Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> >Those profits do not come from
> >redistributing surplus created by other capitalist's
> >workers. They come from overcharging consumers.
>
> By the way, even though Wal-Mart has very substantial market power,
> it's been using that power to drive down wages & prices. About the
> only major "monopoly" I can think of right now that's overcharging
> consumers is Microsoft - and a lot of its consumers are businesses,
> not individuals.
As I understand it, the whole of the critique of Marx's LTV is that it can't explain prices. And Marx's sort of attempt in Cap III to translate values into prices gives grounds in Marx himself for that critique.
Fredy Perlman (a Marxist-Anarchist), in his Introduction to Rubin, gives a pretty persuasive argument that the theory of surplus value is about the structure of daily life under capitalism, not prices. I give several paragraphs:
The Soviet economic theorist and historian I.I. Rubin suggested a definition of political economy which has nothing in common with the definitions of economics quoted above. According to Rubin, "Political economy deals with human working activity, not from the standpoint of its technical methods and instruments of labor, but from the standpoint of its social form. It deals with production relations which are established among people in the process of production."5In terms of this definition, political economy is not the study of prices or of scarce resources; it is a study of social relations, a study of culture. Political economy asks why the productive forces of society develop within a particular social form, why the machine process unfolds within the context of business enterprise, why industrialization takes the form of capitalist development. Political economy asks how the working activity of people is regulated in a specific, historical form of economy.
The contemporary American definitions of economics quoted earlier clearly deal with different problems, raise different questions, and refer to a different subject matter from that of political economy as defined by Robin. This means one of two things: (a) either economics and political economy are two different branches of knowledge, in which case the "replacement" of political economy by economics simply means that the American practitioners of one branch have replaced the other branch, or (b) economics is indeed the new name for what "used to be called" political economy; in this case, by defining economics as a study of scarcity, prices, and resource allocation, American economists are saying that the production relations among people are not a legitimate subject for study. In this case the economists quoted above are setting themselves up as the legislators over what is, and what is not, a legitimate topic for intellectual concern; they are defining the limits of American knowledge. This type of intellectual legislation has led to predictable consequences in other societies and at other times: it has led to total ignorance in the excluded field of knowledge, and it has led to large gaps and blind spots in related fields of knowledge.
A justification for the omission of political economy from American knowledge has been given by Samuelson. In the balanced, objective language of an American professor, Samuelson says: "A billion people, one-third of the world's population, blindly regard Das Kapital as economic gospel. And yet, without the disciplined study of economic science, how can anyone form a reasoned opinion about the merits or lack of merits in the classical, traditional economics?"6If "a billion people" regard Das Kapital "as economic gospel" it t is clearly relevant to ask why only a few million Americans regard Samuelson's Economics "as economic gospel". Perhaps a balanced objective answer might be that "a billion people" find little that is relevant or meaningful in Samuelson's celebrations of American capitalism and his exercises in two-dimensional geometry, whereas the few million Americans have no choice but to learn the"merits in the classical, traditional economics". Samuelson's rhetorical question ""-'And yet, without the disciplined study of economic science, how can anyone form a reasoned opinion about the merits - is clearly a two-edged sword, since it can be asked about any major economic theory, not merely Samoelson's: and it clearly behooves the student to draw his own conclusion and make his own choice after a "disciplined study" of all the major economic theories, not merely Samuelson's.
Although Samuelson, in his introductory textbook, devotes a great deal of attention to Marx, this essay will show that Samuelson's treatment hardly amounts to a "disciplined study" of Marx's political economy.
The present essay will outline some of the central themes of Marx's political economy, particularly the themes which are treated in Rubin's Essays on Marx's Theory of Value. Robin's book is a comprehensive, tightly argued exposition of the core of Marx's work, the theory of commodity fetishism and the theory of value. Robin clarifies misconceptions which have resulted, and still result, from superficial readings and evasive treatments of Marx's work.
Marx's principal aim was not to study scarcity, or to explain price, or to allocate resources, but to analyze how the working activity of people is regulated in a capitalist economy. The subject of the analysis is a determined social structure, a particular culture, namely commodity-capitalism, a social form of economy in which the relations among people are not regulated directly, but through things. Consequently, "the specific character of economic theory as a science which deals with the commodity capitalist economy lies precisely in the fact that it deals with production relations which acquire material forms." (Rubin, p.47).***** [There may be misprints in this cybertext: I have corrected the citation from Robin to Rubin.]
[See http://www.blackandgreen.org/fp/commodity.html for the whole essay.]
Carrol