me: >> Neither of these are "perfect" competition; though Marx's analysis implies >> equilibrium, I don't think that he believed it was ever achieved. The first >> one tends to destroy small firms, etc.<<
nathan tankus wrote: > the new school marxists argue that their is a tendency for the rate of > profit to equalize but it is disrupted by various factors such as technical > change so that marx's theory is actually dynamic, where others see statics.< they're right. competition helps drive technical change, which disrupts any equilibrium or prevents it from being attained. My dissertation involves a similar dynamic vision, though I don't deal with technical change much. There's a quote from Mandel about how any equilibrium is disrupted by the normal workings of capitalism. me: >> I don't think that his theory needs to be updated. His statement in his >> early POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY that competition generates monopoly and _vice >> versa_ makes a lot of sense. It just needs to be made more concrete.<< > have you read howard botwinick's book? (as an aside, i picked this book up > off of amazon when it was at 30 dollars, now it's priced in the 100's, have > i made a capital > gain?:http://www.amazon.com/Persistent-Inequalities-Disparity-Capitalist-Competition/dp/0691042977)< it's not a realized capital gain, which is what counts. Anyway, I don't remember being impressed by the presentation I heard him give. If I remember correctly, he argued that unions could capture rents from their employers, which isn't an especially new idea. I really don't think that Marx's theory of land-rent differs that much from the standard theory of scarcity rents except that (like most 19th century authors) he focused on the scarcity of land and used the framework of his Law of Value. It's at the volume 3 level of abstraction, which is about competition among capitalists (and much closer to the "surface of society" than volume 1), so it's no big surprise that Marx's analysis isn't that unique. > i think the new school marxist vision of competition is very developed. > whether it's wrong in crucial respects, is another matter. a matter by the > way, i'm curious to here discussed on pen-l.< it's a better job than discussing Jobs. Oh, the tribulations of Job! -- Jim Devine / "In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness." -- George Bernard Shaw _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
