Dissatisfaction with what has happened to the study of economics is producing a rapidly growing revolt among economics students in France, Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. Within a matter of months, this new movement has made considerable inroads in exposing the meaninglessness of orthodox economics in contemporary capitalist societies. Students are eagerly looking for answers about the issues of the day, such as expanding globalization, growing dominance of international finance, increasing polarization between the rich and poor nations and between the rich and poor of each nation. But orthodox economics has no meaningful answers to any of these questions—a fact that has fed the widening rebellion among economics students in numerous countries. Before reporting on this new discontent, we need to provide some background on how economics has been transformed, since its classical period, into a study that is becoming more and more irrelevant. Marx and Engels and their classical predecessors understood political economy to be the study of the production and distribution of what MR founding editor Leo Huberman called our “worldly goods.” To them, it was obvious that production and distribution are social activities; and that the nature of the social relations of production and distribution are of most interest to the political economist. The political economy of Marx and Engels differed profoundly from that of the other classical theorists, but it would never have occurred to any of the classical economists to consider production and distribution in isolation from the social relationships people engaged in as they produced the output and contended for its distribution. Yet this is exactly what modern, “neoclassical” economists do. They presume an isolated, autonomous, and totally self-serving individual. This “homo economicus” has unlimited wants and is never satisfied. However, an unlimited supply of goods cannot be produced because resources are “scarce.” Therefore, each individual has to make choices, and economics is the “science” of the individual's choice-making. Economics, then, is reduced to the study of the relationship between individuals and things. Such a procedure lends itself nicely to the techniques of mathematics. Just assume that each one of our insatiable choice-makers is single-mindedly trying to maximize his or her well-being or “utility” (which is called profits when applied to the capitalists). Then economics becomes a problem of maximizing something subject to constraints (scarcity), and the tools of mathematics can be applied to find the conditions necessary for the achievement of the maximum. Such an economics is capable of only the most trivial results. And since it takes the social relationships once central to the subject as given, it quickly becomes an ideology supportive of the status quo. Economists increasingly gained fame not by helping to solve important social problems but by becoming masters of mathematical manipulation. Eventually the discipline was virtually taken over by abstract mathematical models and became almost completely divorced from reality, with its usefulness lying not in its practicality but simply in its scientism, which serves to disguise its ideological support of the status quo. This conversion of economics into a sort of pseudo-physics has not gone unchallenged. In the 1930s, the Great Depression moved many economists to the left, and something similar occurred in the 1960s. Today, a new revolt is in the making. Centered in France, where over eight hundred students and 150 professors have signed petitions protesting the “excessive mathematical formalization” of economics, an anti-neoclassical movement has been spreading across Europe and even into the United States. French newspapers and magazines report that students now think of economics as a form of “autism,” divorced from reality and lost in “imaginary worlds.” But unlike autistic people, who cannot help their social isolation, neoclassical economists seem to revel in it and routinely deny entrance into the profession to anyone daring to profess unorthodox ideas. At a meeting in Cambridge, England, participants decried the “Stalinization” of their discipline. For some time now, schools have been removing History of Economic Thought courses from the curriculum, lest inquiring students “question or place in perspective orthodoxy.” These are heartening developments and we applaud the rebellious students and teachers. While their goal now is simply to open up economics to other ideas, to create a “post-autistic” economics, we are confident that as they succeed, they will move inevitably to the one theory of capitalism that yields the most profound insights, namely Marxism. To subscribe to the post-autistic economics newsletter, send an email with the message “subscribe” to <pae_news@btinternet.com>.
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