A little over a
month ago, in early November, more than seventy students in Professor N. Gregory
Mankiw’s introductory economics course at Harvard University stood up
and walked out of the lecture. They organized this walk-out to protest
the course’s neoliberal predispositions, the corporatization of higher
education, and the growing burden of student debt. The students explained that
their action was in solidarity with Occupy
Wall Street, and went on to join a march in downtown Boston.
In organizing
this action, the students drew attention to a problem that has its roots
in the mainstream neoclassical theory that dominates today’s economics
departments. According to such theory, the discipline is a positive science that
can be used to reach empirical judgments free of bias and ideology. This way of
thinking about economics has generated elegant mathematical models, but these
cannot compensate for its incorrect assumptions. The Harvard student protest,
and the Occupy movement more broadly, prompt reconsideration of what it
might mean to walk out on mainstream economics.
The primary
problem with neoclassical economics is that its conceptual apparatus is supposed
to transcend social and class relations. In fact, however, this supposed
transcendence conceals capitalism’s natural
inequality. Focused only on the way economic relations look superficially
(i.e. like relations between things), neoclassical economics is not able
to analyze the exploitative and alienating relations that underlie the process
of exchange, relations that are becoming clearer and clearer to masses of
discontented and dispossessed workers as a result of the current crisis.
