The left wing of economics has been largely shut out of the conversation by a rhetoric, especially an American rhetoric, that does not admit that an economics under the spell of Marx is “serious work.” The rhetoric is strange: the serious empirical work of the Marxist Paul Sweezy (1938; Baran and Sweezy 1966) is slighted by comparison with the blackboard economics of the anti-Marxist Paul Samuelson, the one “not serious” though about the economic world, the other “serious” though about A-prime-C-prime. It's not fair. Often enough the Marxists are better A-primers, too, having their own tradition of A-priming, the attempt to produce facts about the world from the sheer logic of production of commodities by commodities. In the Cambridge capital controversy of the 1960s the Marxist A-primers under the leadership of Joan Robinson and Geoffrey Harcourt annihilated the forces of Massachusetts Institute of Technology neoclassicism.

It did the Marxists little good. Since then some of the American Marxists (and a stray Norwegian or two) appear to have decided that if you can't beat them you should join them. The new analytic Marxists have produced an impressive literature doing MIT neoclassical economics as well or better than the MIT neoclassicals. The plan is to argue in terms that the neoclassicals appreciate, as in Stephen Marglin's Growth, Distribution, and Prices (1984).