From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Mon Sep 25 2006 - 12:07:05 EDT
> >I think as regards foreign trade, that what Marx would have done in his >critique is to start off not with expanded reproduction, but with a critique >of Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage. Jurriaan, Are you looking for a critique on the basis of the acceptance of Ricardo's assumptions? Yet Marx did not accept the Ricardian assumptions that capital could not be exported across national borders and that trading countries could in fact produce the imported commodities on their own. Moreover, if I remember Carchedi's argument, Marx analyzes foreign trade from the perspective of its effect on profitability, not simply as a labor saving device. For these reasons, Marx seems not so much to have critiqued the Ricardian ca theory, but never to have accepted in the first place the assumptions on which it was based. Drawing from Gunnar Myrdal, Michael Hudson very helpfully lays out all the many untenable assumptions built into Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage (again if I remember correctly). I don't think Marx accepted many of those assumptions--mobility of labor, mobility of capital, fixed technology, etc. Since Marx never accepted the assumptions on which Ricardian theory of ca is based, it's not clear to me that he had to develop an explicit critique of it in order to demonstrate the possible multiple effects of foreign trade on the expanded reproduction of capital. So I think I am less persuaded by your counter point the more I think about it. Rakesh
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