On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 3:04 PM, Max Sawicky <[email protected]> wrote:
> I don't get the definition of monopoly as hinging on inelastic demand, > unless in contrast to the limiting case of perfectly elastic demand. > Otherwise, monopolies can last a good long time, if not forever. So one > doesn't escape their prominence under modern capitalism. Right. Exclude sheer legal monopolies, which become "unsustainable" in the longer run, because they are only maintained by ukase and no ruling class would keep wasting its power to defend the indefensible. (Hm, no, scratch that. Just exclude sheer legal monopolies by assumption.) On the supply side, sustainable monopolies arise from scale economies. But even if scale economies are on your side, you cannot take over the world (get big) unless demand is highly inelastic. I'm the only global supplier of Julio-speak, but so what? There's no demand for Julio-speak. Yes, I have a market share of 100%, but the whole the size of the market is zero, so I have nothing. I think that by monopoly we don't mean just a large firm, or even the only supplier of x, but a firm that holds a large (and relatively stable) market share of a seizable x market so that the price of x entails seizable (and relatively stable) rents. In Capital, Marx does not exclude this possibility, but he doesn't deem it the normal case. And he doesn't think it as altering his analysis that much. In fact, part 6 of the volume 3 of Capital can be viewed as an illustration of how his analysis of value and surplus value circulation can be modified to account for these rents. The monopolist gets to appropriate a larger share of the surplus value than otherwise, but the pool of value (assuming demand as given, a common implicit assumption in Capital) and the subpool of surplus value remain the same (or, at the very least, the ultimate way these are determined, i.e. produced, remains qualitatively the same). > Re: disruption and misalignment, you could pile up all the leftish > neo-classical arguments on why markets don't work, or are missing > altogether, and save yourself some very heavy reading. That leaves out a > lot, but along with a critique of income/wealth distribution and Galbraith's > 'counter-vailing power,' it pretty well covers the low-lights of Capitalism. I'm not against that. It's not a bad way to communicate with the other economists. But I admit there's a problem couching these arguments in the neoclassical jargon, namely that people tend to adopt the deeper assumptions that come with the neoclassical mind-frame. > I suspect it is possible to trace a number of threads through to Keynes and > Minsky, though I'm not the one to do it. So in that sense, if no other, Marx > is underrated. I think there's plenty of credit to go around. Keynes and Minsky made great contributions. > Your 's' seems to be whatever isn't v or c. Circular reasoning? I don't see why. There's the existing wealth of a capitalist society, the pie. And two groups of people: those who appropriate it and those excluded. Over the next period of time, those who hold it can consume this wealth and/or use it to make the others enlarge their wealth holdings. It is the latter that Marx calls "capital." The flow of new wealth produced by the producers over that period of time can only be appropriated by either of the two groups. What goes to the wealth holders, Marx calls "surplus value." The other portion stays with the producers and cannot be surplus value. When it is in the hands of the capitalists, Marx calls it "variable capital." Once it gets to the hands of the workers, it becomes "wages" or what the BEA calls "labor income." The groups are in conflict. If the capitalists manage to lower the consumption standards of workers, then they can turn what used to be "labor income" into (BEA's) "property income" or (Marx's) "surplus value." If workers manage to expand their consumption standards and resist, then they can turn what used to be "property income" into their "labor income." Come to think of it, this would be circular reasoning just as much as the BEA's underlying reasoning in their classifying income into "property income" and "labor income." (I put it this way, because if one thinks about it, all reasoning gets circular. That's why Hegel keeps bouncing back.) _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
