MARX’S ECONOMIC THEORY TRUE OR FALSE A MARXIAN RESPONSE TO.pdf

MARX’S ECONOMIC THEORY: TRUE OR FALSE? A MARXIAN RESPONSE TO BLAUG’S APPRAISAL by Fred Moseley Department of Economics Mount Holyoke College South Hadley MA 01075 E-mail: fmoseley@mhc.mtholyoke.edu December 1997 Presented at the 25th Encontro Nacional de Economia of ANPEC, December 11, 1997, Recife Brazil. 1 Abstract MARX’S ECONOMIC THEORY: TRUE OR FALSE? A MARXIAN RESPONSE TO BLAUG’S APPRAISAL by Fred Moseley Mark Blaug has recently presented a very negative appraisal of the empirical validity of Marx’s economic theory: Blaug concludes that Marx’s theory has been glaringly refuted by the empirical evidence of the last century. This paper presents a Marxian response to Blaug’s negative appraisal of Marx’s theory. The paper reexamines in detail Blaug’s empirical evidence and other related evidence with respect to the following conclusions: the falling rate of profit, the impoverishment of workers, conflict over the length of the working day, conflict over the intensity of labor, recurring depressions, increasing concentration of capital, proletarianization of the labor force, and the necessity of money. The paper comes to essentially the opposite conclusion as Blaug: that Marx’s theory is largely consistent with the empirical evidence and has an impressive range of explanatory power. Brief remarks are also made about the relative explanatory power of Marx’s theory and neoclassical economic theory. 2 MARX’S ECONOMIC THEORY: TRUE OR FALSE? A MARXIAN RESPONSE TO BLAUG’S