Answers to Some Unanswered Questions

[twc]

Answers

Here are answers as promised to challenges thrown up by robbo203 in the morality/logic/survival thread.  The context of that thread has long since shifted.

The answers will come in installments, time permitting.

robbo203 wrote:

I would banish the expression “scientific socialism”; it is thoroughly misleading and sets quite the wrong tone.  …  [We] should simply recognise the limits of the scientific approach when it comes to changing society.  You dont seem to recognise any such limits.

How can I recognize scientific socialism’s limits “when it comes to changing society” when you merely imply that there may be some, but you don’t specify what they could be.

I cannot make your counter case to scientific socialism for you, and then unmake it for you.

You tell us what Marx left out.  It’s up to you to make the counter argument against what he produced “when it comes to changing society”.  Without him, you wouldn’t even know it was possible.

So please specify these unspecified limits “when it comes to changing society” so that we can all evaluate them on equal footing.  And please don’t waste our time until you can present a proof that they actually do limit scientific socialism.

robbo203 wrote:

I think you’ve got it precisely the wrong way round.  Most people don’t become socialists through an academic contemplation of the nuances of labour theory of value and then become indignant; when they learn from the theory that they have been exploited by their capitalist employer all along.  On the contrary, it is their own experience of exploitation expressed in a myriad of ways that gives rise to a feeling, however inchoate, that they are being exploited.  That becomes the spur to acquiring greater understanding.  In short, indignation generally precedes knowledge rather than follows knowledge, though of course it can be reinforced by the latter.

I entirely agree.

You simply read this idea into my text, which makes me wonder just how inhuman you think your materialist opponents are just because we challenge your cherished emotional beliefs.

The point in my text, on which we agreed, was that today’s short-term indignation wants to keep the long-term system in tact, and only seeks to fix its infuriating short-term faults.

I objected to your plan to channel indignation against system faults into indignation against the system itself, devoid of any immediate prospect of solving the system fault that generated the fury you seek to channel without falling back on scientific socialism.  If you agree that conviction can only come in such cases by falling back on scientific socialism, then we agree.

But you want more.  And so I objected that more deceptive voluntarism plays a dangerous game whose limits we all recognize, and so can actually be specified unlike your implied limits of scientific socialism.

You presumably feel it equally inhuman of me to ask how you plan on bottling up short-term indignation if your own scientific theory of the long-term system has, in your own estimation, unspecified limitations “when it comes to changing society”?  How, in your humanity, do you plan to keep unresolved short-term fury on permanent simmer without recourse to scientific socialism?

Surely, you can’t be advocating that we hijack social movements as prelude to our human scientific socialism.

[twc]

What Happens When Science Abolishes Exploitation (Continued)Here’s my reformulation of your problem in its most general form so that it includes the neo-ricardians as well as the neo-classicals [your marginalists]. How else, than by non-scientific indignant [moral] value judgment, can a scientific socialist possibly counter scientific theories of zero or indeterminate exploitation, which are entirely impervious to attack by socialist science itself? 

robbo203 wrote:

Back in the late 19th century when the marginalist revolution in economics got underway, one effect of this was to radically reconceptualise the whole question of distribution in a capitalist society.¹Within the general framework of marginalist theory, capital and labour were deemed—subjectively, of course—to get back exactly what they put in—no more and no less.The theoretical possibility of exploitation was thus precluded by an ex cathedra type statement which rationalised massive inequalities of outcome as something that is wholly explicable—and justifiable—in terms of the commensurate contributions to production made by capitalists and workers respectively.Ironically, while the Marxian labour value theory was severely criticised on grounds that it did not adequately deal with the problem of the heterogeneity of labour inputs and how to assign different labour time values to different skills,²  no such scruples were raised with regard to the distribution of income between labour and capital.³Michael Perelman quotes the once prominent American economist—John Bates Clark—on the matter, that “the distribution of income [is] controlled by a natural law, and…this law, if it worked without friction, would give to every agent of production the amount of wealth which that agent creates. … Free competition tends to give labor what labor creates, to capitalists what capital creates, and to entrepreneurs what the coordinating function creates.” (Michael Perelman, The Perverse Economy: The Impact of Markets on People and the Environment, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 p. 152).

Fair enough, that’s their theory of rewards. Robbo’s Problem

robbo203 wrote:

Now I put it to you, twc—how would you counter Clark’s point?  If the capitalist countered your objection that he is exploiting his workers by pointing out that, in fact, the value of his contribution to the production of wealth is at least equal to that all of his workers combined, how would you respond? Robbo’s Dire WarningYou can recite the labour theory of value all you like but you cannot get round the [marginalist] fact that different labour contributions impart different values to the end product.The capitalist has only to assert that 10 minutes of his time in a flying visit to his factory office to sign a cheque is equal in value to a full day’s work by one of his workers to counter the charge that he is “exploiting his workers”.The point that I am getting at is that this is, at bottom, a value judgement, not simply a cold mathematical calculation that workers are exploited in terms of socially necessary labour time.  If you deny that [i.e. that it is at bottom a value judgement] you cede ground to the bourgeois economists and you will find yourself engaging in a debate that will inevitably be rigged in their favour.Beware and be very aware of the perils of insisting that the case for socialism is one essentially based on objective scientific rationalism.

 How I Would and Wouldn’t ReplyI would first point out to you, that you are a hopeless spokesman for the capitalist before you even try to become a spokesman for the socialist.Your industrial capitalist must cover his production costs, and it is totally absurd for him to pay himself a huge wage for turning up and then have to pass that huge cost on to the customer.  That’s how insane your imbecile scenario is.Suppose instead you intended him to say it’s OK so long as he turns up from time to time.  But this is just as nonsensical.  Why should the industrial capitalist bother to turn up at all when he pays a manager to do that for him?Suppose instead you intended him to speak like a sane man and simply say he owns the stock and that is sufficient justification for his special reward.  Now that makes sense, and puts him on par with his competitor financial capitalists [rentier, stockholder, banker, landlords] who never turn up at all.But your whole scenario is so inept, and so clearly imaginary, that no self-respecting capitalist would ever stoop so low.  But an idealist socialist might in his sterile ramblings.  I’d back the capitalist any day.For my part, having stopped your 10-minute capitalist at his original game, by calling his bluff, I’d launch into scientific socialism.For your part. Apparently you’d be actively fueling his well-deserved contempt by your, apparently only possible philosophical response “well, it’s actually a matter of value judgement, and I happen to hold different ethical values from you”. For his part, the sane capitalist is far from impressed by your philosophical performance, and so you are now forced to resort to your ultimate weapon, your infallible display of non-scientific-socialist indignation.  That should do the trick!I’ve never confronted anything so ludicrous in my life! Footnotes¹ From Marx’s point of view, there was no radical re-conceptualization, because there is no conceptualization at all involved in taking phenomena at face value which, in Marx’s sense, is a fetish—mistaking appearance for reality.  It was a retreat from the conceptualization of Smith and Ricardo.  What was radical was the marginalists’ mathematization of the characteristic appearance of capitalist distribution—see Marx’s “Theories of Surplus Value”. ↩ [Back]² Labour heterogeneity is settled entirely in human practice through the going wage rate for an occupation, and I’m afraid human practice there resolves ambiguity beyond further theoretical argument.Here misplaced ethics leads into ethical reduction beyond human practice, or misplaced “physicalism” leads into what Sraffa called “reduction to dated labour” and proved was theoretically infeasible.  Andrew Kliman shows reduction of any kind is irrelevant, as the going wage rate is the irreducible socially established fact. ↩ [Back]³ A few “socialist” scruples were raised;  even our wayward predecessor Hyndman, the year after Engels died, scrupled against it in his “The Final Futility of Final Utility", etc. ↩ [Back]

[robbo203]

I tried to plough through the various screeds you submitted on this thread  that pretend to answer the questions I raised on another thread but, to be quite honest, half way through my eyes began to glaze over.  Talk about tedious, turgid and, for the most part, utterly irrelevant waffle.  You never seem to get to the point  Why can you not learn to answer a simple and direct question, simply and directly, without proposing to mount some pulpit to lecture an already half- bored congregation for the next four hours, eh?If you are to believed,  Robbo has foolishly allowed himself to be irrationally swayed by the sheer force of moral indignation alone and has summarily repudiated all science and employing a scientific method.  What rubbish.  All I am doing is denying the fact-value distinction which Marx himself incidentally regarded as a form of "estrangement". I have lost count of the number times L Bird has demolished your flimsy pretentious arguments,  making  precisely the same point as I am doing here.  But nothing will seem to budge you from your entrenched 19th century positivismThe thread from which these various "unanswered questions" (which still remain unanswered!)  derive is entitled "Is the case for socialism, one of morality, cold logic or long term survival of our species?" My point was simply  that, yes, of course the case for socialism is based on morality – how can it not be? – but I was not for one moment suggesting it was not ALSO based on cold logic (or science, if you prefer) or the long term interests of the species.  On the contrary it is based on all of these things.    You've just wasted a lot of your own time and mine and that of anyone else unfortunate to happen upon your long-winded bad-tempered and ridiculous attempt to constantly bark up the wrong tree.   Try, in future, reading what other people write before putting pen to paper. It might just helpIve told you already why I dont like the expression "scientific socialism" – because it conveys  precisely the wrong impression.  You have already admitted I was right to say:Most people don’t become socialists through an academic contemplation of the nuances of labour theory of value and then become indignant; when they learn from the theory that they have been exploited by their capitalist employer all along.  On the contrary, it is their own experience of exploitation expressed in a myriad of ways that gives rise to a feeling, however inchoate, that they are being exploited.  That becomes the spur to acquiring greater understanding.  In short, indignation generally precedes knowledge rather than follows knowledge, though of course it can be reinforced by the latterThen you protest that Im reading into your text something that was not there. Really? This is what you said in post no 60 of the other thread:Socialism doesn’t rely on indignation.  Indignation, like all emotion is impermanent.  It must be feigned to be kept alive, and then it becomes a mere self-serving pose.  Our opponents are expert poseurs at this.  We despise their subterfuge.You then proceed to read something into my text which I did not say. According to you I entertain some "plan" to "channel indignation against system faults into indignation against the system itself, devoid of any immediate prospect of solving the system fault that generated the fury you seek to channel without falling back on scientific socialism".  Surely, you ask,  I can’t be advocating that we hijack social movements as prelude to our human scientific socialism.   How pathetic can you get.  Its pretty obvious what I have been saying and only a compolete idiot could not have twigged this by now  – that the advocacy of the socialist case does not mean abandoning logic and science; only that it needs also to give due weight to the fact that people, for the most part,  are not primarily or initially drawn to socialism because they are presented with some irresistable "scientific" argument for socialism.  (If only that were true, most people when presented with the case for socialism reject it precisely becuase they dont think it is crediuble. They are prejudiced  which means we cannot sidestep the question of addressing the values on which their prejudices rest) Insofar as they do become attracted to the case for socialism it is primarily because they are indignant about things that the system throws up. We have to connect with that sense of indignation which is what also surely drives us as socialists and speak in a language that people can understand – the language of moral outrage.  That is where the limits of "scientific socialism" lie.  If such a socialism doesnt rely on  indignation then of course all it has to fall back on is cold logic and cold logic on its own is mnot going to motivate many to become socialists.  Socialist discourse will merely come to resemble kind of academic discourse carried out in academia increasingly abstract in tone and more and more removed from the everyday realities of working class expereienceThe naivete of your whole perspective  is well illustrated by your ridiculous logic expressed in post 91 of the other thread    (robbo.1)  the materialist conception of history is false.    (robbo.2)  base–superstructure determinism is false.    (robbo.3)  the objectivity of capitalist social relations is false.    (robbo.4)  we must therefore rely on emotion and morality.I don say the MCH is false .  What I say is that you hold a view of history which is at variance with what is called the materialist conception of hisotry. You are a mechanical or reductionist materialist.  As L Bird mentioned earlier. it is indeed surprising that no one in the SPGB has yet called you out on this.  Here is what the SPGB's own pamphlet on Historical Materialism has to say on the matterA few years ago a writer in the Guardian (March 5th 1965) put forward a common misconception of Marx’s view. He contended that Marx preached economic determinism by which, he alleged, Marx meant that all individuals act in accordance with their economic interests. A short acquaintance with Marx’s writings would show how absurd it was to attribute such a superficial view to him  That superficial view is the view you hold.  Make no mistake about it, you are preaching economic determinism with your dogmatic insistence that "base determines superstructure".  I challenged you to show how this was possible when a certain configuration of relations of production (one component of the "economic base" along with the productive forces themsleves) must presuppose certain ideas, values, beliefs etc  in order to come into existence. How can private property exist or come into being without a set of values that sanctions such an arrnagement?  You declined to answer my point.  Instead you infer illogically from what I say that " the objectivity of capitalist social relations is false".   No , thats not what I am saying. What I am saying is that it is not a question of PURE objectivity.  There is no such thing as facts standing alone accessible to all by mere observation. I emphatically deny the whole fact-value distinction which you constant insist on making with your fetishised  notion of "scientific socialism".  Your faulty logic leads you to further infer that I think we must therefore "rely on emotion and morality".  But since I dont deny the objectivity of capitalist social relations –  only the claim that such relations can be considered purely objective and standing completely apart from our values, your argument falls to the ground.  You seem to have this totally simplistic naive view of the world in which things are either black or white and there are no shades of grey in betweenAnd so we come finally to the question of exploitation.  You did not not answer my question at all.  All you did was parade your superogatory and oh-so-clever familiarity with Kliman's response to Steedman or whoever – like anyone gives a toss.  Well, if a bit of namedropping helps your cause and hides your own pitiful  evasions on the subject then why not  go for it, I suppose.   The basic question still stands, howeverIf exploitation is purely objective (which by your own definition means accessible to everyone) then why is it that most workers dont think they are exploited in the Marxian sense.  Not just workers but capitalists too. They are not even aware of such concepts as"surplus value". Exploitation to them simply means not getting a fair days wage for a fair days work.  The implication being that, in theory, you can operate capitalism without exploitation by being more generous and less harsh in your dealings with your workforce.The fact of the matter is that exploitation in the marxian sense is  theoretical judgement and as such presupposes a process of selecting the facts which in turn implies a set of values upon which such a selection is based.  Once again you cannot separate facts and values and this is why "exploitation" is NOT a purely objective matter.And you still dont understand the point I made about John Bates Clark.  I dont deny the objectivity of capitalist exploitation only that my recognition of it has come about separately from my socialist values. In raising the example of Clark I was playing the role of Devil's advocate to get you to see this very point and not as you idiotically claim as  a "hopeless spokesman for the capitalist". You warble on ridiculously: "your whole scenario is so inept, and so clearly imaginary, that no self-respecting capitalist would ever stoop so low.  But an idealist socialist might in his sterile ramblings.  I’d back the capitalist any day".  Are you really incapable of grasping the simple  point that the situation itself does not have to be an actual one  for it still to present the possibility of a theoretical defence of the capitalists claim that they do not exploit their workers but on the contrary that everyone gets their just rewards. – that they get out of production exactly what they put in – and that this is a process of evaluation?All you are doing is evading the argument by whining about how inept the scenario is becuase, well, no self-respecting capitalist  is going to stoop so low as to put in a little bit of work now and then  (Really? Are you seriously suggesting that no capitalist has ever done any work whatsoever? I think thats quite an extraordinary claim to make .  Years ago I worked as a gardener for a full blown multimillionaire who even had a heliport on his sumptuous grounds in Surrey and a helicopter to whisk him quite frequently to his office in the East Anglia where he could do some of the paper work).  Puhleeeeze.  The fact that that capitalist draws a profit doies not mean that the capitalist necessarily sees himself as exploiting his workers in the Marxian sense or that his workers see themselves as being exploited in that same sense. No one is denying that profit exists; the issue is what does it signify  and this is where the question of values enters the picture.  I cant seem to get that point into your skull.  All you are doing is to concoct some facile excuse to avoid confronting the issue of how you might evaluate the capitalist's contribution to the social product vis-a-vis the worker and that makes you , ironically enough,  a pretty piss poor exponent of "scientific socialism" in my opiniuon

[twc]

By the way, I understand completely what you are saying. No sentient human couldn’t.  And most of what you say about human values every sentient human being holds.  It is therefore trivial stuff because nobody denies it.What infuriates you is that you can’t understand why I can’t go along with the rest of your stuff.  I must be abnormal, because everybody else holds these views.The reason I don’t go along with you is that I see what you are doing politically.  You wouldn’t get so upset if it wasn’t politically motivated.  You want value judgment to imply political voluntarism.I detect you marshalling value-judgement grounds for the political voluntarism, which you valiantly defended against my former attack upon it.If so, you naturally don’t like me impeding your political progress by pointing out that socialist science essentially opposes political voluntarism.Socialist science sees value-judgement voluntarism as an abrogation of inconvenient socialist science itself, which is why you claim that the science itself is deficient.  Of course it is, if you want to bypass it!  Scientific socialism is extremely deficient for political voluntarists.That should make my position crystal clear. There should be no mistaking what I am saying.If you are not laying the groundwork for political voluntarism, then we are arguing at cross purpose. So here is my challenge for you to clear up the matter once and for all.Are you relying on value judgement — [for you exploitation is at bottom value judgement] — to launch a case for political voluntarism? Please answer that.

[twc]

[Just for your benefit, since you clearly approach my stuff from the prejudiced viewpoint that it corresponds to an economic determinist caricature, just drop that imbecility and try to understand what I am saying without misconstruing it from a predetermined prejudiced position.]You might find the following worth persevering with.Steedman proved that value and exploitation could be (1) negative and were (2) redundant, because everything could be expressed in terms of price.And nobody was able to disprove him.  Nobody.Steedman’s neo-ricardian science had thereby demolished Marx, marxian science, and the socialist case.  Marx was wrong to have dismissed Ricardo, etc.How would you have defended Marx when marxian value and exploitation had been proven beyond obvious doubt that they could be negative and did not influence price and profit at all. Our key concepts were meaningless.I automatically assumed you were aware of this.Indignation and your “value judgement” were all that remained to rely on.  Exactly your scenario.As a consequence, of conditions most favourable to your case, you’d expect socialism, freed of encumbering science, to thrive.  For marxian science was dead, and swept aside. Value judgement had the field to itself.  I’m unsure whether you are a product of these value-judgement circumstances, but in any case your trump card of “at bottom” value judgment had no competition throughout three and a half decades. It held a monopoly.Yet, in circumstances most favourable to your case, socialism waned while  triumphant Sraffian science [look up Okishio] thrived in its stead.  And Sraffian science proved that Marx was way off the mark, up the creek.  Who in his right mind could now defend Marx?Socialists might keep on reciting Volume 1, but as far as anyone knew they were spouting nonsense.The simplest approach these days for you to get to comprehend the demolition of Marx that took place is to read the chapter on Marx in Keen’s popular book “Debunking Economics”. It describes the anti-value/anti-exploitation view that dominated in the aftermath of the demolition, and is still Keen’s view today.Keen defends the Marx of Vols 2 and 3 only insofar as they abstract from marxian value and exploitation, but he scorns marxian value and exploitation as meaningless concepts.  How would you go about rebutting him?You can rant and rave over exploitation and value as much as you like, but if they can both be negative and redundant, and so economically incoherent, and thus not explanatory, then you are ranting and raving in defence of nonsense.Ask someone independent of me, if you want to know what happened from the 1970s to the 2000s, if you don’t trust my account. Ask the author of the Standard article on Kliman’s book, if you want confirmation of what I am saying, if you don’t trust me.It all started, robbo, after Sraffa embroiled Samuelson, and bested him, but then forced labour theory of value historian Meek [look at the Preface to his second edition of his “Labour Theory of Value” book] to renounce the labour theory of value!That was devastating enough. It soon became apparent that the implications of Sraffa’s remarkable book “The Production of Commodities by Commodities" were that Marxian economics was irrelevant because value didn’t influence price. Sraffa’s implications were soon recognized to hold for the Monthly Review school of Sweezy, etc.  They were all pervasive.Marxian theory was in terminal crisis.  The rest of the marxian economists quickly succumbed, falling like a house of cards, until it became embarrassing to hold to marxian value and exploitation. The few professional marxian economists who held out, like Anwar Shaik [whose non-“solution” dear old David Harvey fondly believes in] reproduced Sraffa in veiled or what’s called iterative form.Make no mistake about it, Sraffa inadvertently killed Marx, and marxian value along with marxian exploitation. The SPGB simply ignored the problem and went on teaching Vol 1 just as Marx wrote it, and was absolutely correct in doing so, but it too was powerless to mount a case against the Sraffians who had proven that Capital  Vol 1 was nonsense. The fact remained that when Capital was expressed in input–output form in linear algebra, value and exploitation vanished, and indignation and “moral value judgement” were the sole remaining residue, which is a real-life instance of your fairy-tale scenario.Lots of people ranted and raved then, and solved absolutely nothing. Marxian value and exploitation remained resolutely incoherent concepts that ranting and raving could not save from obscurityYou rant and rave against me now, but it similarly doesn’t kill scientific socialism, although for you it “gives the wrong impression”.It’s you, apparently having slept through it all, who are insular, and— unlike you and your war dance—I am not grandstanding. I am describing actual history. The indignation arises naturally out of that. There’s no need to grandstand.The SPGB would be a standing joke in persisting with Marxian economics based on marxian value and exploitation if it wasn’t for Andrew Kliman.¹Forget about your perceived problems with the MCH [by the way, I’m exploding Stillman in my next post] it was the generally agreed core of marxian economics—value and exploitation—that were proved to be irredeemably problematic.In such circumstances, the SPGB would be clinging onto concepts that had been convincingly proven by linear algebra to be meaningless.So don’t knock Kliman.  You owe the coherence of any argument you mount to his reclamation of Marx.You, standing on ignorance, have the cheek to grandstand that marxian materialism, as I express and defend it, is outdated.  Grow up, and at minimum try to understand what I’m about to say in my next post. I want a reasoned response, not a rant and rave.Just try for once to comprehend the real-world implications of the death of Marxian science during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, that  many still hold in the 2010s.Don’t you dare pull that miserable stunt again of assuming that I don’t recognize the moral dimensions of socialism.Dear Socialist Punk, who is going through difficult times, and is the founder of the original thread, knows my personal views.  But I don’t parade them. Footnote¹ Kliman’s book “Reclaiming Marx’s Capital” is descriptive, interpretative [hermeneutics], and mathematical, which makes it inaccessible to some [its mathematics are typeset most ghastly].It is available, for example, from http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reclaiming-Marxs-Capital-Inconsistency-Dunayevskaya-ebook/dp/B00EORHR5Q/ref=la_B001JSALNS_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1399169860&sr=1-2General information can be found from the Wikipedia articles on Andrew Kliman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Kliman, and the TSSI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_Single_System_Interpretation ↩ [Back]

[twc]

What Happens When Science Abolishes ExploitationI’ll consider your question generally, because the issue of indeterminate and negative exploitation annihilated marxian economics for the whole of the immediate past generation.  Negative exploitation killed marxian economics stone cold motherless dead. Real World Test of Indignation or ScienceIn 1961 Piero Sraffa reformulated Marxian economics as input–output relations expressed as simultaneous linear equations.  To everyone’s surprise, value and exploitation turned out to be sometimes positive, sometimes negative and sometimes diverging in different directions.If marxian value and exploitation behaved in this incoherent fashion, then there was something seriously wrong with them.  If the rate of exploitation is negative, the worker is robbing the capitalist.  Marx refutes himself.The consequences were impossibly embarrassing upon Steedman’s unanswerable “Marx After Sraffa” and Samuelson’s triumphant “eraser” sneer at value’s proven redundancy, that Marx introduces value only to remove it in prices, when Sraffa showed he could have worked in prices all along.Sure, indignation was mightily aroused by this unexpected turn of events, but it proved totally ineffectual in rebutting Steedman and Nobel economist Samuelson, and effectively finished up rebutting itself.Marxian value theory literally died on the day of Steedman’s publication, followed up by his funeral oration in New Statesman, where he condescendingly suggested that Marx might still be remembered for his philosophical theory of fetishism, but little else.Theoretical marxism died— not figuratively, but literally.  Just read Steedman then or Keen now — “good try boys, but” and their hectoring stung like hell until the whole tribe of so-called marxian economists succumbed, swapped sides, or gave up, powerless before alternative theoretical might.That was the parlous state of affairs until Andrew Kliman resuscitated Marxian value and exploitation theory in 2006, giving us a hitherto unrecognized insight into Marx.Kliman and colleagues showed that simultaneous equations unconsciously abstract from the effects of marxian value [we were just discussing on another thread (if “discussing” is the right word) scientific “abstraction”].The world of capitalist reproduction is not simultaneous in the Sraffian sense, which is the same false sense as Walras, and neoclassical [or marginalist] economics.  The actual capitalist world is none of these.Meanwhile, taking stock, all the marxian indignation in the world proved its worth as delicious gravy to the bourgeois economists who enjoyed themselves enormously at Marx’s and his economists’ expense.Marxian indignation simply backfired, literally wiping out the indignant marxian economists, just as effectively as all ideal “responses” to real world problems invariably wipe out those who rely on them.Don’t you preach to me the efficacy of your indignation.  It is the best way of demoralizing those who rely on it.In the real world, actual resolution came not through indignation but through marxian science.  The very last thing you want us to rely on.That’s the real world proof against you that I offer.In this real world test, so close to the bone, indignation came out bedraggled, licking its self-inflicted wounds.  It was a bloody hindrance!In the next installment I’ll give my detailed response to your specific problem.

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