From: Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM
Date: Mon Nov 08 2004 - 21:00:14 EST
> I cannot see what the so called 'provisional acceptance of Say's law' has > to do with the Mattick quote. Say was dealing with a world of > appearances and > provided an assertion of a superficial empirical nature. Marx made the > provisional assumption of the complete realisation of value from the > commodity to the money form to the commodity form again to start his > reproduction constructs. The two were working and thinking in completely > different ways. Marx had enough contempt for Say and his law for anyone > to realise that the methodology of each could never be reconciled ( unless > of course one believes Marx didn't understand Say). Marx showed that the > system cannot do what Say 'says' it could because the 'supply' of surplus > value could not meet the 'demand' of accumulation. Marx showed that > the system set up 'demands' it couldn't itself meet, Say asserted that the > system could go on for ever, hardly Marx's starting point. Paul B, Grossmann makes basically the same point when discussing Bauer's scheme: "... we saw that the neo-harmonists Hilferding, Bauer and others join the company of Tugan-Baranowsky in reproducing a version of J.B. Say's old proportionmality theory in order to prove that capitalism contains unlimited possibilities of development" (_The Law of the Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System_, Pluto Press, p. 67). The confusion in this thread may be caused by Rakesh's expression 'provisional acceptance of Say's Law'. Neither Grossmann nor Mattick (nor Marx) provisionally accepted Say's Law. Rather, Grossmann's critique of Bauer could also be seen as a _critique of_ Say's Law. The important point here is that Grossmann simply began his critique of Bauer's reproduction schemes by taking Bauer's own numbers and attempted to demonstrate different results from Bauer. To start out such an effort by supposing that _initially_ there are no realization problems and that S = D does _not_ mean that he was accepting -- provisionally or otherwise -- Say's Law. In solidarity, Jerry
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