Hi Gil, hmmm. a rather lengthy reply to Albritton's relatively brief post. Doesn't seem your speech was so easily chilled after all! I hope that the length of your reply does not chill Albritton's speech... I'll just stay at the beginning > >In virtually all of these passages, Marx emphasizes that although >these circuits of capital yielded surplus value, they did not >involve even formal subsumption of labor under capital. Let us not talk about the conditions in which the circuit of capital can yield surplus value but rather the conditions in which the law of value comes to regulate production and exchange. I think Albritton is concerned about the latter. You of course are concerned about the former. What is meant by regulation by the law of value? I am not sure, but perhaps these are three possible meanings. i. capitalists sufficiently indifferent to use value that capital will be shifted to where it yields the greatest possible surplus value (Albritton emphasizes this). ii. the tendential ability to realize prices of production becomes a condition of supply (Mattick Jr underlines this). iii. social relations are mediated through commodities: society is in accordance with the commodity principle (again see Albritton). (For example, let us assume that we are on the free wage island, the commodity principle would not hold if workers were to form direct cooperative relations with each other and then borrow inputs from banks or merchants which in effect guaranteed the appropriation of surplus value; unions would also seem to interfere with the commodity principle). Now it seems that Albritton believes that for conditions i and ii to be met, (a) wage labor has to be doubly free and (b) capital mobility more or less achieved. I have questioned (a). Without (b) there could of course not even be the formation of the very average rate of profit which is held to be a condition of supply (Albritton notes that capital markets were too undeveloped for there to have been the formation of an average rate of profit in the period Brenner calls agrarian capitalism which thus could not have been regulated by the law of value). Weeks adds that condition ii will not be realized without more or less full monetization of the inputs. It seems to me that Albritton is saying that when conditions i-iii are met we have a pure, competitive capitalism which of course never exists in history but can be analyzed by means of a thought experiment for its laws of motion. Albritton seems to think however that mid 19th century England best approximated pure capitalism. The problem then becomes one of connecting levels of abstraction; Albritton gives three: pure theory, stage analysis, conjunctural analysis. It seems that Albritton is arguing that Marx's *Capital* was meant to stay at the first level of abstraction but there are very damaging confusions of levels of abstraction in his analysis. Since the Uno-Sekine-Albritton interpretation of the methodology of *Capital* is one of the major schools of Marxian thought, I would like for us to get what they are saying more or less right. Rakesh
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