| Varoufakis Interviewing Richard Wolff |
I recently stumbled across the podcast Econoclasts. Usually, he co-hosts with the Wolfgang Munchau, a journalist. The above is an extract from the end of an episode where Varoufakis, by himself, interviews Richard Wolff.
It takes lots of study to show why marginalist economics is wrong. Varoufakis says that he no longer can recommend to students that they do that study. He asks Wolff what he does. Wolff responds:
"Well, here's what I tell them. And again I share much of what you have to say. In the ten years I spent at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, I had to learn, I had to teach neoclassical microeconomics and Keynesian macroeconomics and all the rest. I believed then as I guess you did, too, that this was necessary. I had to understand how the system, not just how it worked, but how it rationalized itself, how it imagined itself to be working.
I did learn early on that the system also understands that dichotomy. So, it has economics departments who develop the ideological cover, as you put it, the rationale, why it all works out for an optimal - look at the language - an equilibrium - more silly language, you know - a system that is neither optimal nor presenting itself as all of that.
And then they have a business school where you actually learn a little bit about how to market something, how to go. They recognize the separation of function.
So, I say to students, you have to do something else, which I had to figure out how to do. I'm going to save you the time. And they look at me, but this is what I do, and I'm answering your question. You have to learn Marxian economics. You do. You have to immerse yourself in the volumes of Capital, in the other literature. Not because everything is clear there, it isn't. Not because there aren't contradictions, there are. Not because there's nothing in neoclassical economics you can't make use of. It's not that.
It's that if you think what I am doing is interesting, it's not me. And it's not what I got at Harvard and Yale. What it is, it comes out of trying to squeeze useful understanding out of the Marxian tradition, separated from the propaganda and from the mistakes and the lessons that weren't learned that should have been, in order to do that - you have to do, and the university cannot do that for you precisely because it fits your description. It’s not - it could care less.
It never was interested in - I never had a class in 10 years and except for Paul Baran, I never had a class in which anybody ever put together a Marxian idea, a neoclassical idea, and then went with us as students through what they had to say, where they were silent and shouldn't have been, where ' etc., etc. None of that was ever done. I had to do all that myself or with a few other students. But the payoff is you get a way of thinking, a way of posing questions that you can then use for all of the new material that Marx, you know, died long before it became relevant.
You know that you try to do that when you try to understand the Cloud. What does the Cloud make possible? What are these conglomerations of wealth and power able to do that capitalists couldn't do before? Where does that take us? Where are the obstacles? What is our best - You need a critical mentality.
And I know many people believe they can develop that on their own. I don't think so. I think if you really want to get beyond Marx, which is fine, you got to go through it to get beyond it. You can't skip over it At least, I’ve never seen anyone pull that off." -- Richard Wolff
I learned Marx on my own. It would be challenging to get through even the first volume of Capital in a semester. The teacher could use one of a number of textbooks. (For some reason, I do not have Resnick and Wolff's Contending Economic Theories in that list.)
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