The Transformation Problem
redsails.org
The transformation problem has provoked controversy within Marxism and derision from without for more than a century. Bourgeois economists in particular (beginning with Ladislaus Bortkiewicz, and continuing, most notoriously, with Paul Samuelson) have seized on it to argue for…

What follows is an unusually long and math-heavy essay compared to other writing on RedSails; not coincidentally, it’s also the first time we’ve had to render math by implementing LATEX. [1] In our opinion the effort is worth it — the transformation problem has dogged Marxism for long enough, and we do not want our readers to be caught by surprise when neoclassical economists (or worse, other Marxists) throw it in their faces.

The political stakes are straightforward: Marxism ceases to be Marxism when it bails on the labor theory of value. Intellectually, Wright’s research opens the door to further investigations of the fault line between capitalist and natural necessity running through economic thought and modeling. [2] [3] It is our hope that further work in this direction will be able to expose more and more concrete ways in which capitalist social arrangements, despite their seeming necessity, are ultimately irrational and superable. — N. F.

  • quarrk [he/him]English
    2•5 months ago

    Ian Paul Wright is a rehashing of Ian Steedman, who himself is a neo-Ricardian and should be ignored on that basis. This version of the transformation problem is a problem with their neo-Ricardian theory, not Marx.

    One rebuttal to this sort of thinking was offered by Alan Freeman in Marx after Marx after Sraffa. Freeman is co-author of the temporal single-system interpretation of Marx, and also happens to be the spouse of fellow Marxist Radhika Desai.

    • Parsani [love/loves, comrade/them]OPEnglish
      2•5 months ago

      Interesting. Thanks for the link I’ll give that a read. Didn’t know that about Wright.

      Freeman is co-author of the temporal single-system interpretation of Marx, and also happens to be the spouse of fellow Marxist Radhika Desai.

      Very cool. That also explains why I’ve heard her rant about neo-ricardians too lol

      • quarrk [he/him]English
        2•5 months ago

        it’s just my opinion of course. I was very interested in the Wright paper a while back. It made me question my “faith” in Marx, but in the end deepened my understanding. So I only put it so strongly because in the first place I found it to be a compelling argument against Marx, secondly because I think it’s important to conclusively deconstruct that line of thinking altogether, due to its potential to mislead Marxist thought. So thanks for posting, it’s a good thing to be reading even with a critical eye