From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Sun Jul 08 2007 - 01:51:17 EDT
Fine I will desist, and since Jurriaan will be with you, I will stay off the list until he takes or is asked to take a break from it. I am not a shopkeeper Marxists and I encourage plunges into statistical data with the critical mind recommended by Desroisieres which I hope people appreciate my forwarding to the list as it is the most sophisticated analysis out of the Bourdieu school. I'm obliged to send this correction about Andrew's book to this list and the public archive because I did indeed miss the paragraph where he discusses double divergence on p. 109 (it's a very short paragraph at the very end of an chapter) and I wish to rectify the error. I don't wish to impose this long post on anyone, but since my posts are challenged in Kliman sympathetic circles, I address it to them via the archive. To begin with the most obvious point: I see no reason to make the value of a commodity the sum of two different kinds of things--direct labor time and the value of money required to buy mop at current prices rather than indirect labor time itself. Why do we skip from labor time to the value of money? It's antithetical to Marx to take the entrepreneur's point of view of the value of the means of production. Which is what Kliman does by taking the value of his money outlay for means of production. The question is however a social one--how much of its socially necessary labor time does the production of a commodity represent to society, not the entrepreneur. The answer to that question can only be the sum of direct and indirect labor time. Which does not mean I mean am a dual systems theorist. I have long accepted DeVroey's interesting attempt to create a single system interpretation. And now for the empirical relevance: It seems to that with global value chains US purchasers are close to monopoly buyers as a result of their control of design and distribution. It seems to me that they may be buying intermediate goods, means of production at prices below value so that some of the surplus value embodied in them shows up in the final product (say the iPod) which the US company owns. Here profitability is maintained for some capitals at the expense of other capitals which are getting pushed to the wall. This simply can't happen in Kliman's single system because the value transferred from say the intermediate goods is simply the value of the money required to purchase them at current prices. But let's say the value transferred from these intermediate goods is given by their actual value and they are purchased at prices below their value; then the profits of US companies also include the surplus value produced by the workers in the supplying firms farther down the value chain. US profits then combine exploitation of workers at home and abroad. And you couldn't separate high US profitability from low supplier country profitability with all the pressure on the workforce that this implies. Kliman's system can't account for this kind of thing as far as I see. It's one empirically important reason to reject his argument for a single system. And it will be no problem finding places where Marx speaks of surplus value being claimed farther down the value chain so to speak. Now here is my response to that very short paragraph: First, Kliman seems to be saying that value transferred in a value economy is determined by value of the mop themselves while value transferred in a price of production economy is determined by value needed to acquire mop at current prices. But why would this be so? Of course he could be saying that value transferred is always determined by value needed to acquire mop and in a value economy the value needed to acquire mop is the same as value of mop themselves (this is why Smith could conflate a command and embodied labor theory of value). This is the missing premise to his own argument. But should value transferred be determined by value needed to acquire mop at current prices rather than the value of the mop themselves? Where is the theoretical argument? And it's clear in many, many places--too many places to count--that Marx understands value as the sum of the labor value of the mop themselves and the labor added. It's what Ricardo thought and I know of not one passage where Marx challenges Ricardo on that point! As Kliman himself notes, the places in which Marx does infer the value transferred frm the value needed to acquire mop at current prices are those places in which he still assumes price is proportional to value. But once he drops the assumption, then he notes that there are two reasons for divergence. Allin was right, and I am right to agree with him. Second, Marx is clearly talking about double divergence between commodities' value and their respective prices and a commodity's value and its price. Kliman says that since Marx did not speak of the latter, then he is comparing two different kinds of economies--a value economy and a price of production economy. This seems to be a non sequitur to me. At any rate this reintroduces a kind of dual system--a value system and a price of production system. What is the status of the former? Is it is only a mental construct or a historical stage? No clarity here in this one short paragraph. It seems that Kliman hs argued himself into a corner, reintroducing two systems to save his one system. I on the other think that the value system only exists in, as and through the price of production system which brings into existence the law of value even as it generates the contradictory tendency of the equalization of the profit rate . So Marx could not be and more importantly should not be comparing a value system to a price of production system. And why did Kliman not cite Allin and me for together making the argument and putting the two passages on double divergence together? And why does he not quote those two passages about double divergence in full as he seems to recognize the importance of these passages? Indeed the passage from the 1861-63 manuscript will show that the quote he takes on page 107 is simply out of context, and it is the strongest evidence he has!!! But the passage as a whole is pretty garbled; we are best taking the passage from Capital 3 on double divergence, and here Kliman is simply twisting it in unreasonable fashion while arguing himself into a corner. He thinks Samuelson was exemplary in the capital switching debate; Fred has been just that in admitting these two minor passages create problems but should be disregarded. Rakesh
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Jul 31 2007 - 00:00:06 EDT