From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Sun Sep 24 2006 - 13:13:30 EDT
Rakesh, You wrote: "So we have an open and always already incomplete book but Marx's Capital is not an open book--it is a self-enclosed and completed theory of its object." With all due respect, this seems to me like sophistry. I could say e.g. "a dog is a dog, and at the same time not a dog", but this surely isn't very profound or dialectical. Beyond some remarks scattered through various manuscripts, Marx regrettably simply did not offer a systematic theory of foreign trade. Rosa Luxemburg in fact attempted to derive such a theory of the necessity of foreign trade from the "expanded reproduction of capital" as you say, but personally I'm a bit skeptical about that approach. Trade in the world market, as Marx noted, is historically bound up with the very origins of the capitalist mode of production, i.e. not just a result of it, but a presupposition or initial condition of it. All we are saying here so far, is that for capital to grow, markets must expand, and this expansion occurs both nationally and internationally. I think as regards foreign trade, that what Marx would have done in his critique is to start off not with expanded reproduction, but with a critique of Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage. This is in fact the path taken by authors like Anwar Shaikh, Samir Amin, Michael Husson, Klaus Bush, Guglielmo Carchedi and others. But that path takes us beyond what Marx himself said. Jurriaan
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