technology (Re: Horowitz's center)

[Rakesh Bhandari]

>Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
>
>>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 Doug, don't turn student on me here. I don't know anything about post
keynesian theories of pricing (or about how surplus value is redistributed
in the realm of competition by the market power of certain firms or
industries vis a vis others). One more way to interpret Brenner's argument
is in terms of Schumpeterian price theory. Monopoly pricing is dynamically
efficient; it is achieved within national boundaries. Intl competition
intensifies, undercuts monopoly pricing with a return to perfect
competition now on a global scale. The economy is taken off a long term
dynamic path that only monopoly pricing can ensure. Again, the political
consequence of Brenner's theory seems to me to be import duty socialism.

best, rakesh