BTW at least a partial Coase–Marx synthesis might be possible if we were to combine Coase’s *institutional realism* with Marx’s *analysis of power and class*. Both Marx and Coase reject frictionless, abstract economics and insist that outcomes are shaped by concrete institutions: firms, property rights, contracts, and law. Coase explains these institutions as responses to positive transaction costs: firms exist because markets are costly to use, and legal rules matter because they shape bargaining. Marx complements this by showing that the same institutions also stabilize class power: property rights and workplace hierarchy are not neutral, but systematically favor owners over workers. Read together, transaction costs are not just technical frictions but socially structured costs that reflect unequal power and dependence.
On this view, capitalist institutions can be seen as both simultaneously *efficient and dominating*. Firms reduce coordination costs precisely by concentrating authority, which also enables surplus extraction and labor control. Legal rules lower transaction costs for capital while raising them for labor, making many “Coasean bargains” formally possible but practically unreachable. The synthesis preserves Coase’s comparative institutional analysis while adding Marx’s historical and normative critique: capitalism’s institutions work, but they work by embedding class power into the mechanisms that economize on costs. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#39883): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39883 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/116944738/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
