From: ope-admin@ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu
Date: Tue May 08 2007 - 19:00:47 EDT
A comment below from Jurriaan, who is taking a temporary vacation from the list effective today. / In solidarity, Jerry ------------------------ Original Message ---------------------------- From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <adsl675281@tiscali.nl> Date: Tue, May 8, 2007 5:33 pm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- <snip, JL> One simple observation I had I will mention about the equilibrium discussion, while I'm writing anyway. I think we always have to be clear about what is being equilibrated. The suggestion is in effect often that "the market" (or indeed the law of value) equilibrates the society as a whole, and thus the equilibrium question seems to become a way of explaining how social order occurs. However I think we should bear in mind that as a matter of fact an enormous amount of non-market activity has to occur in order for markets to function at all, including the activity of the public sector among other things. Many studies have been done e.g. of domestic labour, which, if valued at market rates, would be roughly equal to total personal cash income in the economy. That gives you an indication of proportion. But domestic labour is only one part of all the non-market activity. In addition, at any time the majority of goods/assets held in an economy are not being traded anyway. So really you cannot say that market equilibrium on its own, however defined, can be the structuration principle that ensures social order. I think personally that what Marx meant is, that the bourgeois society was usually in equilibrium so long as its property relations could be securely enforced and protected - it was really the "relations of production" that were the foundation of the social order - so long as they were reproduced, the society could continue to function, even through quite large market fluctuations, job losses etc. But this kind of equilibrium is more a condition of social stability rather than a market equilibrium, and really it is precisely the fact that markets aren't in equilibrium - i.e. that supply and demand don't match to some or other extent - that explains a lot of economic behaviour... the mystery of equilibrium arises because it is difficult to understand how a myriad of independent transactions carried on simultaneously could spontaneously result in an overall balance, but if we consider the total context in which people have to constantly recreate their material and social conditions of life in a reasonable way, whatever happens, a lot of the mystery disappears.
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