In his "102 Years Later" post, Jerry says:
(snip)
Putting aside the question for now of landed property and wage-labour
(Books 2-3), what is the justification now for not concentrating on
developing Marxist theory re a) the state; b) international trade; c)
world market and crisis; and, d) competition?
I respond:
It seems to me that there may be several reasons for the lack of
attention for the attention these topics have received.
Have things been worked out on the level of capital in general?
That is, how do you deal with competition if you do not have
agreement about matters on the "general level"? On this list,
our discussions indicate that we have do not have agreement
on basic concepts like abstract labor, value, technical change,
depreciation, prices of production, the rate of profit, the falling
rate of profit, etc. To move on to other topics would require some
heroic assumptions about these matters. Works that do attempt
to treat topics in the last 3 books of the 6 book plan implicitly
or explicitly make such assumptions. No one is stopping anyone from
moving ahead on that basis. Yet, it should be clear that given
the assumptions such efforts may well not be a "systematic" way
of proceeding.
John