George Novack was probably one of the leading critics of pragmatist interpretations of Marxism as found in Sidney Hook or Corliss Lamont. Novack presented that critique in his book Pragmatism versus Marxism. George Novack criticized the attempt by Hook to interpret Marxism through the lens of pragmatism. Novack contended that pragmatism reduces questions of truth to what is merely useful and so undermined the scientific character of Marxism. For Novack, Marx’s labor theory of value was not simply a useful interpretive framework but an objectively valid explanation of capitalist production.
However, a defender of the pragmatist interpretation of Marxism (like the young Sidney Hook) could respond byarguing that Novack overlooked the methodological problem that Hook was attempting to address. In Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx , Hook suggested that the dispute between Marx’s labor theory of value and the marginalist theory of value cannot be decisively settled by direct empirical confirmation or refutation. Both theories can account for observed price phenomena in different ways. Hook’s resort to pragmatist reasoning therefore reflects not a rejection of scientific inquiry but an attempt to deal with a situation in which empirical evidence alone does not uniquely determine the choice between competing theoretical frameworks. In this respect Hook’s reasoning resembles the conventionalist insights of Henri Poincaré, who argued in Science and Hypothesis that empirical observations do not uniquely determine the geometric framework used to describe physical space. Different geometrical systems can describe the same phenomena if the associated physical laws are appropriately formulated. Hook’s claim is structurally similar: rival value theories may organize economic phenomena in different ways, and the choice between them must therefore take into account broader explanatory considerations. >From that perspective, Hook would have argued that his pragmatist defense of >Marx does not weaken Marxism’s scientific aspirations. Rather, it recognizes >that economic theories operate at a high level of abstraction and often >function as conceptual frameworks for interpreting complex social processes. >The question then becomes not simply which theory fits isolated price >observations but which provides the deeper explanation of the dynamics of >capitalist production and exploitation. I think that in this sort of discussion one can see the clash between scientific realism and instrumentalism, which has long been a topic for debate in the philosophy of science, and which is just as much an issue for Marxists. as it is for anyone else. I think that in regards to the debates over the labor theory of value, people like Hilferding and Bukharin stood for a scientific realist view of the theory. Novack, presumably, would have also stood for scientific realism, IAnd am sure the same is also true for Paul Cockshott,who has attempted to show that the theorucan be empiricallyverified On the other hand, a possible ally of the young Sidney Hook in this discussion might be Paul Sweezy, especially in his book The Theory of Capitalist Development. Sweezy argued that Marx’s labor theory of value was not intended primarily as a direct explanation of market prices but as a theoretical framework for analyzing the underlying social relations of capitalist production, particularly the origin of surplus value and exploitation. If this is correct, then the familiar marginalist criticism, originating with Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk in Karl Marx and the Close of His Systemm , that prices diverge from labor values does not by itself refute Marx’s theory. Rather, it shows that rival economic frameworks address different explanatory levels, which helps explain why Hook argued that the dispute cannot be settled by simple empirical comparison of price data alone. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#41064): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/41064 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/118257263/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
