[OPE] Brecht and value-form theory

Alejandro,

It is true that Marx does not explicitly talk so much about the social utility of market signals that such-and-such labor efforts are unnecessary relative to demand, because the products of that market activity cannot be sold, or cannot be sold at the expected price.

But he does talk very explicitly about supply and demand "adjusting" to each other. This is not "market balance" or "general equilibrium" in the sense of the vulgar Marxists and Neoclassicals (insofar as we could specify that balance in a neutral and objective way) but a retrospective, imperfect and continual adjustment.

That is, in Marx's own theory, supply and demand adjust to each other continually irrespective of whether this leads to balance being achieved, or not. But Marxists do not understand this theoretical point yet, because their thinking is shrouded in ideology. They think that if the adjustment occurs, this must logically always be towards general equilibrium.

The theoretical point to be made here is that human needs and the activities required to satisfy them will adjust to each other in any type of society, with intermediation by markets, or without markets altogether, or through a combination of both.

It is just that the market ideologists find it very difficult to understand how any society could function without market exchange, and thus they "impute" the existence of a market, even if there is none because trade is absent. I will try to describe this in a future article, in which I explain what markets are.

The "market socialists" are full of enthusiasm about the marvellous properties of markets, but they do not really understand much about how real markets function, and the many different kinds of markets there are. Consequently they do not provide very much information which is practically useful, beyond market regulationism. The real dispute in this sense has nothing much to do with markets per se, but with the conditions and preconditions of trade.

The debate about socialist economics is held back by the fact that 90% of economics is based on "idealized assumptions and stylized facts" about economic life. Economics attempts to depict market exchange as a rational process which obeys a logic which they claim to discover, and thereby to rationalize the existence of markets with a functional explanation such that, if markets weren't efficient, they would not exist.

This has a superficial plausibility but unfortunately for a real thinker this kind of thing won't wash, because the very way in which markets are described, is in good part ideological. Among other things, the efficiency of human action, human relations and human work is suddenly ascribed to market exchange (cf. vulgar Marxist value-form theory) as if it inheres in market exchange (the reification of political economy) - "the market knows best" until the market collapses and people are ruined, but the point is that markets are not entities which can "know" anything, that is a reification (in fact I think I will title my article "the economics of innocent markets").

Jurriaan

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Received on Sat Mar 21 06:27:45 2009