----- Original Message ---- From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Tue, March 8, 2011 11:28:47 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] An Orgy of Speculation?
I missed this. The 'problem' is that there is no such thing as "the standard Marxist theory" of anything. Secondly, Volume 3, in which this alleged "theory" is expressed was the _earliest_ part of Capital to be written, and that early draft was never revised as were the drafts of Vols. 1 & 2. And finally, there is a major debate among Marxists as to whether Marx himself had any economic "theory" whatever. As Moishe Postone puts it, Marx wrote a _Critique_ of Political Economy, and that is not the same thing at all as a _Critical_ Political Economy. So if you want to argue with the alleged Theory of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, you had better find some "Marxist" other than Marx to argue with.
Carrol
Dissenting Wren:
The standard Marxist theory of the falling rate of profit rests on the notion that there is an upper bound to the rate of exploitation. That bound is both political and physical, political because the capitalist mode of production unintentionally increases the potential political power of workers, and physical because exploitation of the workforce must, in the long run, be conducted at a level that permits the reproduction of the working class. (OK, that last is quasi-physical since, as Marx notes, the level of consumption required for reproduction varies from place to place, but capitalism raises this level of consumption needed for reproduction, thereby making the quasi-physical limit more stringent, not less). In mainstream economics, these kind of limits get taken up in discussions of the efficiency wage.
The problem with Marx's argument is the assumption that investment in constant capital only reproduces value, which is doubly nonsense, partly due to the incoherence of the notion of value... ^^^^^^^ CB: If the notion of value is incoherent, how are you defining "exploitation" and "rate of exploitation in your previous paragraph ?
^^^^^ [NB - I won't respond to any of the objections this may elicit]
^^^^ CB: giggles ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
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