From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU)
Date: Tue Oct 07 2003 - 14:13:45 EDT
>Rakesh, > >thanks for this.... why then are these MSS still MSS? can they not be >archived on the Web? What are they like? Blake, read many yaesr ago, seemed >to hold a sort of underconsumptionist view of crisis...is that your interp?. > >Cheers > >Paul Bullock. >----- Original Message ----- I had once pretty much memorized Blake's book, but it has now escaped memory. I think the crisis theory is confused. Definitely not a simple underconsumptionist argument since Blake argues that overproduction tends to break out first in Dept I, not Dept II. That could suggest a kind of disproportionality argument; it could suggest a falling rate of profit argument. For that matter, it's not incompatible with an underconsumptionist argument. So perhaps you are correct. Blake does clearly reject Luxemburg's argument. But Blake does not seem to grasp why Grossmann argued that the reproduction schema were too far removed from the actual capitalist dynamics to illuminate them. Here however is an interesting juxtaposition of quotes. "the law of value is essentially a theory of general equilibrium"--Paul Sweezy, 1942 "Value is not the law of equilibrium of economics, in Marx, as it is in other systems. It is the fact that labor can never be manifested, except by exchange, and under a form that negatives the exchange of time for time, that characterizes value as summing up of disequilibrium, of the sum of contradictions between labor time and the private production which ascertain that labor time, not directly but by way of other commodities. From value to form of value, from that to money, from money to profit, from profit to purchase of labor, from that to contradictions of production and consumption, thence to crises and unemployment, this is an unbroken chain beginning with the theory of value as the SOCIALIST CRITIQUE OF CAPITALIST PRODUCTION." William J Blake, 1939
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