You really should read Postone. Or at least Fredy Perlman. It is disputable whether there is such a thing as "Marxian economics." Marx wrote a Critique of capitalism (political economy) at its highest level of abstraction, a level which _never_ exists in practice. Albritton does suggest that there is a mid-level theory (considering, e.g., "neoliberalism" or "196h-ce British liberalism" at a lower level abstraction, but still abstraction, not description of actuality. Albritton calls what you are talking about, an analysis/description of what is happening now, _history_, not "economics." Postone suggests flatly that Marx produced a Critique of Political Economy, NOT a Critical Political Economy. Fredy Perlman argues that Marx simply does not ask and answer the same questions (e.g., how are prices determined?) that "economists" try to answer. Perlman's exxay on Commodity Fetishism is available on the web.
And if what is called economics is _history_, then we have to view the present _as history_, i.e. from a future perspective. But we can't predict the future, hence that future perspective has to be a hypothetical one, at a high level of abstraction. Marx's _Capital_ has one or two paragraphs referring to a future "socialism," but he give absolutely no details of that future, merely indicating that the worker will know the meaning of the product she/he produces (i.e. the meaning of labor will not be beyond the control or knowledge of the producer). That premise (of a very very loosely, hypothetical future social order) allows Marx to see Capitalism 'pure' as it were from a future perspective, historically. Hence if you _must_ try to use Marx for 'practical' economics, you are seeing 'his' capitalism as a bundle of _tendencies_, with the conditions which enable those tendencies never really noticeable. So probably the question you ask about productive/unproductive labor is unanswerable. Carrol ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of nathan tankus Sent: Sunday, July 01, 2012 1:12 AM To: pen-l; Doug Henwood Subject: Re: [Pen-l] Profits call the tune "Everyone who plays this game does it by different rules. Many esteemed Marxist profit-watchers adjust the official stats in numerous ways, such as trying to eliminate "nonproductive" activity. While I understand the interest in jiggering the numbers, no known capitalist can see or feel the adjusted rate of profit. What they (and their shareholders) care about is the actual rate of profit, reported in cash money, relative to the amount of capital that had to be invested to gain the return." This has been one of my longstanding questions about Marxian analysis (I only just recently got back to a more intensive study of Marx. I'm doing a cursory reading, okay listening, of capital volume one and then I'm going to read it physically and take notes. I'm about half way through listening so far). Based on the above Doug seems to be arguing that profit to enterprise is what really matters when analyzing trends in a capitalist economy. This leads to an obvious question in my mind. Let's assume for hypothetical example's sake that there is a relatively radical political party that has gained large electoral control in our hypothetical country which is in a devastating recession with high inflation (in short it's the 1970's). Could this party restore profitability to enterprise, shrink inflation and lower unemployment by shrinking other sectors such as unproductive labor and rent? It seems to me that this is a logical conclusion from anything I've read from Marxists and Marx. Yet I've almost never seen it discussed. Fred Moseley has also emphasized the importance of increases in unproductive labor to the 1970's: "there were two main causes of the decline of the rate of profit in the postwar US economy from the late 1940s to the mid- 1970s: an increase in the capital invested per worker, and an increase in the ratio of unproductive labor to productive labor. According to my estimates, these two trends contributed roughly equally to the total decline in the rate of profit during this period (see Moseley 1991, Chapter 4)." http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~fmoseley/working%20papers/PWCRISIS.pdf Now I'm not arguing for any particular reform position or that this means capitalism should be saved blah blah blah. Nor am i saying it would really be politically possible for such a platform to succeed anywhere. I'm more interested in knowing whether I've got a decent grasp of the argument or whether I'm missing major pieces that make what I'm suggesting technically impossible. On another note, I'm not so sure unproductive labor should be completely ignored when calculating the rate of profit. I think perhaps executive pay should factor in too. If the executives think they can dramatically increase their compensation through investment they will do so even if the firm as a whole sees a low profit rate or even sees negative quarters. -- -Nathan Tankus ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
