>From: Paul Zarembka <zarembka@acsu.buffalo.edu> >Date: Thu, 02 Nov 2000 19:16:09 >Subject: Re: [OPE-L:4401] Re: Re: growth rates > > >Rakesh Narpat Bhandari <rakeshb@Stanford.EDU> said, on 11/01/00: > >>What did you think of Mattick Sr's essay on Lenin and Luxemburg? > >That article is a 1935 one and I found it rather more objectionable than >his1970s work which seems to be more balanced. However, I don't think >Mattick is really that much interested in Luxemburg's work and, as I >write, he sustains a "dismissal of Luxemburg, not much in his own words >but using the words of others (minus the polemics)". > >My most serious objection is the following: > >" 'without a doubt the reproduction schemes show that even under the >conditions they assume, the circuit of capital is conceivable on an >expanded scale' (Mattick, 1974, p. 100). Mattick has hit upon the issue of >contention. But he fails to explain his assertion! Luxemburg is denying >most forcefully the accuracy of such a statement and Mattick is doing no >more than asserting her supposed error in understanding Marx -- but not >analyzing her argumentation (for which she devoted much of her book of 450 >pages)." > >In any case, I use five pages to discuss Mattick on Luxemburg. > >Paul Z. Paul, but what do you make of Mattick's argument, derived from Grossman, almost 40 years earlier (1935): "The theoretical confusion of Rosa Luxemburg is best illustrated in the fact that on the one hand she sees in the average rate of profit the governing factor which 'actually treats each individual capital only as part of the total social capital, accords it profit as part of the surplus value to which it is entitled in accordance with its magnitude, without regard to the quantity which it has actually won', and that she nevertheless examines the question as to whether a ocmplete exchange is possible; and that on the basis of a schema which knows no average rate of profit. If one takes into account this average rate of profit, Rosa Luxemburg's disproportionality argument loses all value, since one department sells above and the other under value and on the basis of the production price the undisposable part of the surplus value may vanish."(reprinted in Anti Bolshevik Communism, ME Sharpe, 1978, p. 38) True, Mattick Sr here does allow here for some modification in conditions in the reproduction schemes, that is allows for an average rate of profit, but he certainly seems make an interesting argument here which you did not address in the draft, correct? I had suggested that to understand the totality of Mattick Sr's views on Luxemburg one would have to consider these earlier essays as well. As a teenager, let us not forget, Mattick Sr was in the youth section of the German Spartacist League! Yours, Rakesh ps I am still seeking to put Marxian theory on the foundations of Grossmann, Blake and Mattick Sr.
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