A couple of thoughts on Rakesh's 1666
(1) What explains differential ownership of scarce resources? Why should
that be taken as a "primitive"?
(2) If people must either starve or surrender some of their labor or
some of the product of their labor to you because you've got control of
the productive assets they need in order to avoid starving, then, yes,
differential ownership "explains" (can "account for") the surplus-value.
BUT ONLY IF YOU DO DECIDE TO WORK INSTEAD OF TO STARVE TO DEATH (of
course, a third alternative is to expropriate the expropriators). So
the ORIGIN of profit is still the "unpaid" labor of other people.
(For a long time I've had the sense that post-Marx economics, although
ostensibly giving a different answer to Marx's question about the
origin of profit, in fact changed the question in a subtle way. E.g.,
because I won't surrender the use of $100 for a year without a guarantee
that you'll give me $108 back, "time preference" is said to "explain"
the interest. But where does the extra $8 COME FROM? Rather than
providing us with a theory of the ORIGIN of profit, the post-Marx
economists give us necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence
of profit. ... I'm certainly no expert on Roemer's work, but it strikes
me that a lot of what he says doesn't so much contradict Marx as run
"orthagonal" to Marx, especially on this question.)
Andrew Kliman