[OPE-L:788] Re: More Digression

glevy@acnet.pratt.edu (glevy@acnet.pratt.edu)
Mon, 15 Jan 1996 13:12:15 -0800

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Duncan wrote in [787]:

> If you write down an explicitly disequilibrium model with time subscripts
> differentiating commodities at different times, thus allowing for prices
> of inputs and outputs to differ, one solution will be the equilibrium
> prices where the inputs and outputs have the same (relative) prices. This
> is also the easiest solution to analyze, and its existence is a good
> indication that the equations make sense. As an historical aside, this
> seems to be the approach Marx took, for example, in his work on
> reproduction schemes.

Didn't John ask in [785] about the valuation of inputs and output in
relation to Marx's _"notion of accumulation"_? That's a rather different
subject and level of analysis than Marx's reproduction schema.

In fact, wasn't one of the major points of Marx's analysis of
reproduction in V2 to show the abstract formal possibility of crisis and
the formal conditions for equilibrium and disequilibrium? Of course, many
Marxists of the underconsumptionist and disproportionality schools have
attempted to use the reproduction schemes when analyzing accumulation.
But, that wasn't Marx.

"As a historical aside", in fact, one could say that *most* Marxists
historically (e.g. German Social Democracy, the Bolsheviks) have been
underconsumptionist and/or disproportionality theorists who analyzed
accumulation in relation to equilibrium conditions and the reproduction
schemes.

In OPE-L Solidarity,

Jerry