Yeah, yeah, it was an abrupt end yesterday -but like I said when we started this I would just post what gets done in the hour or so. And then there are chores and things. You know how it is. So anyway,
We were talking about how a discipline can be imposed upon another culture. In this case the most industrially developed capitalist economy imposed its ’science’ of political economy upon less industrially developed countries.
Only in this instance the ’science of political economy’ imported into Germany did not match the conditions ‘on the ground’ so that the ’science of political economy’ in Germany remained in an underdeveloped state.
Sort of how the World Bank develpment programs that emphasize free trade conditions (generally good for the core nations and not so great for the periphery). The result of these programs tends not to be development, but a persistent relative underdevelopment.
A good anecdote for analogy. My partner, an objects conservator for an ethnographic museum here in the Netherlands does a lot of work with museums in underdeveloped Southeast Asia - Jakarta and Manilla (Indonesia and the Phillipines). There is a tendency for the ‘pupil’ and ‘expert’ relationship in her exchanges, where the underdeveloped tropical museums look to the ‘developed’ museum in temperate Netherlands for the ‘right’ way to store and treat their objects. The problem is storing and treating objects presents different needs and possibilities, a different array of materials (in both availability and priority) and so on and so forth depending upon whether your climate is tropical, arid, temperate and from which climatic conditions the objects hail. Nevertheless, the conservation practices found in the core portions of Europe, Australasia, and North America have a tendency to dominate the conservation practices of the periphery.
I would never suggest that this dominance in terms of ideology and practice exists in every instance, but there does appear [at a glance] that this is the case. At any rate, Marx feels this is the case with Germany and political economy at the time of this book. One could probably find a number of contemporary analogs.
III. The relationship between the level of class conflict and the extent to which ‘political economy’ is capable of being critical of itself, i.e. scientific versus dogmatic or polemic.
“In so far as political economy is bourgeois, i.e. in so far as it views the capitalist order as the absolute and ultimate form of social development, it can only remain a science while the class struggle remains latent or manifests itself only in isolated and sporadic phenomena” (96).
According to Marx, Ricardo was the last scientifically motivated political scientist, and “…classical political economy belongs to a period in which the class struggle was as yet undeveloped” (96).
The following period, however, ‘was the vulgarizing and extending of Ricardo’; the transformation of ’scientific’ poltical economy into a weapon of the bourgeoisie once they finally siezed political power from ‘the governments and the feudal aristocracy gathered around the Holy Alliance’. The siezure of legitimacy “sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economics”.
“It was thenceforth no longer a question whether this or that theorem was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, in accordance with police regulations or contrary to them. In place of disinterested inquirers (academics) there stepped hired prize-fighters (think-tanks, lobbyists, publicists, pundits, etc.); in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and evil intent of apologetics” (97 - paranthesis mine).
In Germany, because it imported the ‘bourgeois science of political economy’ before the material conditions of the country in question met the material conditions upon which the science was based had the situation where “the capitalist mode of production came to maturity after its antagonistc character (that is the class conflict that partially defines capitalism as a struggle between exploiters and exploited) had been revealed” (98).
In other words, when the material conditions for developing a science of political economy indigenous to the ‘German condition’ finally presented themselves, the class conflict had already reached the point where any such science (or at least the dominant approach in that science) descends into the vulgarisms Marx mentions above.
When it comes to the vulgarized bourgeois political science, Marx identifies two groups of ’spokesmen’ (because now they are not scientists but apologists or idealogues):
1. ‘prudent, practicval business folk’ (perhaps crudely typified in our context by economics and business degrees -MBAs, the ‘entrepeneur’ who may study things like ‘the law of supply and demand’ but not look at the things underneath.
2. the apologists “proud of the professorial dignity of their science, followed John Stuart Mill in his attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable” (98).
Might it be possible to make the same basic illustration with Marxist political economy and the socialist revolutions that seized legitimacy in the periphery and semi-periphery of the capitalist world economy in the last century?
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