Pat Bond says:
If the profits are increasingly drawn from a corporation's financial maneuvres, instead of from surplus value extraction, the best attempts of Marxists to track crisis conditions will be well rewarded. Had you read these comrades a bit more seriously, Doug, you wouldn't have been so flumoxed by the events of 2007-08.
John Gulick says:
I can't resist a ready-made kibbitzing opportunity.
1) You imply that because Doug is a self-proclaimed Marxist, his political economy analysis must be informed by strict adherence to Marxist value theory. But is this a precondition for rightfully claiming the label of "Marxist"?
2) You also make it sound as if the debate is settled regarding how useful Marxist value theory is for interpreting matters of political economy (to put it clumsily). But it is not settled, including for many self-proclaimed "Marxists."
3) Personally, I don't believe there is tremendous pay-off in pursuing scholastic debates about, for example, the transformation problem, and how one's conclusions about the transformation problem may or may not invalidate political economy diagnoses that rest on purist versions of Marxist value theory. I'm an agnostic and pragmatic sort.
Clearly, there are difficulties translating empirical realities like profit rates into abstract concepts like surplus value extraction. Equally clearly, patterns of capitalist expansion and stagnation, boom and bust, accumulation and crisis, and so on and so forth conform in some general sense to what Marxist value theory (or Marxist theories of value in contradictory circulation) would suggest. But for me Marxist value theory is a guide and a heuristic -- it signals what to look out for, how to study it, how to gain interpretive purchase on it, and so on. It is not an exact science.
That's why it seems silly to me to criticize a "comrade" for getting away from the Marxist value theory "basics." What the "basics" are depends on who you ask. For one, who ever said that the debate on "productive vs. non-productive" labor was decisively resolved? For another, maybe if China's "new socialist countryside" (sic) reforms had been seriously implemented, China's internal demand may have been broadened and deepened enough to stave off the financial clash and world slump for a while longer -- thus prolonging Doug's "capitalist resilience" (which Pat gives the straw man treatment in any event) for another five or ten years. It's historically contingent on political struggle.
Anyway, sorry for the rambling excursus.
_________________________________________________________________ It’s the same Hotmail®. If by “same” you mean up to 70% faster. http://windowslive.com/online/hotmail?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_AE_Same_022009