From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Wed Dec 14 2005 - 07:43:37 EST
The current issue of RETHINKING MARXISM a journal of economics, culture & society [Vol 18 No 1; January 2006], in addition to having a symposium on Gramsci ["In this symposium we highlight both the often-undervalued practice of translation and the significance of rereading-and rethinking-classic Marxian texts with a symposium on Joseph Buttigieg's new edition of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks"], has a couple of articles that you might find to be of interest (abstracts below). Any reactions? In so0lidarity, Jerry ================================================================== The Fallacies of Keynesian Policies p. 63 Guglielmo Carchedi This article examines the effectiveness of Keynesian policies from the perspective of Marxian value theory. It starts from a sketch of the economic cycle, whose ultimate cause is identified in the decreasing production of (surplus) value following technological innovations, and argues that the strongest case for Keynesian civilian policies is not the redistribution of a (decreasing) mass of value. Rather, they should spur the production of more value through the state-induced mobilization of idle capital and/or Labor's savings. In this case, they can initially increase profitability and/or wages and/or employment, but they cannot create the conditions for an upturn and boom. Similar conclusions are reached concerning military Keynesian policies. The paper concludes by arguing that Labor should fight for state-induced, Capital-financed public works (and for reforms in general) not from the perspective of Keynesian policies (i.e., as if they were Labor-friendly, effective anticrisis devices), but from the perspective of thoroughly different social relations-that is, relations based on cooperation, equality, and solidarity. The "Quantitative Approach" to the Marxian Concept of Value p. 121 Kepa M. Ormazabal This paper is concerned with what I call the "quantitative approach" to the "transformation problem" of chapter 9 of volume 3 of capital, very widespread in the literature. I call it so because it conceives the "transformation of value into competitive price" as a relationship between quantities of labor-value and quantities of money price. Such a conception of the transformation of value into competitive price presupposes that value has quantitative determination. My central contention in this paper is that this presupposition contradicts Marx's idea that labor is the substance or immanent measure of value. In Marx, labor cannot be money, which means that value as such does not have a quantitative determination apart from price expressed in some product of labor. Accordingly, there are no such things as "labor-values" and the transformation of value into competitive price does not contradict the determination of value by labor or Marx's "law of exchange": it is the process through which labor-value becomes objectified as money price in such a way as to equalize the profit rate of capitals of a nonuniform composition. With the "transformation" of value into competitive price, Marx refutes Ricardo's refutation of the labor theory of value in principles
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