[OPE-L:5781] Re: Re: Marx & Ricardo

From: Paul Zarembka (zarembka@acsu.buffalo.edu)
Date: Mon Jun 04 2001 - 11:53:15 EDT


Following upon some work I am doing now, I have found Lenin to be quite
uncritical of Ricardo (while MUCH more critical of, for example,
Sismondi).  The only important exception seems to be Lenin's referring to
Ricardo's buying into Smith's error of forgetting constant capital is
discussing the value of a product.  And even in this case, Lenin doesn't
show dramatic implications for Ricardo's theory of this error.  I haven't
reached conclusions yet.  

Note, in any case, that TSV, Volume 3, cited by Gerry, was only first
published in 1910, considerably after Lenin's economics of 1893-99.

Paul

***********************************************************************
Paul Zarembka, editor, RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY at
******************** http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka


"Gerald_A_Levy" <Gerald_A_Levy@email.msn.com> said, on 06/03/01:

>In brief, I think that Marx's position was that
>Ricardo represented the culmination of 'scientific'
>bourgeois political economy. After Ricardo came
>the 'disintegration of the Ricardian school'
>(Torrens, James Mill, Bailey, McCulloch, J.S.
>Mill, etc.) and 'vulgar economy' followed by
>'the bad conscience and evil intent of apologetics'.

>Yet, despite this, Marx was not a Ricardian --
>his object, in part, was to *critique* political
>economy. In so doing, he had to appropriate
>from Ricardo what he deemed to be
>scientifically valid but also surpass Ricardian
>theory. And one can *never* forget that Marx
>was a 'scientific socialist', i.e. a communist.
>Nor can one forget that while Marx viewed
>Ricardo as the 'last great representative' of
>cpe, he also viewed him as an advocate of
>bourgeois  theory (when it was still possible for bourgeois economics to
>be scientific.) From
>*this* standpoint, their two projects were
>*vastly* different: Ricardo was an advocate
>for capitalism; Marx called upon the working
>class to bury that mode of production.

>To give some idea of just how many differences
>there were between Ricardo and Marx from
>Marx's perspective, consider the following 'errors'
>of Ricardo that are noted *IN ONLY ONE
>CHAPTER of _TSV_* (Part III, Ch. 20):

>1. "Ricardo's mistake is that he is only concerned
>with the magnitude of value" and fails to see how
>value is an expression of the social relations of
>production under capitalism;

>2. he mistakenly identifies surplus-value with
>profit;

>3. he sees only the physical difference between
>fixed and circulating capital and not the relation
>between  c and v;

>4. He assumes capital and capitalist relations and
>does not explain their inner nature or how they
>are brought into being;

>5. he assumes a general rate of profit rather than
>showing how it is necessarily brought into being
>by the nature of capital itself;

>6. he identifies cost price with value and does
>not see that this is is contradiction to the law of
>value;

>7. his definition of a general rate of profit where
>there are differing organic compositions contradicts the law of value;

>8. he didn't comprehend the distinction between
>labor and labor power;

>9. he saw the surplus product in its physical
>sense but not surplus value;

>10. He accepted Say's Law of Markets.

>11. He denied the possibility of a crisis of
>generalized overproduction;

>12) the functions of money are overlooked and
>assumed rather than analyzed.

>Remember -- that is only *from 1 chapter of
>TSV*!



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