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www.kaosenlared.net / news / Marxism, philosophical and scientific thought-our-time Hugo Fernando
Azcurra is an Argentine economist who did postgraduate studies in Economic History at the Faculty of Economics, National University of Buenos Aires (UBA). He served as a professor in the faculties of Economics and Philosophy and Letters of the same university. Currently serves as professor of Economic History at the CBC, UBA. Macroeconomics has been academic at the University of Salvador, among many other university activities. He also teaches a graduate workshop on Marx and Sraffa at the University of Luján.
is the author of 'Democracy and social processes in Argentina' (1985), 'New Argentina bourgeois alliance '(1987),' State Enterprises and economy in Argentina '(1989),' Marx and the subjective theory of value '(1993),' Foundations of macroeconomics' (2003), 'Capital and surplus' in collaboration with Alejandro Fiorito (2005), "Macroeconomic Theory" (2006).
hazcurra89@yahoo.com.ar Visiting Chile invited by the political group unit of Peoples' Movement and Workers, and the mountain range slopes of the Central Valley, on the outskirts of Santiago, Fernando Hugo Azcurra granted this interview . On Tuesday 11 January at 19:00 hrs. at 177 Race Street will offer a presentation and discussion about his latest production "Imperialism and Socialism" open to the public.
"Most of the time it speaks very poorly of Marxism ...
" Marxism as a materialistic vision of the world, will point in a few decades to two centuries. Relatively recently from the perspective of historical development of political theories, sociological, philosophical, logical and, above all, economic. That is, we're not talking about something dead, but something existing, but not total and absolute truth. His now contends it permanently is realizing its validity by the incessant debate it raises. Although, of course, aspects of Marxism have had changed the tenor of the changes that have taken themselves of bourgeois society. "
" Some people say that Marx is a thing of the past ...
"In the social sciences, there any theory of society that has passed today, or is in transit to do so, the work of Marx and in the field of political theory and practice is summarized in the figures of Lenin and Gramci. No one can say that Marxism is already out of fashion, because it was never fashionable. Marxism has always been present because he is immersed in the class struggle of the peoples. Its validity is not an academic or literature, but emerges in the process of reality itself and the transformations that exist in society. "
- what?
"During the crisis that erupted in the United States in 2008, took place at some academic centers a kind of resurrection of Marx, there looking for what could be said to address the crisis, which, moreover, continues. And so it was with Keynes. These two great thinkers still reference source because something made you stay. No one is looking for a thinker who is already considered overcome.
"So, what is Marxism?
" Marxism is thought philosophical and science of our time. "
- What is the most important currently offered by Marxism?
"Materialism analytical political theory. And then, even though it is highly contested, economic theory. In the first field has not appeared, nor do I see on the immediate horizon, no political theory can provide a set of concepts and analytical categories such as from the classics of Marxism. In the economic area is more objective, not wholly, but in some ways that continue to be central. If I say that Marx is highly disputed and quite certain fundamentals Strictly speaking, the theory of value, to the point that the criticisms come to doubt the existence of such value or nature rather as a definition or scenario analysis, for the part of many that we form on the left could be a kind of sacrilege. However, whenever the theory of value was questioned by the orthodox academic concepts. But one thing is when the objection from an ideological standpoint, it is another thing when, as happens now, it appeared, was developed and disseminated an economic theory based on Quesnay and Ricardo, Marx respect what he did at some points But eliminating the value of analysis of bourgeois economics. And on technical grounds is very serious and analytical. It may, as always, agree or disagree with it, but you can not ignore claiming that it is a purely ideological. "
A PRELIMINARY REVIEW Piero Sraffa
- Who takes the lead in the questions above?
"For thirty years, the economic theory of Piero Sraffa has caused an impact that demolished the dominant marginalist economic theory for more than a century, and also impacted on the economic theory of Marx. Sraffa emerges as a thinker who defined a new paradigm from which to examine how the process works reproduction of capital. His work is known as "production of goods through goods" and is located in a highly original and penetrating. There are 100 pages that have caused a revolution within the very thought of many Marxists, to the point that is very rare in Europe and the United States significant number of economists and thinkers of this concept is still a Marxist. Exists, but is a minority. Many of the former Marxist economists have now become economists 'esraffianos' because they believe that Marx was unable to complete his work from a logical perspective for an explanation that is coherent and consistent between value and price; and Sraffa succeeded in explaining the functioning of prices and distribution without need for any theory of value. "
- What is your opinion?
I have the impression, even very elementary, that the work that was imposed compared with Marx Sraffa is extremely small. Marx is a whole range from the point of view of his work logical, philosophical, political and economic. Instead Sraffa took up a small mountain of this range, resolving the issue with remarkable brilliance. And it comes from a widespread analytical concept among economists that mathematical thinking. Of course that capital is not immune to having formulas, definitions, diagrams and very basic arithmetic. But Sraffa was among the first to use mathematical formulas that are not even in Ricardo and Adam Smith much less. In this case, the use of mathematics is not simply to make clearer the thought, for establishing quantitative relationships, but corresponds to a whole mode of thinking about reality. While Marx also thinks quantitative relationships, but with more weight on the historical-institutional relations in which capitalism operates. Sraffa did not address it. "
- What looked Sraffa?
Roll economics a natural science, and if possible, with a high degree of accuracy in their calculations. That is, the economy would be designed by Sraffa something like an analytical framework which would allow for strict economic policy tools in the same way a dentist, as Keynes. He stated that at some point the economy would have to be sufficiently developed as dentistry. However, Sraffa took that idea to its highest point. "
- What is your opinion regarding this claim?
"is respectable, but Sraffa evades what is the foundation of the economy: social conflict. Marx, meanwhile, said the economy can only become a positive science in natural science, when only addressing conflicts of dogma, and is unaware of the fundamentals that are the real conflicts. "
- What does this mean?
"That can make economics a science strict and close to nature only escape from the real conflicts of society, class conflict and the institutions that are engaged in these struggles. Economics is the social-historical. "
- What could be used when Sraffa theory?
"When society no longer divided into classes and their conflict is with the best appropriation of nature. But this method can not be used through social classes, when a sector exploits the other. These are the limits of the design Sraffian. "
RISKS OF ABSTRACTION
-You hold a degree of caution regarding the general to see the reality ...
" The left in the world has been able reading of the classics that the structure critical of bourgeois society exists in the contrast between venture capitalists and employees. Marx was not talking about capital and wage labor, because it replaces abstraction with real subjects. It is true, the reality is apprehended by abstractions. The problem is that immediately, the abstractions seem to become autonomous of its origin and then take the place of the real subjects. Then, when one speaks of capital and not immediately think of venture capitalists, but in a generic. Ie the concept is substantial. And when we talk about wage labor also an abstraction. Since workers do not immediately think of flesh and blood existing concrete and exploited. "
" Sounds like a
subtlety ... "But it's a subtlety extremely important because it prevents the real subjects replaced by their abstractions, although both are necessary in the real mental abbreviations. Must be taken to avoid the categories substantivation philosophical, economic, political because this is the idealist slip with abstractions. Inadvertently tend to shorten and then we used to dealing with abstractions that are not really empty, they have an empirical content. "
- What are the abstractions most dangerous for those who undertake the struggle to transform society from the interests of workers?
"You have to understand that the concept of paid work is grounded in a reality of class struggle that has history. The left has been instructed on the concept of labor and proletarian, and immediately on our behalf we see a proletarian nineteenth-century manufacturing is not there today, "but we seldom realize that this figure corresponded to a predominance in its development stage of capitalist society and the accumulation of capital. So the works of Marx have the concept of proletarian workers and the empirical content. However, when we speak today of worker inadvertently continue to believe in that figure, since the reality has extended the concept of proletarian to the employee, ranging from factory worker to the bank, the educator, of health, services. Ie reality has become richer than the concept. So we have to discuss employee that we all live on a salary. Here the concepts should be enriched with sociological categories of status and role. "
- How?
"The bank worker considered to occupy a status and plays a different role to that of a factory worker. The worker has the experience of exploitation on their skin much more clearly that the bank worker who believes, for example, which is making a career. A factory worker at the most will become foreman. Although both are objectively in the same class. "
What challenges means this for those struggling to change the present order of things?
"Unity, because the worker is enhanced when you join. So Marx argues that capital has been a revolutionary force in human history because of feudalism broke down barriers, opening the social power of labor. The production process is social reproduction. Do not think the individual or society although there is no individual production and reproduction. But when individuals come together produce relationships and things that are past. The individual is not only what exists but rather the result of mutual relations, and together, create superstructures sometimes autonomous, as the State. It is a creation of individuals, however, became autonomous and turns against him when one sector of society uses the state as an instrument of subjugation of the rest. Now, as is a human creation, men can change this state. "Hegemony
FINANCIAL CAPITAL - What is capital?
"Overall, people associated with the capital with money, with machinery, with education to improve their standard of living. The capital is determined mainly because he makes a profit and has, presumably, the rights to this benefit. The capital always produces a profit, because all that does not produce a benefit is not capital. However, capital needs, factory workers, bankers, merchants, service-to produce goods and services and obtain capital gains because it would invest. Then the substantial element that defines the capital is wage labor. In short, the capital is not a thing. It is a relationship that exists between social sectors, between owners of capital, the means of production that serve as capital, compared to non-owners of means of production. The owner of the means of production is a non-worker and the worker is a non-capital. In this asymmetric structure appears good. The capital is a specific historical relationship production. "
- What about saving people?
"I have a nest egg product of my personal effort and deposit in a bank to give me a cup of interest. Then people say 'I have a little capital. " But it is not true. That is little capital for which it takes into debt and put it in the production process. For those who deposited in a bank, it's just deferred consumption. In fact when one goes monthly by removing a fraction of your salary for savings in a bank, is to buy something later. Like that I can buy something immediately, I go gathering little by little and after a time of purchase. In the economic reality that savings the worker is deferred consumption, but meanwhile are used by the banking network to provide credit to businesses and continue playing the capital. In the end, everyone who can save something, without knowing or wanting it, are helping to reproduce the capital itself. When I buy a bottle of milk I do so not just because I'm off the market, but because I can not survive without it. But in banking, I can do without that bottle of milk. In good accounts, the financial system is absorbing part of the effort of the working class to play as a business to other companies. "
" You said with great force the hegemony of financial capital in the world, how explained?
"First, banks are financially and floors: the bank credit that relates to companies and depositors, the bank that specializes in certain loans only to companies, the investment bank, the only specialized bank financial assets and create new financial instruments such as derivatives, and the central bank that only works with banks. Then there are the exchanges and securities markets. All this set is correlated and has expanded in such a way, especially in more developed capitalist countries, that financial capital relations have autonomized to the point that financial capital is 'mounted' on the old commercial and industrial capitalism. "
- When was it pointing?
"Until the Second World War and still in a relative way, one could speak of a predominance of industrial capital where the financial capital was a facilitator of business and transactions of the industrial capital, and that the interest rate could never be on the average rate of profit. Today this no longer occurs. Financial capital has grown so monstrously and has autonomized So he tells him financially to commercial and industrial capital and end all kinds of calculations, and imposes upon obtaining a performance because financial capital is now the owner the industrialist, not 50 or 100 years ago. At present, companies and corporations are bought and sold to see if they yield as canned tomatoes. "
" But before companies are also bought and sold ...
"But buying or selling a small industrial workshop is different to sell giant corporations. Indeed. Financial capital can be drawn and quartered for the specific branch of a corporation is more productive than others. Financial capital is the lord of life, not just of workers and society as a whole, but of its own bourgeois industrial sectors are required to create through its templates new forms of performance management that requires financial capital. So now the rate of profit must be consistent and pay according to a rate of interest. "
beyond capitalism
- What is socialism after the fall of the Soviet Union, what happening in China?
"There are already historical experiences. And here we can not be absent-minded, regardless of the flaws and errors. That the Socialism of the USSR, for example, has proved unsuccessful experience with all its historical specificity, does not mean that capitalism is superior to socialism. Not so. Capitalism does not is able to eliminate exploitation, inequality, injustice, or poverty, and impunity. If capitalism managed to avoid this, simply cease to be capitalism. So while fail a thousand times any socialist experience, that does not mean that the capitalist system is better. It means, however, that companies are looking out of it because otherwise there would be many socialist experiments. The workers are unhappy in capitalism. And no society disappears in exchange for another 'pure'. In truth we are walking access to a new society, but as we are contemporaries, we realize this, we see immediately before dying. In the future we will see the Russian Revolution as the beginning of the decline of capitalism. And the capital and the bourgeois society are not eternal. Are historic. I have no doubt or angst about overcoming of capitalism. "
" There looks to link to a centralized state socialism ...
"If the state concentrates the means of production, concentrated production decisions and reproduction as resolving a single entity and, therefore, as a single employer, and the rest of society is of employees, so there is an attempt to overcome capitalism, but still within the working relationships paid and capital. Now there are millions of employers but monopoly of a single economic, political and social: the State which claimed to represent workers. In these circumstances, the company continues to live on a salary and continues to produce goods to which access by wage income. This means that if the current socialist experiences successive basic and central aim not to create the conditions for removal from employment, will revive capitalism. "
- And that way than wage labor?
"Building for the work associated conditions. Can be in the process of transition property public state property, combined with cooperative enterprises in the industry of all kinds. "
" But there continues to be over ...
"The surplus was not invented by capitalism. The surplus is something that any society occurs when the amount of goods and services exceeds the level of survival. The issue is who appropriates the surplus and by what social and political relations. In capitalism, there plus product, plus work, plus appropriate value privately. In a socialist society the surplus is socially produced and distributed by the producers themselves. In a related workers are working not for another, but for the set and improvements overall life. "
- And politically?
"The existence of a workers' party in the state does not mean the perpetuation there. The experience of the Communist Party identified with the state, was a purely Russian phenomenon was generalized as if it were a law of nature. Lenin said they were still in a process -1920 - many estrechecez, hardship and harassment of the bands imperialist invading the country, preventing recovery in peace. So says that we should not fail to deliver the State because the revolution. But we are talking about transitional periods. Lenin said that when the revolution was consolidated the should secede from the State party and the state would have to be directed and controlled by the workers themselves. Then, at that stage, the new company will stand on its own feet. Also, if the Party and State will replace and replace the working class, why the class should fight for this society? "
" If you separate the state party, what good is the game at that time ?
"will tend to disappear because they also tend to fade in the State."
January 10, 2011
http://www.insurrectasypunto.org
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