From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Sun Aug 12 2007 - 07:15:06 EDT
Hi Alejandro, My name is Jurriaan Bendien, not Badien. You accuse me of trying to be "clever" but you offer no substantive arguments in support of your accusations. I am not trying to present here a complete theory of socialist economics, I am trying to say briefly what the problem is about. Most Marxists do not even frame the problems correctly, hence they cannot be solved by them. I did not refer in my post to "equilibrium mania of walrasian-paretian economists", and what this has to do with the problem is unclear. I did not argue for " the elimination of THE WHOLE CIRCUIT of intermediate transactions between producer and consumer". I said specifically that Engels (like Marx) believed "A WHOLE CIRCUIT of intermediate transactions between producer and consumer (and all the labour-time necessary for it) would be simply eliminated and redundant", making the allocation of resources more transparent. I am very aware, that insofar as you have trade of any kind, or a complex division of labour, that you cannot eliminate ALL intermediation, and that is not in dispute. The real argument is that a large PART of the intermediation arises, purely because of particular property rights. Likewise, PART of the way that the division of labour is structured, is attributable exclusively to the prevailing structure of property rights. It has nothing to do with the efficient allocation of resources. A good example, about which Prof. Perelman has written, concerns "intellectual property rights" of a type which prevent the general use of new innovations. Another example is a type of trade in financial claims which does not facilitate any rational economic relationship between producers and consumers. Marxists frequently talk about "the market" but this is meaningless, because there are all sorts of structures of market-trade possible, i.e. there are all sorts of modalities of trade possible under all sorts of conditions. In the USSR, a strong attempt was made to wipe out market-trade and replace it with centrally planned direct allocation, but the effect was, that people started to trade informally since the central plan was incapable of meeting many human and economic requirements. There is no point in imposing collective planning, if it is not more efficient and effective than ordinary trading, as an allocative mechanism, and there is also no good reason, why collective planning cannot combine with regulated trading. No market of any complexity can function, without enforced legal norms securing property rights and market-access, and without a social infrastructure. To give you an idea of variety of markets possible, in the supposed citadel of unfettered capitalism, the USA, government employees number about 16% of the labour force. In Holland, a more egalitarian society, government employees are about 11% of the labour force. This is just to indicate you can have a more egalitarian society with less bureaucracy, and a less egalitarian society with more bureaucracy. In fact, Al Szymanski calculated once that in the 1960s or 1970s proportionally the number of bureaucrats in the USA was larger than in the USSR. In the case of the USA today, at least 40 million people are employed in administrative occupations (public and private) concerned mainly with facilitating transactions that give access to goods and services. This does not make much rational economic sense. In the USA there are about 3 million truck drivers, and many of them truck food from one side of the country to the other, burning fossils fuels. In particular cases, the "fresh" food is no longer fresh upon arrival, and up to 40% of "fast food" produced is wasted and thrown out. Why all this occurs, often has little to do with economic sense, but with property rights and the income derived from those property rights. I suspect a "dualist" theory of value is incoherent. I have argued myself, that it is rather meaningless to talk about an "objective" or a "subjective" theory of value, since per definition economic value has both objective and subjective aspects. This is acknowledged by Austrian and neoclassical economists who e.g. regard prices as an objective expression of value. The perception of Marx's theory of value as an "objective theory of value" originated with Werner Sombart in 1894 who wasn't even a Marxist. The real question which any theory of economic value has to explain, is how the objective and subjective aspects are related. Jurriaan
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