Response to Moseley

In “A Marxian reply to Hahnel: The relative explanatory power of Marx’s theory and Sraffa’s theory,” Moseley begins by arguing that I misrepresent Marx. For any like myself, who believe that because we now have linear algebra, and the theorems of Frobenius and Perron to take advantage of, we are able to elaborate a better formal framework for understanding prices and income distribution in capitalism than was available during Marx’s time, the past fifty years has become a game of whack-a-mole: whenever anyone rebuts one particular defense of using a labor theory of value framework, a different variation rises in its place.

Marginalism and Marxism: The first encounter

The paper discusses a critical episode in the history of economic thought of the 19th century — the first encounter between marginalism and Marxism. It happened in 1884, when Philip Wickstead published a short twenty-page text in the magazine of “scientific” socialism “To-Day” under the laconic title “Das Kapital: a Сriticism”. The paper briefly traces the creative path of Wickstead; considers the reasons that prompted him to make a stand against Marxism; analyzes his main criticisms; describes the reaction to them by his contemporaries (both professional economists and adherents of socialism) and evaluates the place of his work in the history of ideas. It is noted that Wicksteed’s article was not only the first encounter of marginalism with Marxism, but also the first popular exposituion of the theory of marginal utility (in the version of S. Jevons), which was completely new for that time. His criticism was radical in nature, since it was aimed not at revealing partial shortcomings, but at the complete collapse of the Marxist construction and its replacement with an alternative theoretical scheme. Amazingly, none of Marx’s supporters dared to accept Wickstead’s challenge and his criticism was never publicly contested by them. This seemingly inconspicuous event turned out to be of crucial historical significance. Under the influence of Wickstead, the Fabians rejected the labor theory of value and British socialism (in its main part) ceased to be Marxist forever.

DEVELOPMENT OF MARGINALISM IDEAS AND THEIR REFLECTION IN DOMESTIC ECONOMIC THOUGHT

In the conditions of transformational shifts and construction of the national competitive economy of Ukraine, society is a particularly attractive object for socio-economic research. The necessity of deep theoretical comprehension of the processes that take place and determination of the directions of further development of the domestic economy through the reference to the historical experience of studying market transformations by domestic economists is substantiated. There is a tendency of revival of scientific interest in historical and economic research in modern economic theory, where Ukrainian economic thought opens a wide field for scientific research. The aim of the article is to study the development of the ideas of marginalism and their reflection in the domestic economic thought in the works of representatives of the Kyiv School of Economics. The article presents the evolution of the theoretical and methodological foundations of the stages of the marginal revolution. It is noted that in Ukraine there were also powerful scientific centers of marginal orientation. It is claimed that the Kyiv School of Economics, headed by M. H. Bunge and D. I. Pikhno, initiated the subjective-psychological direction of political economy in Ukraine. It is determined that the peculiarity of O. Bilimovich's scientific thought was the complete denial of the labor theory of value. The article states that MI Tugan-Baranovsky has the primacy in the deep substantiation and creation of the synthesis of the labor theory of value and theories of marginal utility. It is noted that the combination of objective and subjective approaches on a methodological basis allowed him to avoid one-sided economic research. It is emphasized that the views of M. Tugan-Baranovsky in this problem were characterized by both undeniably powerful and theoretically weak aspects. Based on the study, it was concluded that marginalism as a powerful direction in the development of world economic theory had its own peculiarities of perception and development in Ukrainian economic thought of the second half of the nineteenth - early twentieth century. Research has revealed a critical perception of methodological individualism as a characteristic feature of the scientific tools of marginalism. It is noted that the fundamental ideas of marginalism in the Ukrainian economic thought of the second half of the XIX - early XX centuries. combined with the methods of the new historical and social schools. The article notes that at that time Ukrainian scientists took into account the influence of non-economic factors on the economic behavior of economic entities,

Marx’s Argument for the Labor Theory of Value

In a Times Literary Supplement review of some recent literature on Marx and Marxism for a general readership, Jonathan Wolff claimed that Marx’s solution to the so-called “transformation problem” is “half-baked.” The aim of this paper is to challenge this complacent dismissal of some of Marx’s central economic ideas. In the process, I want to show that although the issues here are subtle and complex, Marx’s ideas retain a great deal of intuitive appeal, and his “solution” to the so-called “transformation problem” is neither conceptually implausible nor mathematically dubious. Crucial to this aim is to show that Marx viewed the categories of (what he called bourgeois) economics through a social lens, which is given in the first chapter of the first volume of Capital.