#I wish I had had the energy to stick with Crane's crit theory reading group because like

[bogusfilth]

I guess I'm going to passively @edwad on this because it was originally sort of supposed to be an ask for him only because. idk. as a tumblr commie he's our collective econ-theory advice columnist i guess. but i couldn't keep it short enough and it's more about me just talking to myself anyway. but I'm sitting here reading Skidelsky's edited Essential Keynes volume and it gets to the selections from the Tract on Monetary Reform. and Keynes says something about the natural interest rate and I'm trying to dredge something up from my brain about Sraffa's argument against a natural interest rate and end up falling down the rabbit hole on that a little bit and Wicksell's idea vs Hayek's idea of said concept. and I'm thinking about how every time I try to handle these ideas their concepts of things like "rent" and "interest" seems very slippery over time. and maybe I'm just broadly not well read enough. and how long it took me in high school even just to understand a substantialist value-concept from reading the opening chapters of capital.

but like what I really don't understand is the relationship of Marx's Critique taken more in its status as Critique to the conceptually related but still heterogeneous traditions of economics that come after him, in a way that isn't just attempting to rehabilitate the classical approach, or something like Ben Fine's critique of the explosion-implosion of the assumptions of marginalist theory, or like. idk Eatwell's constant insistence that modern macro is built on sand because of the Cambridge Capital controversy or whatever. those feel like attempts to say "the way we're doing economics is wrong" but is that warranted or useful if we're trying to say that the real insights of Marx are the places where he's doing something beyond just "these guys are doing economics wrong." Given the whole thing about the "categories of bourgeois economics" in the section on commodity fetishism, do we not have to follow the shifts in those categories, rather than say "well only the earlier categories were actually right."

in any case. re: the glorious-revolution posting from User @'ed Above I think it's interesting to look at this pivot to examining maybe something like more concrete a) financial technologies and b) policy as something important and like. idk I guess i've been personally meaning to tackle something like broader longue durée history. and I would really hope to end up with something like world-systems theory but more informed by a more critical approach to the economic concepts involved.