From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Sun Feb 05 2006 - 09:36:37 EST
Jerry asked: "Besides the "time factor and such things as credit money and capital gains", what from your perspective can lead to an inequality between the sum of s and the sum of profits in the world economy as a whole?" I assume you mean generic gross profit income (interest, rent, profit, tax, royalties and fees) from production? (as I have noted in the past, social accounts of gross product will always understate real profit income, since they include only those profits thought to be directly associated with value-adding production). S-P inequalities could result e.g. from: - forms of structural unequal exchange - "imperfect" competition of various kinds - wasted labour or destroyed outputs - accounting "tricks", forms of transfer pricing, and tax rules - profits generated by the transfer of resources without production occurring. So, the trend in aggregate prices can only approximately track the trend in aggregate values produced. I think, like Marx and Engels, that the identity of total surplus values produced and total profits from production is only a modelling assumption, used to explore the dynamics of capital accumulation under competitive conditions, where producing enterprises confront a price structure for inputs and outputs which they do not control. The implication of Marx's story is that the deviations between values produced and prices realised are precisely a source of intercapitalist competition, part of what drives that competition along. The very concept of the tendency towards the equalisation (levelling out) of profit rates in competitive conditions implies that, at any time, there are discrepancies between surplus-values produced and realised profits, and there is no good reason for believing that those discrepancies would in reality cancel out at the macro-level, nor can that be proved; it is only a theoretical assumption. In opposition to the Marxists, I do not believe that surplus-value contained in products can be said to be "redistributed" among enterprises, I argue only that more or less surplus-value is realised as generic profit by different enterprises in exchange. Sure, Marx sometimes suggests a metaphor that there exists a "pool" of surplus value from which different capitalist claim their share. But in reality no "redistribution" occurs here, it is only that more or less surplus-value is realised by different enterprises in exchange. Redistribution ideas lead to the idea of value magnitudes being "conserved" in price magnitudes. But this is I think an abuse of a concept. What Marx means I think is that value is conserved between successive exchanges (by human labour), and that changes in value relations will regulate and set limits upon changes in price relations. Value relations between products exist quite independently from their exchange, and do not depend on exchange for their existence. Value relations exist objectively between products, because products physically take definite quantities of social labour-time to produce. All that the generalisation of exchange accomplishes, is that the value of labour-time comes to be represented by the value of its product, and that the value of its product comes to be represented by a money-price. Some theorists (e.g. Jim Devine) seem to argue for the two famous identities as an "ontological" synchrony (cf. James Devine, The Utility of Value: the 'New Solution," Unequal Exchange, and Crisis" in RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY, 1990: 21-39). In that case, it is worth asking, what kind of "identity" is the postulate of aggregate value-price identity anyway? What does it MEAN to say that total prices and total values are "equal"? Presumbly it would mean, that aggregate value produced, exchanges for an aggregate price which reflects equal exchange, i.e. individual products may not exchange at their value, but their aggregate does. But the reality of this, is precisely what I contest; it is only a modelling assumption. In the real world, unequal exchange occurs all the time; why that unequal exchange would mysteriously cancel out exactly at the macro-level is anyone's guess. In this sense, the preoccupations with the Transformation Problem are I think misguided, i.e. those preoccupations arise from a theoretical framework of equilibrium economics, comparative statics, and accounting aggregations, whereas Marx argues that capital can be understood only in motion, i.e. as a process, and his primary concern was with the dynamics of that process, how it affects economic behaviour and drives it in a particular direction. He then provides generalisations about that process, about how production and exchange are related. The only substantive claim that Marx explicitly makes is that total generic profit from production cannot be more than total surplus value produced, although that total profit could be less than total surplus value produced. This seems to be an idea of "no more can be shared out than there is". But even this idea could be challenged, since product values are "shared out" not just among capitalists. Generic total profit can exceed surplus value produced insofar as the whole capitalist class can fleece the whole working class, i.e. unequal exchange can occur between social classes. ĦE pur se muove! - Galileo Jurriaan
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