File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9706, message 18


Date: Sun, 1 Jun 1997 22:45:41 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-TH: The Illusion of State Socialism


Gerald Levy wrote:

>Those political contributions don't create value, they merely transfer
>surplus-value among capitalists (in the case of state contracts, which
>benefit some capitalists, but not all necessarily) and/or redistribute
>income away from the working class towards the state.

Redistribute income toward the state? And who in the state is the
beneficiary of this income? The state's functional stockholders, the
bourgeoisie?

You're looking at the regime of political cash transfers in much too narrow
a way. They're a crucial link in the capitalist class's control of
politicians and political discourse.

>Yes, advertising becomes necessary for firm profitability in markets where
>there is product differentiation. What one firm gains, though, through
>marketing -- one could argue -- is lost by other firms (although one could
>also argue, in the case of oligopolistic markets and price coordination,
>that these expenses are ultimately born by the working class, when
>there has been a real increase in the price of means of consumption that
>they exchange their wages against).

Again, how is it news that the ultimate expenses of capitalist reproduction
are borne by the working class?

If advertising increases the propensity to consume, especially out of
borrowed funds, then doesn't this result in an increase in the pace of
exploitation and the mass, if not the rate, of profit? And if advertising
helps create the atomized, commodity-fetishized homo economicus of
bourgeois theory and preference, then isn't it productive labor from the
capitalists' point of view?

>There are many developments which should give cause for "embarassment" by
>Marxists, e.g. the multidude of "Marxists" who eschew value categories for
>the privilege of using, unaltered and unadjusted, bourgeois
>economic statistics.

Since we're in a memory-refreshing mode, could you remind me just what
insights into fundamental capitalist processes are offered by your kind of
value theory that  aren't offered by the critical use of bourgeois
statistics? Bourgeois stats report a decline in profitability from the
early 50s through the early 80s, and a rise since. What does value theory
tell you?

Doug

--

Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
250 W 85 St
New York NY 10024-3217 USA
+1-212-874-4020 voice  +1-212-874-3137 fax
email: <mailto:dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html>




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