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> --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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