Launch of the CASPER Forum
Why I founded the Computational and Statistical Political Economy Research Forum
My new website where users can blog and post in discussion forums about political economy is live. Here’s a preview of the essay I published on its launch.
The goal of this forum is to create a community for producing and reproducing scientific knowledge in political economy that exists totally outside of the realm of academia, the world of bourgeois non-profits and thinktanks, and the state apparatus. Today, political economy, which has been transformed into the “scientific” discipline of economics, has been both gutted of its most insightful content and held back by obscurantist and outdated mathematical models.
It was once the case, in the days of Smith, Ricardo and Marx, that political economy was a form of thinking, researching and discussion which was undertaken by a broad public: working men, skilled craftsmen, professionals, clergy and professors. In this time, people didn’t write textbooks of economics, books to be taught by rote learning, they wrote books which were meant to be read by people interested in political economy and further their own research and understanding.
Among the great classical thinkers, it was Marx, who wrote his magnum opus for ordinary workers to read and use, who best embodied this ethos, and whose critique was most reviled by the academic economists. Beginning in the late 1800s and the early 1900s, economics became simply another academic department, another PHD program, a purely institutional science, and Marshall’s Principles of Economics the first great textbook. It became closed to the outside world and to the insights of other disciplines such as philosophy, physics, and history. The expert economist, whose opinions and language were indispensable for crafting public policy and generating political legitimacy for the bourgeois state, was born.
After the second world war, there was scarcely a place on Earth where political economy existed as it did before the turn of the century. Various political movements might include political economy, especially Marx, in their educational programs for members, but overall, research in the field remained sporadic, atomized, and largely cloistered from the public. This atomization and lack of a real scientific community outside of academia remains the case today, even in the internet age. Books and blogs by intelligent authors are still being written and inducing immense progress in political economy proper (rather than “economics”), and some being discussed on a handful of forums. The problem is that, among the public and on these forums, all that’s being done is reproducing and educating people of existing scientific information made almost entirely by individuals still within academia. There almost no production of scientific research in political economy being done on the outside, among the public, among ordinary workers and professionals…