[OPE-L:6294] Re: Re: Re: Re: grossman (response to paul z)

From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@stanford.edu)
Date: Sat Jan 12 2002 - 12:47:21 EST


Paul Z writes:

>>
>>Anyway, Rosdolsky already dealt with the 'swindles' issue a long time ago
>>(1968, pp. 497-99) and not only agrees with Luxemburg, his rebuttal is
>>complementary to and perhaps even clearer than Luxemburg's own.

yes but rosdolsky does not understand grossmann's and mattick's point 
(see the latter's essay on luxemburg in anti bolshevik communism). RR 
writes that "'the transfer of capital in material form' cannot us 
over the difficulties raised by RL. And of equally little help is the 
transfer of capital in money form, which underlines bauer's 
method--regardless of how much it corresponds to everyday practice of 
capitalists --since this transfer has been practiced since time 
immemorial without any regard to the changes caused by technical 
progress."p. 499

So even if one doesn't accept Howard and King's argument that the 
tranfer of capital can be invoked deus ex machina to ensure 
equilibrium growth, we don't necessarily need capital movement for 
the formation of prices of production  that eliminate the 
interdepartmental 'imbalances' that result from exchange at value, no?

Again Grossmann thinks that in terms of the long term prognosis of 
the capitalist mode of production, one can't allow one's attention to 
be absorbed by interdepartmental relations that over time can be 
balanced one way or another (transfer of capital in material or money 
form, value-price deviations); the greatest contradictions are in the 
process of production itself which must thus be abstracted from the 
concrete totality. Marx thus reversed the analytical priorities of 
the bourgeois school of exchange economics. Grossmann and Mattick are 
in the tradition of Marx; Bauer, Luxemburg and Rosdolsky are not.

Rakesh



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