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«Commodity fetishism»: Fredy Perlman
Fredy Perlman’s 1968 Introduction to I.I. Rubin’s «Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value«, Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1973.
INTRODUCTION: COMMODITY FETISHISM
According to economists whose theories currently prevail in America, economics has replaced political economy, and economics deals with scarcity, prices, and resource allocation. In the definition of Paul Samuelson, «economics – or political economy, as it used to be called … is the study of how men and society choose, with or without the use of money, to employ scarce productive resources, which could have alternative uses, to produce various commodities over time and distribute them for consumption, now and in the future, among various people and groups in society.»(1) According to Robert Campbell, «One of the central preoccupations of economics has always been what determines price.»(2) In the words of another expert, «Any community, the primers tell us, has to deal with a pervasive economic problem: how to determine the uses of available resources, including not only goods and services that can be employed productively but also other scarce supplies.»(3)
If economics is indeed merely a new name for political economy, and if the subject matter which was once covered under the heading of political economy is now covered by economics, then economics has replaced political economy. However, if the subject matter of political economy is not the same as that of economics, then the «replacement» of political economy is actually an omission of a field of knowledge. If economics answers different questions from those raised by political economy, and if the omitted questions refer to the form and the quality of human life within the dominant social-economic system, then this omission can be called a «great evasion».(4)
«The Decline in the Rate of Profit»: Paul Mattick Jr.
Paul Mattick Jr attempts to describe the declining rate of profit in under 15 minutes.
«Financialisation, the Value of Labour Power, the Degree of Separation, and Exploitation by Banking»: Ben Fine
Introduction
The emergence to some prominence of radical political economy from the mid-1960s for a decade or more witnessed significant debate over Marx’s value theory across committed Marxist economists, more sceptical but sympathetic heterodox economists, and also orthodox economists who tended to be dismissive if occasionally offering some admiration from the perspective of their own concerns (Marx as general equilibrium, growth or duality theorist). As a result, debate involved the nature and validity of value theory and its position within Marx’s and Marxist political economy as a whole. Over the past two decades, contributions from non- Marxists to value theory have fallen away considerably. This reflects both bad news and good news. The bad news is, of course, that the influence and presence of Marxist political economy has been in decline. The good news is that current debate itself is richer for having moved beyond, if not universally, whether Marx’s value theory is valid and to address how it is to be interpreted by those who have both knowledge of its finer points and wish to apply them to theoretical and empirical questions.
«La Globalización o la razón del más fuerte. El sindicalismo ante la globalización neoliberal»: Joaquin Arriola
La Globalización, o la razón del más fuerte
Con la crisis que se desencadenó en 2007 en los países desarrollados, se ha puesto en marcha una nueva ola de políticas neoliberales que buscan cargarle a los trabajadores la factura de de la etapa de consumo alegre y despreocupado precedente de la que no han sido los beneficiarios, y de una crisis que no han provocado. Sin embargo, los trabajadores europeos, norteamericanos y de otros países desarrollados no solo no parecen especialmente preocupados con las nuevas políticas, sino que son ellos precisamente los que con frecuencia votan y llevan al poder a los políticos y los partidos de las defienden.
Esta aparente paradoja se explica ciertamente por la enorme maquinaria de propaganda en la que se han convertido los medios de comunicación social (a fin de cuentas, no es por casualidad que el gobierno de Estados Unidos dedica más de 1.800 millones de dólares al año a investigaciones psicológicas) que ha llevado a que en la opinión pública se asiente la idea de que la evolución de la economía se ha convertido en un proceso autónomo, sobre el cual la política tiene una influencia en el mejor de los casos limitada. Y ello parece ser así como consecuencia de un proceso, acelerado en los últimos años, de internacionalización creciente de los flujos y las estructuras económicas, lo que se ha venido a denotar la “globalización”.
«Cuestiones polémicas en torno a la teoría marxista del trabajo productivo»: Diego Guerrero
El número 30 de la revista francesa Issues (primer trimestre de 1988) recoge un interesante debate entre los autores del libro, Les enjeux de la société de services (Jean- Claude Delaunay y Jean Gadrey, 1987) y varios de los colaboradores habituales de la revista: Paul Boccara, Jean Lojkine y Claude Quin. Podría resumirse el debate diciendo que estos últimos reprochan a Delaunay y Gadrey haber abandonado el criterio que tradicionalmente defendieron (un criterio más estricto, ligado a la «materialidad» de la producción), en favor de otro criterio más amplio, que Boccara, Lojkine y Quin consideran que se desvía de las directrices proporcionadas por el propio Marx. Nosotros vamos a defender en este articulo que, en realidad, la posición de Delaunay y Gadrey se encuentra mucho más cerca de la del propio Marx que la de sus oponentes.
«Detrás y más allá de la crisis»: Guglielmo Carchedi
La crisis financiera de 2007 ha vuelto a encender el debate sobre las crisis, su origen y sus posibles remedios1. Actualmente la tesis más influyente en la izquierda ve la crisis como una consecuencia del subconsumo y recomienda políticas keynesianas para su solución. En este trabajo se argumenta que debemos entender la crisis desde la perspectiva de la ley de la caída tendencial de la tasa media de beneficio (TMB) de Karl Marx (para resumir, en adelante: “la ley”). Su característica peculiar es que el progreso tecnológico hace descender la tasa de beneficio, en vez de incrementarla, como se suele asumir. Veamos por qué.
«Teoría del valor»: Reinaldo Carcanholo
Vídeo:
«A general refutation of Okishio’s theorem and a proof of the falling rate of profit»: Alan Freeman
This is the first published general refutation of the Okishio theorem. An earlier refutation based on a specific example was published by Kliman and McGlone in 1988. Okishio’s theorem, published in 1961, asserts that if real wages stay constant, the rate of profit necessarily rises in consequence of any cost-reducing technical change. It proves this within a simultaneous equation (general equlibrium) framework.
This paper establishes that this proposition is false within a differential equation (temporal) approach. In such a framework the denominator of the rate of profit rises continuously, regardless of whether or not there is technical change, unless capitalist consumption exceeds profit, as occurs in a slump.
Okishio himself asserts that his theorem is ‘contrary to Marx’s Gesetz des Tendentiellen Falls der Profitrate’ – contrary to Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This assertion is, within the literature, universally taken to be the substantive content of the ‘Okishio Theorem’. Thus, if Marx’s approach to value is in fact temporal, and not simultaneist, this assertion by Okishio is false, since it applies not to Marx’s own theory, but to the interpretation of that theory subsequently attributed to Marx by a specific school of thought represented principally by Bortkiewicz, Sweezy, Morishima, Seton,
and Steedman.
«Marxism, Crisis Theory and the Crisis of the Early 21st Century»: William K. Tabb
In the writings of Karl Marx we find the most penetrating theoretical construction of the basic laws of motion of capitalism, and also acute observation of the significant events of his time and their larger meaning. Distinguishing his different levels of analysis can be obscured by the employment of the same words in different usages. For example, as Marx moves between the usages of the term «class» applied at the level of the mode of production to «class» as class fractions relevant to a specific social formation in his contemporary conjuncture, the term takes on different meanings (Oilman, 1978; Tabb, 2009). So too his writing explaining the causes of economic crisis range from disequilibrium in reproduction schemas and the core contradictions of social relations under capitalism, to contingent events of timely importance which attribute causal significance to such things as the discovery of natural resources or the bankruptcy of a particular enterprise. Just as our use of «class» depends on subject of our inquiry, so «crisis» is employed to consider different ranges of explanation.
Marx was quite expansive in discussion of crisis but, as Schumpeter writes (1951, 49), he «had no simple theory of business cycles. And none can be made to follow from his ‘laws’ of the capitalist process.» But this is to ignore his dialectical method. It is true that nowhere does Marx present a single crisis theory. He offers different explanations in different contexts. This should not be surprising, for Marx’s science is not a deterministic one but a dialectical approach with strong stress on historical specificity. For us his work raises the question in what ways our understanding of Marxian crisis theory helps explain the conjunctural crisis of the early 21st century and suggests appropriate political responses. In attempting to discuss these crucial questions in the limited space available I will paint a broad canvas highlighting diverse elements to connect discourses which frequently stand in isolation from or conflict with each other. Such scope reminds us of the breadth of Marx’s writing; the different levels of analysis, periodisation, and abstractions he pursued.
«The logic of prices as values»: Guglielmo Carchedi
Abstract
There are two major lines of criticism moved at Marx’s approach to the transformation of values into prices. The circularity critique holds that constant and variable capital appear in Marx’s numerical examples as inputs at their individual values and as outputs at their social, transformed value (or price of production). This critique is rejected as being foreign to Marx’s methodology. Rather, the problem, when correctly formulated, is why and how the value incorporated in the constant and variable capital at the moment of their realization as outputs can differ from the value appropriated by them at the moment of their realization as inputs (and vice versa). The infinite regression critique submits that Marx’s approach implies following the formation of value step by step backward ad infinitum. This critique too is rejected on logical grounds and it is submitted that the problem, rather, is that of bringing up to the present the value which has been formed in the past. After the transformation problem has been thus reformulated, a solution is provided. Seen from this angle, which I argue is Marx’s own, there is no inconsistency in Marx’s numerical examples.
«La crisis de la financiarización, Costas Lapavitsas (coordinador), Carlos Morera (compilador)»: Reseña de Sergio Cámara
La crisis de la financiarización, Costas Lapavitsas (coordinador), Carlos Morera
(compilador), iiec-unam y clacso, 1ª ed., 2011.
El libro es una compilación de artículos en los que se analiza la crisis financiera mundial desde el enfoque económico marxista, insertándose en la vertiente que enfatiza las características específicas del neoliberalismo frente a su análisis como crisis de rentabilidad y del proceso de acumulación real. Los artículos ubican al proceso de financiarización de la economía mundial como el aspecto central en la caracterización del neoliberalismo y de la crisis de 2008-2009, analizan de forma subordinada sus otros pilares fundamentales: las transformaciones en los procesos de trabajo y en la distribución del ingreso y la globalización del capital.
«Aulas sobre o Capital de Marx»: Reinaldo A. Carcanholo
Curso de Reinaldo A. Carcanholo sobre El capital impartido para dirigentes sociales 2010-2011
«Abstraction versus Contradiction: Observations on Chris Arthur’s The New Dialectic and Marx’s ‘Capital’»: Roberto Finelli
Abstract
This intervention concerns the different statute of abstraction in Marx’s work. By means of a critical confrontation with Chris Arthur’s work, Finelli presents his thesis of the presence of a double theory and fuction of abstraction in Marx’s work. In the early Marx, until the German Ideology, abstraction is, in accordance with the traditional meaning of this term, a product of the mind, an unreal spectre. More exactly, it consists in negating the common essence belonging to labouring humanity and projecting it, as alienated universal, into the idea of philosophy, into the state of politics and into the money of the market. In the later Marx, the nature of abstraction is, rather than mental, practical. It is directly related to the quantity without quality of capitalist labour, and it is the product of the systemic connection of machines to labour-power. In contrast to Arthur, Finelli maintains that practical abstraction in the Marx of Capital is not located in the zone of exchange and the market, where there is the mediation of money. On the contrary, it is located in the zone of production, which, for Marx, is a social ensemble not mediated by money but by relations of technological domination.
Keywords
abstraction, formal determination, presupposed-posited, opposition-contradiction, abstractionemptying out, dissimulation. The New Dialectic and Marx’s ‘Capital
«El origen de la explotación capitalista»: Marta Harnecker
INTRODUCCION
1. En este Cuaderno de Educación Popular nos proponemos estudiar el mecanismo fundamental que explica por qué en la sociedad capitalista existe un pequeño grupo de personas que posee muchas riquezas y goza de una vida fácil, mientras una parte importante de las y los trabajadores vive en una situación muy difícil.
2. Ya dijimos en el Cuaderno anterior que descubrir las verdaderas causas de la explotación capitalista no es una tarea fácil. Ese trabajo fue realizado en el Siglo XIX por un científico alemán llamado Carlos Marx. Este investigador escribió varios volúmenes sobre el tema en su obra maestra que tituló justamente: El Capital.
3. A partir de los aportes de Marx, los trabajadores y pueblos del mundo pueden conocer esas causas y prepararse mejor para luchar contra ese sistema tan inhumano y perverso. Este texto está basado en sus ideas.
«Hostile brothers: Marx’s theory of the distribution of surplus-value in volume 3 of Capital»: Fred Moseley
It is argued in this paper that the overall main subject of Volume 3 of Capital is the distribution of surplus-value, i.e. the division of the total amount of surplus-value into individual component parts, first into equal rates of profit across branches of production and then the further division of surplus-value into commercial profit, interest, and rent. This subject of Volume 3 is clearly stated in the various quotations at the beginning of this paper and in the many subsequent quotations presented throughout the paper.
The paper argues further that Marx’s analysis of the distribution of surplus-value is based on the fundamental premise that the total amount of surplus-value has already been determined by the prior analysis in Volume 1.i The main question addressed in Volume 3 is how this predetermined total amount of surplus-value is divided up into its component parts. The division of the total surplus-value into individual parts does not in any way affect the magnitude of the total surplus-value, since this total surplus-value is taken as a predetermined given in the analysis of its division. We will see that this key premise is explicitly stated and emphasized many times in Volume 3 and in the earlier drafts of Volume 3, especially in the important concluding Part 7 on “Revenue and its Sources”. (Marx’s discussions of this key premise in the earlier drafts of Capital are examined more extensively in Moseley 1997.ii) I argue that this distinction between the determination of the total amount of surplusvalue in Volume 1 and the distribution of surplus-value in Volume 3 is closely related to Marx’s distinction between “capital in general” and “competition” (or “many capitals”). Capital in general refers to the essential properties that all capitals have in common. The most important common property of capitals is their capacity for self-expansion, i.e. their ability to produce surplus-value. Since this common property is shared by all capitals, the analysis of capital in general is necessarily an analysis of all the capitals taken together, that is of the total social capital. Therefore, the main question addressed in the analysis of capital in general is the determination of the total amount of surplus-value produced in the capitalist economy as a whole. Competition refers to the relations among individuals capitals, and, in particular, to the distribution of surplus-value among capitals.
Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey
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Fundación Infancia y Aprendizaje
Colección de libros Marxismo Crítico
Historical Materialism
CIPEC (Centro de Investigación en Pensamiento Crítico)
Centro para la Investigación como Crítica Práctica
Memoria Revista de Crítica Militante
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