From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@stanford.edu)
Date: Wed Nov 06 2002 - 13:41:12 EST
>Re Alejandro's [7917]: > > > I agree with Paul: in general unequal exchange is a misleading >discussion. Amin and Emannuel did several mistakes. By example, >Emannuel ignored the tendency to sell products at similar prices in >world markets despite huge differences in productivitys. But couldn't this mean that the high productivity nation is selling at a price above its individual value while the low productivity nation is selling at a price below its individual value? That's the possibility Carchedi explores through the formation of concepts such as individual and social value (Carchedi's theory reads to me as a development of Bauer's and Grossmann's simple ideas on this question). Why can't there be a redistribution of value in circulation? What role is played by exchange rates? This certainly does not imply that the lion's share of the value redistributed to the high productivity nation ends up in the hands of the mass of its working class, thereby turned en masse into a conservative labor aristocracy. Wasn't it the putative political implication of unequal exchange theory which led many Marxists to reject any form of it as 'circulationist'? There is also the problem that the goods traded between the North and the South are non competing (I think Carchedi tends to downplay this structural aspect of international trade), and Marx did entertain the possibility that the kind of agro-mineral exports from colonies would systematically tend to exchange below value. I had to return to the library Enrique Dussel's book on the Unknown Marx, ed. Fred Moseley, but if I remember correctly, Dussel has collected Marx's passages on this--the most important being (I believe) in Theories of Surplus Value. Yours, Rakesh
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