nathan tankus wrote: > I had a feeling that we agreed Jim. Rereading your comment this > morning I realize that I blatantly misread it.
All is forgiven! ;-) > 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. I find it useful. Capitalist accumulation is (among other things) about individual efforts to accumulate power: owning capitalist wealth gives an individual the power either to organize the production of or to claim ownership of some of the surplus-value. Sometimes that power can go further, e.g., temporary monopoly power. It also can bring social recognition, political influence, and the like. All of these can be used to increase an individual capitalist's ability to produce or claim surplus-value. > 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 don't know what role competitiveness plays in Shaikh's theory. The main point for me is that we have even temporarily fixed exchange rates (i.e., that the classical "specie-flow" mechanism doesn't work instantly), then principles of absolute advantage prevent those of comparative advantage from being realized. Shaikh assumes that the gold standard prevails. That was a mistake if only because he forgot to talk about what happens when that assumption (which attracted a lot of negative attention) is weakened. Rather than assuming that the country with the absolute advantage owns the gold mines, it makes more sense to me to assume that it has the "hard currency." A country such as the US in its days of hegemony could (and maybe still can) combine absolute advantage in industry with the imposition of its fiat currency as the world money. Me: > "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." Nathan: > 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. True, but an increasing technical composition of capital (the real stock of fixed means of production per worker hired) does not mean that the amount of constant capital rises either per worker or a share of output. Technical change means that less labor is required to produce each unit of fixed means of production. The key to me is the fixed capital/output ratio, which has been remarkably constant over the long haul (i.e., many decades). -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
