Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 23:27:43 +0200
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-TH: "Crisis-free accumulation" and value theory


>Hugh Rodwell wrote:
>
>>As for Doug's question about the use of value theory that can't be provided
>>by bourgeois statistics, the obvious answer is that it provides an answer
>>to the question of the centre of gravity of prices, around which they
>>fluctuate.
>
>So does Ricardian value theory, no?
>
>
>Doug


And guess why Marx started from Ricardo's treatment of value when he
investigated the behaviour of commodities in production and distribution in
capitalist society? -- because it was so powerfully explanatory.

And guess why the toughest times Marx had digging the foundations of his
theory so they would be really solid were

a) exploding the Ricardian & Smithian myth of annual production as equal to
the newly added value of the year in question (ie they ignore constant
capital produced before the year in question) -- a central problem in
accumulation theory

and

b) hunting down the fallacies in Ricardo's views on how value theory
determines ground-rent.

See *Theories of Surplus Value* Part II, chs 11,12 & 13 for rent and ch 17
in particular for annual production, the departments of the economy and
accumulation. There's good stuff in The Grundrisse too on the importance of
taking constant capital into account in relation to accumulation, but
Theories of Surplus Value is where Marx cracks it.

Presumably ignoring TSV and the wrestling with Ricardo is what leads the
stable equilibrium crowd to leverage the schemes of Capital 2 so
shamelessly and wrong-headedly. Capital 2 is so smooth in its presentation
you wouldn't dream there were any number of horrors to be overcome getting
there, but TSV turns the stone and squashes the creepy crawlies one by one
after first chasing them to ground. When something is this difficult for
Marx, the rest of us can just look on in breathless amazement as he does
his stuff. The least we can do is acknowledge that the performance took
place!

Without value theory, economics is as empty as physics would be without
gravitation or linguistics without the innate capacity for language. With
it, it becomes scientific. The irrelevance of Doug's example of Keyne's
saying substituting real values for variables is nonsense, lies in the fact
that capitalism represents economic prehistory -- it's unplannable, chaotic
and operates with fetishized categories as far as the consciousness of its
practitioners is concerned. But in a transparent and democratic society
based on cooperative production by democratically managed associations of
free producers it would be feasible to plan labour inputs and outputs and
manage accumulation on the basis of constant, immediate feedback from
consumers and producers. The tasks of economics would not be in
contradiction with the relations of production as they  are under
capitalism.

In the meantime the task of economics under capitalism is to lay bare the
process of exploitation, the mechanisms veiling exploitation and the
historical tendency of the capitalist mode of production to transform
itself (with the necessary political help of revolutionary socialists) into
its opposite and successor, the socialist mode of production. None of these
tasks is possible without value theory -- you can *point* to exploitation
in extreme cases, but you get stuck when it's a matter of everyday
exploitation in "well-run" capitalist operations, and it's not pointing
that's needed, but *explanation*. The necessary fetishism of capitalist
economic theory (and everyday economic categories) is utterly impossible to
grasp without value theory -- and this means that the inadequacy of vulgar
bourgeois and a lot of so-called Marxist economics goes unchallenged -- we
can see this in Doug's remarks about using bourgeois statistics. As for the
historical tendency of capitalism to transform itself into socialism,
non-Marxist, non-value, non-dialectical conceptions of economic theory
haven't got the slightest chance of even getting close to this idea and
harnessing its power in the political struggle accompanying developments in
the economic base.

Cheers,

Hugh





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