From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Sun Jan 01 2006 - 08:45:11 EST
Incidentally, Anwar Shaikh has a useful comment on unequal exchange: "Like Steuart, Marx was perfectly well aware that unequal exchange gives rise to what he called profit-on-alienation, which was the foundation of merchant capitalism... It is for this very reason that he begins his analysis of industrial capitalism on the initial assumption that all exchange is equal, which he takes to mean exchange at prices proportional to labor values. This allows him to show that industrial profit is grounded in the extraction of surplus labor, not in the transfer of wealth via unequal exchange. But then, when we move on to a consideration of prices which are no longer proportional to labour values (e.g. prices of production), unequal exchange is once again part of the issue, and aggregate profit now reflects both profit-upon-alienation as well as profit-on-surplus value. It is possible on this basis to explain the famous 'transformation problem' puzzle in which aggregate surplus value and profit differ when we move from labor values to prices of production, holding the value of money (sum of prices) constant. It can be shown that this difference is strictly limited, and arises from transfers into or out of the circuit of capital flows." http://homepage.newschool.edu/~AShaikh/BIODICT.pdf I assume that with "the circuit of capital flows" Shaikh means the the circuits applying to the sphere of production, i.e. purchase of inputs and sales of outputs. In a similar vein, Friedrich Engels commented: "Whence comes this surplus-value? It cannot come either from the buyer buying the commodities under their value, or from the seller selling them above their value. For in both cases the gains and the losses of each individual cancel each other, as each individual is in turn buyer and seller. Nor can it come from cheating, for though cheating can enrich one person at the expense of another, it cannot increase the total sum possessed by both, and therefore cannot augment the sum of the values in circulation. (...) This problem must be solved, and it must be solved in a purely economic way, excluding all cheating and the intervention of any force-the problem being: how is it possible constantly to sell dearer than one has bought, even on the hypothesis that equal values are always exchanged for equal values? " http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch19.htm Jurriaan
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