From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Wed Jan 09 2008 - 19:04:30 EST
BTW Jerry thanks for referring me to Willi Semmler's 1984 book. I managed to get hold of a copy at reasonable cost, from Germany (his books are incredibly expensive). It's good, but I do have criticisms of it. Among other things, (1) I am not convinced that Pasinetti's linear production theory has anything much to do with Marx's own theory, (2) I think Marx's theory of production prices is not well-understood in the literature - in particular most authors, including Fred Moseley, make the easy mistake of thinking that Marx's concept of production prices is basically the same as Smith and Ricardo's "natural prices", in part because Marx literally refers to these "natural prices" in his text and then says what they really mean is production prices (3) several different concepts of equilibrium ought to be distinguished. I hope to prove this in my paper on the law of value, if I get time to finish it. It would be great to study with Willi Semmler, I mean he really understands this stuff, but basically I don't have the money for it, and anyway I am not a qualified economist, I study these things only if I am able in my leisure time. But I can read his books, and that's a help. As regards Ozgur Orhangazi's paper on financialization, I have a few empirical/quantitative things to say about it, but I have not finished writing that up yet, I really have to finish a few other things first. As I said, in my opinion, financialization means essentially that a greater portion of surplus-value is realised in the form of net interest & net rent, rather than straightforward profit from production. I can show you more exactly what this means in a while, with some calculations which Bob Pollin's people typically don't do. On another note, if you compare historically the number of goods-producing workers and the value of output of goods, as I did, you obviously have to bear in mind that organisational changes occur in the division of labour which are not reflected by the classifications. I can explain this as follows. If services which were originally provided in-house by manufacturing plants are outsourced, and become a separate business servicing manufacturing, this will affect the number of workers employed by manufacturing, it will affect the intermediate consumption and net output of manufacturing, and also the magnitude of services. The statistical system often does not cope very well with the fact that at one production site, numerous different companies employing labour, plus self-employed and subcontracted labour could be working together. There is a difference between ""persons engaged by an establishment at a specific location" and "persons employed by a discrete business entity". And thus, in part the "decline of US manufacturing" is simply a statistical result of the fact that there are in reality "many more services servicing manufacturing", rather than manufacturing containing these services within itself as was the case before. The general business model in the neoliberal era (which is mimicked by government bureaucrats, and reflected socially in society as a whole) is that you have a core layer of rich managers and rich technocrats with permanent positions, then a layer of skilled employees with renewable or semi-permanent contracts on average pay, then a layer of poor semi-skilled or unskilled employees with annual contracts, and then a layer of casual employees with very short-term contracts. In addition, the organisation episodically hires the services of external advisors, consultants and technical specialists for specific projects which they cannot do themselves. The general dynamic of the model is, that you get much more labour mobility within and between firms, that people constantly try to lever up the payment for their skills, and that no particular loyalty to the firm exists anymore, except among those who are paid very well by it. In this sense, restructuring and reorganisation becomes permanent, and the tendency is for workers to have to do any function the management wants, as and where needed, or be fired. Management then consists in having control of an account and the mandate to hire particular people to do particular projects, and shift them around the place. The press is full about the extraordinary pay of CEOs etc. but this is only the most extreme expression of a general trend. If the CEO doesn't get his money, then he's off to another job or another employer, but the same thing happens at lower levels as well, at least among skilled people who have some "leverage". Point is, the statistical system often does not cope very well with this, because it was created with the assumption that free workers work enduringly in one place, that they are all employed in that place by the same employer, and that they aren't leased out, subcontracted or de facto indentured between different employers and different places. If you get high labour mobility and a lot of discontinuity in this sense, then sample surveys become a bit suspect, because they are extrapolated on the basis of previous frames and surveys which may be quickly out of date. And what a specific business entity really consists of, may be more difficult to establish, because the contractual relations involved are much more complex and changeable. Even within a year, occupational designations may change, and so on. Jurriaan
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