>Implicitly Brenner makes the same point as Roger. Both seem to think the
>ability to realize profits (or to mark up prices in a Smithean fasion) in
>the exchange process is fundamentally constrained by some factor--for
>Brenner, it's the magnitude of international competition. At this econ
>conference in Boston, Shaikh made the crucial point that Brenner's implicit
>theory of profit is rather murky and almost surely not a Marxian one.
How do you account theoretically for a world in which firms do have pricing power vs. a world where they don't? Or is pricing power another illusion of bourgeois society?
>Now there is this fascinating suggestion by Max Adler from 1933:
>
>"It may be asked what becomes of Marx's theory of surplus vlaue when human
>labour power, from the exploitation of which surplus value arises, becomes
>superfluous in tis way, and the process of production can be carried on
>with a steadily diminishing number of workers. Theoretically surplus value
>should diminish, as indeed it does, relatively speaking, in accordance with
>the law of the declining rate of profit, although this is compensated by an
>absolute increase in the mass of surplus value. But this is only the case
>when the number of employed workers is increasing. When their numbers
>decline profit is transformed more frequently into what is always been in a
>disguised form, NAMELY A GAIN WHICH IS EXTRACTED BY FORCE..." In Austro
>Marxism, ed. Tom Bottomore, p. 242
>
>What could this mean? Any suggestions?
Just where is production being carried on with "a steadily diminishing number of workers"?
Doug