Devouring mainstream economics: Oskar Lange's war strategy to (def)eat bourgeois political economy

Abstract

Oskar Lange aimed to conquer, subjugate, and absorb bourgeois political economy into a Marxist basis. By trying to devour non-Marxian economics, he proposed a challenging strategy to fight against capitalist ideology in economic science, which resembles the indigenous ritual of anthropophagy: a war scheme of eating the enemy in order to capture its strengths. This article presents what we call “Langean Anthropophagy,” and argues that, despite serious contradictions and difficulties, Lange’s unfinished masterpiece Political Economy is framed by a creative method to engage critically with bourgeois economic thought after the marginalist revolution that has not yet been fully appreciated.