Roemer's "free to Lose" Page 1

Over the last decade and a half John Roemer has published a series of papers examining various fundamental problems in Marxist theory from the point of view of modern economic general equilibrium theory. In the present volume he summarizes his work on the concept of exploitation in the form of an "Introduction to Marxist Economic Philosophy". This book is intended to make Roemer's ideas accessible to readers who have little or no background in economic theory. Roemer has taken the trouble to formulate the very simplest and most transparent models in which the core of his claims and results can be expressed. The exposition of the economic models is a model of didactic clarity, and exhibits an attractive feature of Roemer's work, his accurate and persuasive reasoning from explicit premises. Roemer's clarity and rhetorical persuasiveness render all the more necessary a critical examination of his premises and problematic. Unfortunately these basic conceptions do not stand up well to scrutiny. It is difficult to reconstruct a coherent problematic motivating his research, and key definitions and assumptions on which his results rest are flawed and inadequate to the analytical task he proposes for himself. I will consider Roemer's work first from the point of view of Marx's influential theory of exploitation.