Marxist predictions, is precisely the outcome that might have been expected. For the original establishment of the Soviet command system could only have been a premature exercise bound to fail, Marx being “much too strongly involved with a sense of the inherent logic of things social to believe that revolution can replace any part of the work of evolution. The revolution comes in nevertheless. But it only comes in order to write the conclusion under a complete set of premises” (Schumpeter 1952: 72). We shall have much to say regarding Marx’s evolutionary perspective. As to the point at hand, the disappearance ofMarx’s picture from Red Square−and the imminent removal of Lenin’s corpse−is no reason for historians of Marxist economic thought to alter their research programs. It is in this spirit that I have composed my book.





















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