L'enseignement de l'économie marxiste aux économistes ruraux dans les pays non marxistes

Teaching marxist economics is justified, according to the author who belongs to the neo-classical tradition, because marxism is at least a very good pedagogical means to make students conscious of the fundamental hypotheses, and hence of the limitations, of neoclassical economics. In a first part, marxism is presented as a general theory of economic and social development. This permits one to attract the students' attention on the relationships between production and distribution, on the social and political consequences of distribution phenomena, and on the difference between analytical and dialectical logic. The second part is devoted to some marxist authors' contributions to the analysis family farms in French agriculture, and the need for a global world perspective for understanding the problems of development and rural poverty. The paper ends on a plea for a complentarity, at least of pedagogical nature, between the marxist and the neoclassical traditions. This complementarity, it is true, can only the meaningful if one is convinced that ideological pluralism is absolutely necessary to the progress of scientific knowledge.