>Sabri Oncu wrote: > >>P.S: Any forecasts on when we will be able to solve this >>transformation problem? > >Never. It was a ruse devised by the bourgeoisie to occupy the >attention of otherwise smart and knowledgeable Marxian economists on >something addictively divisive but politically irrelevant. > >Doug
For the neo Ricardians, the transformation problem is only one of the liabilities of Marx's theory of value, though as I indicated in a previous post, drawing from Geoffrey Pilling's very stimulating Marx's Capital, Marx's own transformation is a theory of class contradiction raised to the level of society as a whole. For the neo Ricardians, there are also questions of redundancy and derivativeness and the possibility of negative values. If Frank Roosevelt's "Cambridge Economics as Commodity Fetishism" is in fact correct (in Jesse Schwartz, ed. The Subtle Anatomy of Capitalism--has anyone read the disseration on which this was based?) there are clear political implications. Marx's value theory clarifies the struggle for the self emancipation of the working class from alienated labor while the neo Ricardian theory defends the interest of functioning capitalists, as well as fetishisizes science and technology, against rentiers. Roosevelt argues that it was not accidental that Joan Robinson became a champion of Maoist party leaders and factory managers, not the workers themselves whether they be in the West or the East, the North or the South. I suppose from this reading it would not be accidental that the neo Ricardian theory was embraced by former Stalinists such as Meek and Dobb, either. If this kind of sociology of knowledge has any weight, then one would expect say for it to be defended by those close to those Brahmin controlled CP's in India. Roosevelt's argument has been overlooked, I believe, because it is not a piece of technicist economics but in essence a philosophy of labor. And so little is written which makes a contribution to the philosophy of labor. One thinks of Raya Dunayevskaya (a lot can be learned from her), Lawrence Krader, Enrique Dussel, Istvan Meszaros, Chris Arthur. But there are libraries on dialectics, structural causality, totality, the theory of history and other weighty topics. Marxism seems in fact to have become the last refuge of the bourgeoisie. But there are criticisms to be made. Roosevelt compares the idea of the surplus as physical surplus, as a quantity of mere things to the concept of surplus as surplus *value* which indicates an exploitative social relation in the production process itself. But the surplus does in fact have to be analyzed in terms of use value and value, physical quantity and social labor time ; for while a smaller quantity of the physical surplus could have the same value as a greater quantity, the effects on the accumulation process would be markedly different. For example, if there are more means of production in physical terms, then more labor and surplus labor and surplus value can be absorbed in the following period. I think the value theorists such as Roosevelt are often too anti physicalist in their criticisms of neo Ricardian theories (I submitted this criticism of Kliman and Freeman). Marx's strength was that he analyzed the accumulation process in terms of value and use value. The quantity of the surplus in terms of physical goods matters as much as the quantity of the surplus as value (again Grossmann was the first to emphasize this). Marx's transformation tables are in fact not good at all in capturing the former side; and in this sense the simple neo Ricardian physical input-output matrices do seem to have an advantage over the Marxist value based transformation examples. And I say this despite my great sympathy for the criticisms made by Lebowitz, Roosevelt, Shaikh and Mattick Sr of neo Ricardian theory. Rakesh
