File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9711, message 256


Date: 	Tue, 25 Nov 1997 13:51:38 -0800
From: bhandari-AT-phoenix.princeton.edu (Rakesh Bhandari)
Subject: Re: M-TH: surplus value


Though still not clarifying what exactly he finds wrong with Moseley's
value theoretic analysis, Doug has become exasperated with me:

>My major objection to the value theoretic exercise is this: it adds a whole
>layer of complexity to economic analysis without really offering that much
>in the way of explanatory power. I've asked a hundred times what this
>analysis tells you that the intelligent, critical use of bourgeois stats
>can't,
>So capitalist economies are subject to cycles; big deal. For this you need
>the whole priestly vocabulary?

Quoting from Marx, Mattick clarifies what value theory explains about the
nature of crises:

The crisis makes its appearance "in order to restore the correct relation
between necessary and surplus labor, on hwich, in the last analysis,
everthing rests"...The crisis appears here not as as the result of the
disappearance of a proportionality in the relation between production and
consumption, but as a means to restore the 'proportionality' between
necessary and surplus labor that has been lost through the uncoordinated
movement, rendered independent, of exchange and production. In other words:
the process of production and of circulation, although a necessary unity,
is actually unified and is coordinated temporarily only through a crisis.
Regulation here means essentially nothing but the reestablishment of
valorization, which of course must manifest itself also in shifts of the
relation  bewtween the spheres of production and in those of circulation.
Th changes in process of capital as a whole are thus determined by the
changes of profit and of accumulation. The *concrete* forms these phenomena
take could, according to Marx, be developed only with a treatment of
competition and real capital." Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory, p. 104-5.


Now Mattick's analysis here is quite abstract, but what it does it bring
out through value theoretic analysis is the underlying nature of the
"proportionality" or "equilibrium" that crisis attempts to restore.  Taking
Mattick's lead,  Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway develop more *concrete*
analysis in Global Capital, the National State and the Politics of Money.

You also note: "Lots of partisans of Anglo-American style capitalism have been
pointing to over-expansion of industrial capacity and dangerous financial
leveraging in South Korea for a long time. Maybe the academics haven't made
much of these points, but they've been all over the business press for
years."

Well, Doug, since you are an opponent of the rentier propagandists of Anglo
American style capitalism, haven't you been an enthusiastic supporter of
the bank-led expansion capacity of South Korea as evidence of the limitless
possibilities of accumulation of a properly regulated, albeit unequal,
capitalism?

Hadn't you been encouraging this "reformed" and "regulated" capitalism as a
step in the right direction for some time? Maybe taxing the rentiers and
building industry-sensitive lines of credit is no  solution after all? In
the last analysis, the only way to speed up accumulation is through
intolerably high rates of exploitation and even then devastating crises
will be necessary to reduce the value composition of capital. Failing that,
the system will remain stagnant, creating ever more povery, unemployment
and low skill low wage pseudo jobs.

Rakesh





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