I'd say monopoly rents are far more common than not. They may be susceptible to entry, but they are much more the normal case than the exception. How much that impedes the analysis in Capital, if at all, is a different question.
Your 's' sounds like a residual. Devine says it's the 'normal' return to capital. Sounds neo-classical to me. In Heinrich/Marx, v is what it takes to reproduce the working class, though sometimes v gets too low and maybe the state responds in the interests of capitalists as a whole, and sometimes it's high because the workers are fired up, and sometimes it's higher than subsistence because 'subsistence' is historically specific to time, place, and culture. So it sounds like v and therefore s can be pretty much any damn thing. On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 3:43 PM, Julio Huato <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 >
_______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
