TOWARD A POLITICAL ECONOMY
FOR OUR TIMESLecture Notes from
Doug Dowd's
Econ Y2K 1999 Classes(San Francisco, Berkeley, Petaluma, and Palo Alto) This is intended both for those who have been in my SF Bay Area classes and for those who are just beginning to attend. It is a written version of the seven or eight class meetings that began in February 1999 and ended in September, put together so we can start from what has already been done instead of having to repeat it.
The class has been called Econ Y2K for shorthand purposes. As most who read this will know, before the class started last year I had prepared a short pamphlet--Toward Understanding Capitalism--meant to serve as something like a preface; it is still available, and may be obtained (for $1) either when the classes meet, or gratis through the web site http://www.vaivecchio.com.
This is the second year of the class, beginning in February, as usual, and ending in September (after which, as every year, I go to live and work in Italy for four months). Before beginning the written version of last year's classes, let me provide a brief summary of the overall plan for the classes, and some of the reasoning underlying it.
As some of you know, I have been giving these community classes for many years. My position is always critical of capitalism and of its economics and will be this year; but this class also differs in a major way: its main aim is not that of criticizing what has been and is (though that cannot be avoided), but of sketching out the foundations for a new political economy.
But note Toward in the title of this treatise (as also in the earlier pamphlet). This class does not seek to provide a full-scale new economics; that is a different and much larger task. Rather, we aim to synthesize and update some of earlier and indispensable economic thought; thus organized for present purposes, it may serve as a foundation studying a full economics for today's world.
This may be put differently. As I have often written and said in our classes, economists should, and by most are mistakenly thought to, answer two simple questions: (1) What do we need to know about the economy? and (2) What must be done in order that it best serve human, social, and environmental needs?
Those are not really simple questions, of course; the responses to them accordingly must be very complex. The abstraction called the economy exists in a swirl of interacting relationships that constitutes the social process, all of whose present moments must be seen as partaking of that complexity. In turn, such complexity must be seen as having arrived carrying the weight of history on its back: the history of human beings as human beings (differing greatly from time to time and place to place), relevant political, socio-economic-cultural-technological history, and, especially in the past century, that of nature.
Marx probably had something like that in mind when (in the 1850s) he wrote:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.1What must be learned cannot be accomplished sufficiently in a series of classes, but useful steps in that direction can be accomplished. Although success in such an effort can never be complete, it cannot help but be an improvement over what now passes for economics. As will be commented on soon, important steps toward developing an acceptable (a real) economics for our time are already under way.The very first steps toward a useful economics--along with their limitations--began to be developed as capitalism came into existence. Although I have been very critical of those who created what became mainstream (classical and neoclassical) economics--Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, and John Maynard Keynes, for example--their works were by no means without value. However, most of what will be dealt with here--because in my view it is both pertinent and valuable--was developed by those swimming against and outside the mainstream, moderate or severe critics of capitalism. Of those many contributions, what will be adapted for our classes will be those with the greatest contemporary relevance.
The class may be thought of as falling into Part I and Part II. Part I is much the longer of the two; it began last year and will continue through all this year. Its aim is (a) to summarize and adapt the analytical/theoretical contributions of Marx, Veblen, Gramsci, Keynes, Joan Robinson, Schumpeter, C. Wright Mills, Baran and Sweezy (and some of their "descendants," such as Braverman and O'Connor), and those called institutionalists and post-Keynesians; and (b) to provide relevant information/data regarding various contemporary markets: the economic facts of industrial, labor, financial, foreign trade, etc., and income and wealth distribution (from Bain, Adams, Brady, Mishel, et al.).
Part II may consist merely of a summary or of a semester in itself; we'll see. In either case, it will begin with a critique of recent and generally proposed socioeconomic policies, which (whatever their rhetoric) are designed to serve the felt needs of those now in power. After that, in contrast, we will outline the main elements of a linked program meant to serve human, social, and environmental needs for the present and future. Initially, the emphasis will be on the United States, but that perspective will be integrated with a connected set of principles having the rest of the world (especially its weaker parts) as the focus.
Whether Part II is done briefly or at length, it will then be necessary to move on once more. I have in mind at present that such moving on might well be done best by organizing another set of classes taking the form--but not the usual content--of an introductory university economics course. It would take another two years (and, as usual, no money would change hands). I would not have thought that able to be done except for the appearance of a new introductory economics text (just come to me, and for which I have written a review). The text, by Hugh Stretton, is unique and uniquely valuable--in its breadth and depth and how issues are treated, and in its clarity and good sense and basic human decency.2
Now on to a written version of the 1999 class, worked up from the notes I used in the 1999 class, extended by what I recall of what I said or believe I should have said, and by my memory of class discussions.3 In general, the notes will be written up so as to take the form of chapters. What now follows may be viewed as the first of them.
Notes
1. Part of the opening statement of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, available in many editions, most conveniently in Selected Works of Marx and Engels--to be found both in one and two volumes. Return
2. The book is A New Introduction to Economics, by Hugh Stretton (London: Pluto Press, 1999, ISBN 0745315313). Return
3. Reading suggestions will be made as we go along; to begin with, my recommendations are a few books in history of economic thought: Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, Robert Lekachman, History of Economic Ideas, both more readable than is common, and two others that are more technical: Joseph Schumpeter, Ten Great Economists, and Eric Roll, History of Economic Thought. Brushing modesty aside, I also recommend Chapters 1 and 2 of my own U.S. Capitalist Development Since 1776: Of, By, and For Which People? and my Toward Understanding Capitalism (which covers some of the ground of those chapters).
The best book of all, but perhaps read after Heilbroner or Lekachman, is Leo Rogin, The Meaning and Validity of Economic Theory. Rogin was one from whom I believe I learned most in this area, in his class, and from that book. He died very young, in 1947, and the book had to be completed by some of his colleagues (including Robert A. Brady) and some of his students. It was published in 1956 by Harpers, and republished in 1971 by Books for Libraries Press. Return
Aug 8, 2000