From: Ian Wright (iwright@GMAIL.COM)
Date: Wed Jun 23 2004 - 12:51:21 EDT
Hi Rakesh > In short, why should overproduction lead to less labour time > being allocated to the production of this commodity. More labor time > (or a greater share of social labor time) could be allocated if the > market is expanded sufficiently through the reduction of unit values, > no? Given a fixed level of demand, overproduction implies a reduction of social labour time. Your second sentence then drops the assumption of a fixed level of demand. If both productivity increases and demand increases then more social labour time could be expended even though unit values decrease. Is there a problem with this? > The price mechanism is not one that provides equilibrium through > negative feedback. Perhaps in a world of simple commodity production > the price mechanism would work like that. But the capitalist price > mechanism tends to induce continuous morphological change even as it > tends to maintain the capitalist organism in homeostatis. And of > course cybernetics is a flawed metaphor because it thinks away the > role of real contradiction in capitalist development. You are right to underline the difference between simple commodity production and capitalism. In principle, there may be many homeostatic mechanisms that constitute a totality, some of which may be in real contradiction to each other (e.g., two teams in a game of tug-o-war), in which case what unfolds depends on their interaction. Simple commodity production considered in isolation has a tendency toward equilibrium. ATB -Ian.
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