>The World Trade Organisation negotiations with China is clear evidence
>that the law of
>value does not operate in an unadulterated fashion. It is evidence that
>there is no such
>thing as free trade in any comprehensive sense. It would appear that there
>never has been
>a
>free exchange of commodities in any enduring sense. The law of value and
>the specific laws
>of capital operate in an significantly adulterated way. The state has
>always played an
>historically significant role in relation to the circulation of both
>commodities and
>capital. Consequently to try to apply Capital to the contemporary world
>economic situation
>in any pure way will simply produce conceptual abstraction. Marx's Capital
>cannot be used
>as a naive model that can be naively used to provide a comprehensive
>understanding of the
>capitalist economic system. Capital is a work of abstraction. This may
>explains how much
>of Marx's political work even after he written Capital are in at least
>many cases free
>from the form presented in Capital.
>
>Warm regards
>George Pennefather
This might hold if Marx had ever restricted himself to the theoretical bits
of the first volume of Capital, or had not been aware of the relationship
between the laws determining the movement of capital and their empirical
manifestation, or had not intended to write sections of Capital dealing
with precisely these points. It might even hold if early, revolutionary
Soviet Marxists such as Preobrazhensky had not developed the relationship
between the operations of the law of value and an economic system in which
this law is significantly impaired, such as the proto-socialist Soviet
Union with its workers' state.
George: Can you provide us with a brief outline of P.'s conception of this?
Warm regards
George Pennefather
Be free to check out our Communist Think-Tank web site at
http://homepage.tinet.ie/~beprepared/
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