Rather, he set out the laws
>of motion as he understood them from the material conditions of his time. It
>is your job and mine, Rakesh, to apply those laws to today's conditions to
>make sense out of where we are, before we can begin to try to figure out
>where we want to go.
Roger, just a short note presently to help me work up to today's conditions. Let's say that Preobrazhensky and Grossmann developed the two most important works in crisis theory in their time. But note the conflict: the latter attempts to explain all the most important phenomena in terms of the law of value (see the Law of Accumulation and the Breakdown of the Capitalist System) while the former argued that the most important latest developmentment, viz. monopolisation, undermined the workings of the law of value that had regulated capitalism in its competitive phase (see New Economics and The Decline of Capitalism). There is no doubt that both theorists had a different understanding what the law of value in Marx's system was. Stalinist and Nazi repression foreclosed further development, and neither theorist brought his system explicitly into conflict with the other. Both were dismissed as social fascists by the GBCP.
Yet the implicit debate would resurface.
Howard and King astutely note some important affinities in Baran's and Sweezy's individual and joint theoretical work to the efforts of Preobrazhensky who indeed was Baran's teacher! It is well known that Mattick was Grossmann's student.
This time the conflict became manifest as Baran and Sweezy were criticized for having repudiated Marx's value theory in their analysis of the monopoly capitalism (less investment due to monopoly power and underconsumptionist considerations even as the surplus rises from continuing cost reductions =>reduced effective demand and thus a tendency towards stagnation<=only partially couteracted by increasing commercial and distributive expenditures, which though raising demand for individual monopolists and expanding consumption does so at the expense of growing waste and irrationality analyzed in terms of Frankfurt School Critical Theory).
Yet neither Sweezy nor Mattick (or Cogoy) wanted to hold on to the law of value as a theory of price determination. Moreover, Sweezy's objections to a "quantitative" law of value, such as they were, were not on the basis of its redundancy, a la the neo Ricardians, but to its limited applicability to a particular stage of capitalism. Baran and Sweezy were always more interested in how monopolisation transformed the accumulation process than repudiating value theory, yet how their theory squared with Marx's value theory was hardly clarified.
I think this raises the fundamental question not only of the logical consistency and non redundancy of Marx's value theory (on which Marxist economics is presently focused in its continuing boxing with Samuelson and Steedman) but also the question of whether capitalist developments themselves invalidate the law of value (such that there are no immutable laws even within capitalism).
Of course we will go nowhere without first clarifying what we mean by the law of value.
Here let me raise another concern.
In The Value Controversy Sweezy identifies as the fundamental problem of neo Ricardianism its inability to disclose the rate of exploitation or surplus value (Mattick would have agreed as well). Yet the rate of exploitation in the popular imagination conjures up images of adjusting work rates to maximum output levels through the assembly line. Now the focus is on the maximization of net useful output of the entire production process (i.e., after error detection and correction). Given the increasing mechanical complexity of most products and the increasing cost to manufacturers of uncorrected defects, one wonders whether the optimum work rate (if human labor is still to be used) will be adjusted downwards from levels set early in the 20th century. Towards error detection and correction more sophisticated labor may also be preferred, rendering anachronistic the Taylorist image of the proletarian as a simple hand. In this sense the traditional image of a highly exploited deskilled proletarian on a sped-up assembly line may become anachronistic, leaving Babbage and Taylor behind (so Kenny and Florida among others argue, contra Braverman). Will the problem be less the exploitation of an increasingly sophisticated industrial working class than the leaving behind of the mass of humanity which is not able (it is oft implicitly claimed) to function in an increasingly sophisticated computer mediated work environment. As the banality goes, those who may have been able to work quick may not be able to work smart. In this family of claims I think you will notice important elements of the dominant ideology.
Yours, Rakesh