I had a feeling that we agreed Jim. Rereading your comment this morning I realize that I blatantly misread it.
Your point about monopoly leading into capitalism and back again is interesting and not wrong in any real sense but I'm not sure if I'd find it useful for conceptualizing the dynamic process. re:Shaikh: yes I saw him present that paper, I find it very interesting although I'm not sure that "competitiveness" is the primary driver of the balance of payments or exchange rates. I need to spend a lot more time on that. "I know that this point is irrelevant to the current discussion, but I think Sweezy was wrong that the existence of monopoly meant that Marx's law of value didn't apply. Marx's law of value is not a theory of prices." Good point! I was tempted to make the same point but left it off. It seem very clear to me that Marx's law of value is just cost accounting (growing constant capital as a percentage of output means another category must shrink as a percentage of output. Since wages can't fall below the level needed to reproduce labor power for any appreciable period of time and in "capital in general" profits aren't distributed between rent, unproductive labor etc, profit must fall as a percentage of output for constant capital to continue to grow as a percentage of output. -- -Nathan Tankus ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
