My point seems to have been slightly misinterpreted as a critique of CSE and
Capital and Class, which it was not. I apologise if it gave that impression.
I think C&C has done, and continues to do, an absolutely sterling job in
maintaining an outlet for critical, Marxist, innovative and
interdisciplinary thinking in Britain.

My issue was with the idea that it is anybody's duty to defend academia
against Chakrabortty's criticism, most of which I find entirely legitimate.
I simply don't find anything in academia worth defending - above all
economic academia, which is nothing more than a modern version of the
mediaeval church.

The point to be made to Chakrabortty (who is not unsympathetic to dissidence
and heterodoxy in academic economics and has done quite a lot, quietly, to
promote it) is that academia is not alone in the failures he singles out.
Actually, responsibility lies with the intellectuals as a whole, including
in particular the financial interests which dominate economics, the
systematic web of graft and corruption that links the two together, the
tacit public and governmental consent to this corruption and, above all, the
complicity of the journalists themselves. The question I would like to ask
Chakrabortty (and his far more mendacious colleagues such as Anatole
Kaletsky) is 'where were you when the heterodox community was making these
same points ten years ago?'

I made this point in my 2009 article for the AHE
(http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/15691/1/MPRA_paper_15691.pdf) dealing with
Chakrabortty's predecessors like Simon Jenkins, who wrote (Guardian July 9th
2008) that:

"as the nation approaches recession, an entire profession seems to have
vanished over the horizon, like conmen stuffed with cash, and thousands left
destitute behind. They said recessions were over. They told politicians to
leave things to them and all would be fine. Yet they failed to spot the
sub-prime housing crash, and now look at the mess"

I give my response in that article in full below, because I think basically
the same kind of response is now called for:

============
"
Actually, it is not true, as Simon Jenkins claims above, that "the entire
profession" got it wrong. Dozens - precious few reported by Jenkins at the
time - produced warning after warning. A selection from these many accurate
analyses include Roubini, Brenner (2002), Shiller (2006), Turner (2008),
Pettifor (2006), Stiglitz (2008), and Wade (2009).

When these correct diagnoses are surveyed, a striking fact emerges: they are
found almost entirely in the camp of heterodox economics. Some clarity is
required: by "heterodox", we do not imply any organised or coherent
current. We simply mean that orthodoxy did not accept what they said.
Dissenting and superior analyses were not absent: they were not listened to.
Indeed, they were consciously disparaged and, tellingly, dismissed as
unprofessional and of low quality. This is starkly illustrated by the
"standard view" of academic economics in the UK as expressed by former
president of the Royal Economic Society (RES) in his valedictory speech to
its March 2008 AGM:

'Administrators, who may not have deep disciplinary backgrounds,
nevertheless impose their own views rather than deferring to professional
standards . We also often find deep distrust of 'orthodox, mainstream
economic thought': a referee on another proposal said, '.despite the
excellence of the partners' record within mainly economic science, they fail
to include alternative, complementary or even competing approaches.' The
proposal failed. Referees like these have regrettably been taken seriously.
Mediocrity is rationalised on the grounds that it is hard for the
'heterodox' to publish in top journals.'

The obvious response, given the outcome of the orthodox view, is that the
humble administrator was absolutely right to fail the proposal. The tragedy
is that the admirably pluralist criterion s/he applied is rejected by the
profession itself. No clearer explanation for the current state of academic
economics is required than. "Heterodoxy" - that is, asking questions or
begging to differ - has been equated by Portes, who merely reflects the
general view of the academic profession to "mediocrity". The simple and
reasonable request for a variety of approaches has been relegated to the
sphere of uninformed bureaucratic interference.

The telling outcome is that, at the last conference of the RES, almost a
year into the crisis, no more than a handful of papers referred to the
crisis, and a proposal from the AHE for a session on pluralism, supported by
CHUDE, did not even receive the courtesy of a reply.

=============================================

This in my view is the type of response that is required to; we should not
attack Chakrabortty or react to his legitimate criticism in a defensive way.
Instead we should simply point out that CSE/C&C - along with the whole
community of critical scholars, some in academia and some outside it - have
been making the exact same points for a great deal longer than he has, and
though his belated critical stance is welcome, it would have a lot more
credibility if his newspaper had been reporting on our criticisms five, ten
and fifteen years earlier, when it might have made a difference.