Eruditorum Press

Less organic intellectuals than morbid symptoms

Saturday Waffling (January 27th, 2018)

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Morning all. The Kickstarter for TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7: Sylvester McCoy will, unless something goes weirdly wrong, start on Thursday. I’m finalizing the list of stretch goals, which will be the added essays for the bolume, and I wanted to solicit input on McCoy-era stuff I’ve not covered that you’re hoping for in the book version. It can be Virgin or BBC Books novels, Big Finish stories, other media, Pop Between Realities stuff, or larger questions you’d like me to wrestle with. 

Nightshade is already on the list, and will be the lowest stretch goal, so you’re almost certain to get that. The final stretch goal will be “force Phil to read The Pit.” There are others I’m pretty sure to have on there, but I’ll leave it vague for now and let you suggest what you will.

Also, due to the existing number of McCoy entries and the fact that there’s some definite chaff in there (both Pop Between Realities stuff that only exists because I couldn’t keep a pace of three novels a week and novels that just didn’t work out as essays), there’s a very high chance some blog material will not make the book. If you have any beloved entries from the McCoy era that you’d be gutted to see fail to make the book, now’s a good time to tell me that.…

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Trot On, Hayek!

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Another little detour, away from both the recent starwarsing (which will be continued) and from the main line of all this Austriana.  Once again, this is a long version of a section of the essay ‘No Law for the Lions and Many Laws for the Oxen is Liberty’, co-written by myself and Phil for his new book Neoreaction a Basilisk, which you – yes you! – can purchase for non-gold backed fiat currency.  Buy a copy today – it’s the only rational calculation!

 

Ludwig von Mises – founder of the shittest cult of personality since selfhood itself was invented – famously declared, in an article published in 1920 which was subsequently developed into a book-style object, that socialism – by which he meant any society in which the means of production were commonly owned – was impossible, unworkable. The timing of publication was undoubtedly tied to the fact that, in 1920, it looked to most observers as if the infant Soviet Union was about to expire a mere three years or so after its birth. Mises was positioning himself, with gleeful anticipation, to be able to dance on the grave of the world’s first workers’ state, shouting “told you so!”  Unfortunately for Mises, and for a lot of fascists, Trotsky existed.

Mises asserts that public ownership, because it abolishes the capital goods market, means that there can be no determination of prices for capital goods, and therefore no way to determine the relative values of primary resources, and therefore no way to allocate them efficiently and rationally. This claim is patently outrageous coming from people who are putting it forth as a way of championing capitalism, a system that has brought us to the point where the richest eight men on the planet own as much as the poorest 50% of the entire human race, and which is literally pushing the planet to the point where it will very soon be unable to support human life. But you always have to remember that, for people like this, the world of reckless short-termism and obscene inequality we live in is rational.  Indeed, the entire Austrian project is devoted to the cause of proving that it is as close to a rational ordering of society as we can ever manage… which is why they had to devise an entire school of thought founded on the insolent rejection of evidence.

But let’s take it seriously for a moment. In simple terms, the argument – which, as will be clear, is derived directly from Austrian first principles – runs thus: to achieve a decent and sustainable standard of living, a society must be able to allocate its resources efficiently by making economic calculations. To do this you have to know what the ‘primary factors’ – the big, important resources that form the basis of all production, such as land, steel, and capital itself – are worth, and thus the best use to make of them. You derive this knowledge from prices assigned by the market.…

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An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi

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The obvious starting point is the dualism that creatively defines the sequel trilogy, with J.J. Abrams’s faithful recitations of iconography on either end of Johnson’s far weirder and more difficult approach to doing a Star Wars. Neither director needed to do Star Wars, but for very different reasons. Abrams had already defined himself as a classically minded reinventer of classic genre tropes, and the franchise was merely a bigger version of what he’d already done with Star Trek. Johnson, meanwhile, was a rising indie visionary with ideas of his own and while jumping over and doing a big genre film would no doubt open new options for his own work, he was doing perfectly fine.

There is virtually no way of describing the two where Johnson does not come across as the more interesting filmmaker. He is, frankly, a bizarre and unprecedentedly brave choice for the franchise—to put it with maximal uncharitableness, the first time a Star Wars film has ever been helmed by a real director. And it’s no surprise that the result is fundamentally unlike other Star Wars movies. We might start with the end, noting that the final shot, in which Star Wars merchandise becomes the next Guy Fawkes mask in a scene with none of the main characters, utterly removed from the main action, is simply not something that any previous film would ever have considered. It’s amazing, and we’ll return to what it’s doing, but the real jaw-dropping moment that requires us to stop and reevaluate the basic question of what a Star Wars movie is comes a few minutes earlier, in the fight between Luke and Kylo Ren. Ren directs the full force of the First Order’s weapons against one man, standing out in the salt plain, hitting him with a bunch of AT-ATs. The attack stretches on preposterously long, an act of blatant, childish overkill. And then, as the smoke clears, an unharmed Luke walks out and moves his hand along his shoulder in an imitation of a Jay-Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulder,” a song from a distant galaxy in the far future.

Never mind that no previous Star Wars movie do this – had Johnson done it two-and-a-half hours earlier it would have come off as a complete misunderstanding of how to Star Wars. Doing stuff like this seems to be part of why Chris Miller and Phil Lord got themselves sacked from Solo. It’s the most mind-wrenching and genuinely astonishing shot in all of Star Wars, simply because it passes off something that should be entirely outside the grammar without so much as a fuss. What on Earth had he been doing for two-and-a-half hours that made that work?

Inevitably, there’s no one answer. Indeed, the crux of Johnson’s approach is to repeatedly do small and unexpected things, none of which feel like ruptures of what Star Wars means, but all of which demonstrate a willingness to ask not only what Star Wars can do that’s new, but to ask what it has thus far lacked.…

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Forward, to the Past! 2 – Episode 2: First Order of Business

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Spoilers

 

Even as it complicates the Star Wars universe in some ways, the sequel trilogy clings close to the old liberalism vs. fascism dichotomy that dominated the politics of the original trilogy and prequel trilogy, and which dominates fantasy narratives generally. (See this by Phil, for instance.) The First Order’s politics is essentially contentless. They hate the Republic because reasons. They wear black and grey uniforms, and have red and black banners, and rallies, and they’re therefore fascists, and the fascists hate liberal democracy because they just do. This dichotomy, which is pervasive throughout stories of this kind (look at Harry Potter for instance) tells us something about the permissible horizons of ideology in the capitalist mass culture industries. It is this which gives rise to the syndrome I talked about in my villains essay, in which I point out (amongst other things) that villains are usually the only people in stories like this who are trying to fundamentally change the world. 

Actually, the original trilogy scores slightly better on this than many other such narratives. It is set in a period when the fascists have already won, and the people trying to change the world are the good guys. While it set the fascism/liberalism dichotomy template for a generation of fantasy narratives, Star Wars actually had a marginally better version to offer. The odd thing is that, while consciously more ‘right on’ (or does one day ‘woke’ these days?) in many ways, the sequel trilogy is actually retrograde in this respect, because – at least in Force Awakens – the First Order is more like a challenger to the reign of the New Republic, a splinter group, a secessionist movement. 

I noted in this essay how much the First Order looks like the Confederacy. This is the spin that Force Awakens put on the old dichotomy, and it’s valuable – except that it once again positions the bad guys as the only people trying to change things, the only people challenging liberal democracy. And that’s a shame because liberal democracy needs challenging. It’s better than fascism, but that’s a low bar. The Union was better than the Confederacy, and the Civil War was worth fighting (to push for the freedom of the slaves, etc) but it’s also true that the Union was capitalist and imperialist, and that imperialism was built into its actual motives for fighting the Civil War. The Union went on to build its further expansion on imperialism, invasion, slaughter, warmongering, oppression, genocide, etc. 

In the fascism/liberalism dichotomy, the baddies are almost always the only people challenging such systems. They often get to point out the hypocrisy of liberal democracy, before being proved wrong and crushed. The ideological utility of such moves doesn’t take much parsing. You eternally consign challenges to the status quo to the category of villainy and fanaticism, and to doom.

There is something to be said for storytelling – in the late teens of the twenty-first century – that is open and unambiguous about fascism being a bad thing that needs to be stopped.

…

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The Proverbs of Hell 33/39: Digestivo

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DIGESTIVO: An after-dinner (and after-coffee) drink such as grappa or limoncello. As we’ve completed the actual Italian portion of our adaptation of Hannibal in order to return to the US, this is on the whole sensible.

JACK CRAWFORD: Hannibal Lecter, il Mostro di Firenze, narrowly escapes the Questura. That how the story goes?

INSPECTOR BENETTI: Missed him by that much. The good Dottor Lecter is once more in the wind. But he left one last victim. Open him the way Lecter opened the other one. Open him all the way.

Something of a rarity in Hannibal, Benetti is an utter shithead who gets to display this act of staggering and monstrous corruption without any consequences. He disappears from the narrative entirely, having nothing to contribute past this point. Indeed, this is the last scene to be set in Italy, and there is essentially no unfinished business there, this dickbag excepted. 

CHIYOH: You’re sitting at Hannibal’s table. You know him. You know Will.

JACK CRAWFORD: I know them. They are identically different, Hannibal and Will.

This is a deeply odd time for Jack to lapse into gnomic hedging, even if it is generally his default state. “Identically different” is a particularly sub-par contribution to the genre, saying little (and nothing Chiyoh doesn’t already know) and doing so in a way that is downright ostentatious in its capacity to frustrate. He is admittedly heavily drugged, but “identically different” manages the impressive feat of not actually describing Will and Hannibal’s mirrored quality in any particularly accurate way.

MASON VERGER: There’s a hush over Muskrat Farm, Cordell, like the quiet of the old Sabbath. Smells like salvation.

As we prepare to say goodbye to Mason Verger, let’s pause to savor him dramatically unfurling Harris’s scene description as an aside to Cordell in an attempt to amp up the moment. Although his scenery-chewing “smells like salvation” is a step down from Harris’s almost Trumpian folow-up that “Privately, [Mason] compared his accomplishment to the discovery of radium.” 

ALANA BLOOM: I appreciate wanting to kill Hannibal Lecter. I am not without benefit from that.

MASON VERGER: Can’t make good on his promise to murder you if he’s dead.

ALANA BLOOM: But he’s not dead. Play with your food, Mason, and you’ll give it the opportunity to bite back.

MASON VERGER: Oh, I’m not playing, Dr. Bloom.

ALANA BLOOM: Hannibal is. He’s always playing.

Alana speaks damning prophecy here while navigating a tricky set of competing concerns; she’s previously expressed a desire to sell Mason out and get Hannibal into FBI custody. That seems frustrated at the moment, but pushing for Hannibal’s fast death undermines her stalling for time to save Will. 

MASON VERGER: You boys remind me of that German cannibal who advertised for a friend, then ate the friend’s penis with him before he died. Tragedy being, the penis was overcooked. Go to all that trouble to eat a friend, and you overcook his penis. They ate it anyway. They had to, they committed. But they didn’t enjoy it.

…

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Forward, to the Past! 2 – Episode 1: Mind Tricks

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Spoilers

A note on formatting: I refuse to call the movie Star Wars “A New Hope” or “Episode IV”, so when I put Star Wars in italics (like just then) I mean the first movie they made, the one with Jawas and Greedo and Mos Eisley, etc.  When I put Star Wars without italics (like just then) I’m referring to the series or franchise or meta-text as a whole.

 

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Having finally seen The Last Jedi, I was free to take a look at what others were saying about it. I’d been aware that the film was proving controversial… by which people seemed to mean that almost everyone liked it apart from a tiny sliver of white men whose disapproval was creating the artificial impression of controversy, and who – paradoxically enough – probably also deny the existence of privilege.

I won’t go into the objections of the tiny layer of voluble fanboys who decided to hate (or rather angst over) Last Jedi. I’m sure all that has been well covered elsewhere. But I will just point out one thing: the tendency to point to moments when the film took a stance or expressed a viewpoint and to see these as objective mistakes.

It was, some say, a mistake to depict Luke in the way the film did. It was also, according to some, a mistake to depict Poe the way the film did, especially in his relationship to Holdo. It was a mistake to leave Snoke unexplained, and to kill him off. It was a mistake to reveal that Rey’s parents were nobodies, of no significance to the plot or mythos. It was a mistake to see Leia use the Force impressively to save herself.  Etc.  And so on.

The ways in which these things are said to be mistakes varies, but the basic idea of the mistake is a running theme in the complaints. The film is also too comedic, which was yet another mistake. It’s a comedy of errors, one might say. Though it lacks identical twins and dirty jokes.

Luke, it is said, is depicted wrongly according to his established character. The mystery of Rey’s background is squandered. Etc, etc. The mistake is either a betrayal of some established bit of lore or characterisation (a continuity error of characterisation, basically), or it’s a bug in the storytelling mechanics, a bit of faulty engineering.

This is all rather telling, and in ways that are pretty obvious really.To adumbrate the complaints is almost to explain them.

We’re often dealing with people who see storytelling in terms of correct and incorrect decisions, with these measured against a kind of ‘instruction manual’ conception of how narrative works.

This is, of course, a case of the porgs coming home to roost, since such a view of storytelling has a purchase on the ideas of a couple of generations of fanboys precisely because of the slavish (if initially post-facto) devotion to Campbellian ideas about mythic storytelling that were championed by Lucas, and which turned out to be so unfortunately influential.…

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The Proverbs of Hell 32/39: Dolce

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DOLCE: Dessert. Nobody particularly gets their just ones here, so let’s call this a case of running out of both course names and titles in this phase of the series. 

The bath has been a fragile refuge for Bedelia over the first half of this season. Here she sacrifices this safe position, turning it over to Hannibal as she cleans his wounds after his fight with Jack. This, however, contains its own form of power, as we will shortly see.

WILL GRAHAM: Jack  .

There is an odd understatement and contrivance to this reunion – Will pops up in Florence with improbable speed and simply arrives by Jack’s side, with their reunion almost entirely underplayed. But for all that this violates scads of normative rules about how narrative functions, it’s tremendously effective. The reunion between them that mattered was in “Apertivo.” The significance of this is simply that it allows the plot to move forward, and so it does.

JACK CRAWFORD: And Hannibal would slip away. Would you slip away with him?

WILL GRAHAM: Part of me will always want to.

JACK CRAWFORD: You have to cut that part out.

A simple and moving confession on Will’s part. Jack’s response is fundamentally inadequate, asking something of Will that he cannot possibly give – the “have you tried not being gay” of addictions to cannibalistic serial killing,

HANNIBAL: I want to be able to draw these streets from memory. I want to be able to draw the Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: You won’t be coming back here for a very long time.

HANNIBAL: Memories of Florence will be all I have. Florence is where I became a man. I see my end in my beginning.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: All of our endings can be found in our beginnings. History repeats itself and we can’t escape it.

Bedelia’s fatalism is essentially a restatement of Aristotelean plot structure, and thus an overwhelmingly safe bet for someone currently inside a serialized television show. Her real concerns, however, are not so much Hannibal as herself and her end, as evinced by her use of the first person plural and by the next exchange,.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: I knew you were intending to eat me and I knew you had no intention of doing it hastily.

HANNIBAL: Would be a shame not to savor you.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: I haven’t quite marinated long enough for your tastes.

And here we see the exquisite and frankly mad brinkmanship of Bedelia’s position – her compulsion to study and observe Hannibal wedged right up against her knowledge of how that will inevitably play out. And yet in this moment at least, she navigates an escape, getting Hannibal to, at least temporarily, leave her undigested. 

CORDELL: A Buddhist singing bowl. The gong represents the start of a new day.

MASON VERGER: Buddhists don’t eat meat.

CORDELL: This isn’t meat. This is man.

Mason’s planned consumption of Hannibal is a vulgar inversion of Hannibal’s tastes. Where Hannibal eats people to show that he is more than human, Mason eats them precisely because they are human, viewing the act of consumption as elevating himself.…

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Wrong With Authority Podcast, Episode 6 – ‘Inherit the Wind’

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We’re back, with a proper WWA episode.  Daniel’s choice this time: Inherit the Wind, Stanley Kramer’s 1960 drama loosely based on the Scopes Monkey Trial.  (Details here.)

Download WWA6 here

A really good episode, this one (IMHO).  Lots of laughs and silliness but also some meaty discussion about history and politics.  

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Show Notes: Main Topic: Inherit the Wind. Vague plot summary. Fictionalized. Quality female characters. Familiarity breeds contempt? Chimpanzee casting. Didn’t fall in love. Connected to Mississippi Burning. Cartoonish Brady. Brady’s wife. Sexism of 1925. Pronouncement dialogue. Golden Age acting. Comic relief. Unforgiving role. The One Man Who Can Think. Educating the rubes. McCarthyism. Flouting conformity and Great-Man-ism. Village Atheist. Blacklisted screenwriter and HUAC. Slavish attachment to the USSR. At last, a Trump reference. And Nixon. Fans sponspored by the funeral home. Perspiration necessary for a proper courtroom drama. Bigwig motives. Old Time Religion Uber Alles. Lynching sequences. Black actors. Talking about civil rights without talking about civil rights. Mencken. Brady’s hypocrisy. Not William Jennings Bryan. Classism and the American South. Ditto for British regional accents. Legitimate resentment. Not even Hollywood Poverty. The “respectable poor.” Scopes and eugenics. Scientism and Social Darwinism. Nasty Nietzsche. Sociobiological implications in Darwin’s followers. Kit brings us back to the film for a moment. Rachel Brown’s impossible choice. “Just fucking listen.” Western heroine thing. Darrow calls Bryan. Interlude. Facts not feels. “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” Williams Jennings Bryan and his place in history. Bryan’s presidential runs and the gold standard. No left in American history. Radicalism of the gospels. New Atheists revised history. Defending Dawkins? Arguing against the book. The history of the religious right. Aftereffects of the trial. Inherit the Raging Bull. Two colonels? Eugenics and evolution. Moral systems. Christianity is revolutionary. Origins of creationism vis a vis fundamentalism. Luther and divisions in the WWA crew. The Klan. Hitchens on King. “White With Authority.” Evolution in American schools. Using theology for political purposes. Non-binary thinking. Bill Nye. The Universal lot. Good American monkeys. Adapting the play. H.L. Mencken the Nazi sympathizer. Wrapping Up. Next time: Gangs of New York.

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Daniel’s book recommendations:

Six Days or Forever?: Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes by Ray Ginger

The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design by Ronald L. Numbers

 …

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The Proverbs of Hell 31/39: Contorno

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CONTORNO: A side dish, typically served with the secondo. This episode is a last chance to do small stuff before the major fireworks of the first arc of the season go off, but more to the point, as we will see, is in a meaningful sense focused on a side character. 

CHIYOH: On still evenings, when the air was damp after a rain, we played a game. Hannibal would burn all kinds of barks and incense for me to identify by scent alone. He was charming the way a cub is charming, a small cub that grows up to be like one of the big cats.

WILL GRAHAM: One you can’t play with later.

The game is more or less a direct quote from Hannibal Rising, and the nominal origin of Hannibal’s supernatural sense of smell. Although it is notable that the game is played with burnt objects, so that what is identified is not the smell of the thing, but the smell of its destruction.  In her analogy for his charm, meanwhile, we have something that’s almost diametrically opposite from Will’s “pathetic wretch that failed to die” assessment, suggesting an early and seemingly innate grandeur to Hannibal. It is difficult, as we get into the depths of the show’s third season, to argue that Chiyoh does not have the right of it.

WILL GRAHAM: He comes in the guise of a mentor, but it’s distress that excites him.

This does not in fact describe Hannibal’s initial approach to Will, in which he was largely the manufacturer of the distress. Indeed, Will appears to have Hannibal wrong here. Hannibal certainly does do this on occasion, most obviously with Abigail, but Will is wrong to treat Hannibal’s tendency towards mentorship as insincere. As Chiyoh’s incense story shows, he really does enjoy the role of teacher, which is unsurprising given that the role leads directly towards something that clearly excites Hannibal more than distress: transformation.

CHIYOH:  How do you know Hannibal’s in Florence?

WILL GRAHAM: Botticelli.

It’s interesting that Will’s answer is not, in fact, the double murder at the university, that being the thing that Bedelia assumed would bring attention to Hannibal. (Indeed, so far as I can tell nobody ever really makes anything of Anthony Dimmond’s murder at all – later in this episode, in fact, Pazzi calls Sogliato the second person to disappear.)

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: Almost anything can be trained to resist its instinct. A shepherd dog does not savage the sheep.

HANNIBAL: But it wants to.

I am not an expert on dog psychology, and far too lazy to commit to depth in researching this, but this certainly seems as though Hannibal is projecting, if only because of the research suggesting that dogs’ default behavior is in fact that of a profoundly lazy scavenger. (That and the people I’ve talked to who have pet collies that have never seen sheep, and who instead attempt to herd their families into a single room.) Nevertheless, this is a fantastic exchange, mostly because the discussion of animal psychology paints a vivid image for the real subject, human psychology, and the suggestion that human law and civilization is a thin veneer constantly threatened by an underlying savagery.…

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Böhm-Bawerk Doesn’t Werk

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An interlude, consisting of a much expanded treatment of a short section from the material I contributed to the Austrian School essay in Phil’s new book, which is now on sale along with his other books.

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Amended 16/8/18 to remove a factual error.

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The leading Austrian economist after Menger was Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk.  He was the developer of many key Austrian mainstay theories.  The interesting thing is that he spends a huge amount of his time attacking Marx.  Indeed, as noted, his attack on Marx is to a large extent the springboard which leads him to his own theories. 

His major criticism of Marx is connected to something called the ‘transformation problem’.  But it’s a bit of a twisty story.

In a polemic published not long after the posthumous publication of Capital vol.III (1894), Böhm-Bawerk claimed that volumes I and III of Capital contradict each other when it comes to the matter of how values are transformed into prices.  Marx, says Böhm-Bawerk, claims in vol.I that commodities tend to sell at their values and promises to explain later why it seems otherwise in real life.  However, says Böhm-Bawerk, when Marx comes back to this in vol.III, he fails to explain, leaving himself stuck in a contradiction.  Commodities supposedly sell at their values, yet Marx is unable to explain how values are transformed into prices.

This claim was very influential among mainstream economists for a long time because, as Andrew Kliman says in his seminal book Reclaiming Marx’s Capital, “it reflects their view that only price and profit, not value and surplus-value, matter in the real world”.  Kliman goes on to note, in his polite way, that “[i]t has also been very influential among non-economists, probably because it is simpler than the subsequent critiques”.  Böhm-Bawerk is often mentioned when people talk about long-running and serious objections to Marx’s theory of capitalism.  He often comes up when people begin talking about what is arguably the longest running – and most damaging – controversy in Marxist economics, the issue known as ‘the Transformation Problem’.  There is no doubt that, in the loose sense, he founded the controversy.

However, as Kliman points out, “the specialist literature has all but ignored Böhm-Bawerk’s critique” since the Keynesian economist Paul Samuelson dismissed him, in the midst of his own attack on Marx in 1971.  (Samuelson’s attack is another story.  It was extremely influential but also highly peculiar, and its timing was clearly politically motivated; it was an attempt to counter the increasing popularity of Marx at the time among radicalised students.)  Any idea that Böhm-Bawerk remains a powerful enemy of Marx must flounder on the fact that his ideas have had little direct influence on anyone in the major debate for more than forty years.  That does not, of course, make him wrong (Kliman admits that Böhm-Bawerk may have been abandoned partly for political reasons), but it does make him largely irrelevant.

You see, although Böhm-Bawerk began the critical focus on Marx’s account of value/price transformation, the contradiction he supposedly detects in Marx is actually not the one that formed the basis of the long-running transformation debate.…

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