What Walrasian Marxism Can and Cannot Do

Abstract

In their article “Roemer's ‘General’ Theory of Exploitation is a Special Case: The Limits of Walrasian Marxism,” Devine and Dymski portray me as some sort of Walrasian automaton who believes that phenomena that are not easily modelled using the Walrasian model of perfect competition do not exist. Their criticism of my theory assumes that I was attempting to model capitalism in its entirety, a task that, I agree, I failed to do. I did not propose a theory of accumulation, or of technological change, or of the methods by which capitalists maintain their ideological hegemony over workers, or of the methods by which they extract labor from labor power at the point of production. I was not, in short, trying to write an alternative to Das Kapital. My General Theory of Exploitation and Class (GTEC), as its Introduction explained, was an attempt at understanding the root causes of exploitation and class, so as to better understand how class formation and exploitation might occur in postcapitalist societies. To this end, I adopted a well-known scientific method: strip away many real aspects of the thing under study down to a minimal skeleton and see how many phenomena descriptive of the real thing one can generate. Then add more real aspects of the thing to the model, and see how much more one can generate.