Temporal Single-system Interpretation of Marx’s Economic Theory
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Someone on the Party's Facebook has asked this:
Where does the SPGB stand on this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_single-system_interpretationCan anyone refer me to a relevant article? ALB
Since we have never really been influenced by the academic "Marxists" I'd say this pretty much matches up with what the SPGB has taught as Marx's theory all along, before the TSSI was even termed…There's a review of Kliman's book here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2008/no-1248-august-2008/book-reviews
Vin,Written in haste, because it’s getting late here.The TSSI is explained in Andrew Kliman’s book “Reclaiming Marx’s Capital”. Unfortunately it is a technical book and so may not be an easy read.The Wikipedia article also focuses on technicalities, and is probably not a good introduction.Here is a brief summary of the background to the TSSIEngels, in the Preface to Capital Volume 2 posed to Marx’s critics what came to be known as the “Transformation Problem” of abstract values into concrete prices of production, to be discussed in the as-yet unedited and unpublished Volume 3.In 1942, marxian economist Paul Sweezy of the Monthly Review school, resurrected a 1905 mathematical criticism of Marx’s solution by Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz, ironically claiming it to be the correct mathematical formulation of Marx’s problem.In 1961, Piero Sraffa of Cambridge generalized the Bortkiewicz approach, and used it to attack neoclassical capital theory from a supposedly marxian standpoint. This initiated the famous “capital controversies" between the universities of Cambridge in England and Cambridge in Massachusetts, thereby engaging Paul Samuelson [who, if memory serves, had once been a fellow student with Sweezy].In 1966, Samuelson accepted Sraffa’s demolition of the neoclassical “production function”, and wrote to everyone’s astonishment of this new age of “Leontief and Sraffa”.In the process, the implications of Bortkiewicz’s initial abstractions became evident, and it turned out that Sraffa’s system also demolished Marx, whose epitaph was written by Ian Steedman in “Marx After Sraffa” [1977]. Values, it turned out, could be negative when profits were positive! Marx was incoherent.“Marxian" economists deserted Capital in their droves, many heading straight for Sraffa, now termed neo-ricardianism.The upshot was that Marx was wrong to have criticized Ricardo. Machines, robots and possibly animals produce surplus-value.The devastating malaise persisted as long as no-one could detect the error, or errors, in Sraffa.The TSSI, mainly associated with Andrew Kliman in New York and Alan Freeman in London, is the theory that detected the error—actually two fundamental errors—in Sraffianism.To be continued, where I’ll explain why, once it’s understood, we should support it. [The reviewer of Andrew Kliman’s book in a recent Socialist Standard may have some thoughts on the TSSI and references.]
Thanks DJP and twc. Very helpful. I have used some on facebook and referred the inquirer to this forum.
Before proceeding, my memory did not serve me well.
Bortkiewicz’s article on the marxian system appeared in 1907.
The association between Paul Samuelson and Paul Sweezy that I mis-recalled was as follows:
The young Samuelson attended a debate at Harvard in the 1930s between a brash young Paul Sweezy and the elder-statesman of economic history Joseph Schumpeter [who was a student of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, well-known for “Karl Marx, and the Close of his System”]. This was before Sweezy wrote “The Theory of Capitalist Development” and “Monopoly Capitalism”.
Of course, all three knew of each other’s work, and Schumpeter refers to the youngish Sweezy an inordinate number of times thoroughout his giant history of economics. His fascination with Sweezy was with the mathematics, going back to Bortkiewicz, which might well be Schumpeter’s devastating, but unintended, time bomb for so-called “marxian” economists of the once-dominant Bortkiewicz school.
Samuelson [like Schumpeter] was generous to his intellectual foes, excepting Marx (probably because as Andrew Kliman surmises he had the intellectual wood on them, but not on Marx) as is evident from Samuelson’s open admission of defeat in the “capital controversies” and in his appreciative assessment of the work of Sweezy, Sraffa and Ronald Meek [the historian of the labour theory of value] and fulsome in his obituary tributes to them.
By the way, the Cambridge Massachusetts university was, of course, prof. Samuelson’s MIT.
I propose here the introduction to the work of D. Colognesi entitled Production prices in a steady-state system: a “weak” version of K. Marx’s transformation procedure. Colognesi has been for a short while a member of the SPGB. He is a knowledgeable Marxist and a fine physicist. Historical introduction to the ‘Transformation Problem’The transformation of commodity values into production prices in the framework of the Marxian economic system has been presented in the third volume of Capital [1], published by F. Engels in 1894, eleven years after K. Marx's death, but certainly written between 1863 and 1880. Immediately after the publication of this book, the thesis that there was a contradiction between the first and the last volume of Capital became one of the preferred arguments for the critics of K. Marx, such as W. Mühlpfordt, E. von Böhm-Bawerk, and J. V. Komorzynski. In particular, the second, a well-known Austrian academic economist, issued a radical critique [2] of all the Marxian economic system claiming that the results obtained in the first volume of Capital [3], and fully based on the labor theory of value, were in complete contradiction with those contained in the third volume of the same work.A famous reply [4], defending the coherence of K. Marx's research program, was written in 1904 by one of the leading theoreticians of the German working-class movement of that time, R. Hilferding. Additional studies on this subject were performed in the first quarter of the XX century by several authors, including V. K. Dmitriev, M. Tugan-Baranovskij, L. von Bortkievicz, G. von Charasov, and N. Moszkowska. In this respect, it is particularly worth mentioning the first complete critical analysis of what will be known as the Transformation Problem (TP), which was operated by an outstanding statistician and economist, the mentioned L. von Bortkiewicz [5,6], in two detailed essays which, unfortunately, did not immediately obtain the complete attention that they surely deserved. The attitude of L. von Bortkiewicz was completely different from E. von Böhm-Bawerk’s one, since the former was openly a neo-Ricardian, while the latter was one of the strongest supporters of the neo-classical approach to economic sciences. Thus, L. von Bortkiewicz did not mean to completely invalidate K. Marx's results concerning both the labor theory of value and the formation of a general profit rate. Quite the opposite: he analyzed K. Marx’s procedure, discovered what he considered two serious errors, and, finally, proposed a new amended approach based on a more advanced mathematical treatment of the TP. First, according to his interpretation, prices and values of the inputs into a production process should be determined simultaneously with prices and values of the outputs emerging from this process. So prices (and values) of the inputs and prices (and values) of the outputs must be necessarily identical. Second, according to L. von Bortkiewicz’s interpretation of the labor theory of value, values and prices form two distinct and independent systems. With respect to their relative magnitudes, prices do not depend on values and vice versa. So the prices of the outputs depend on the prices of the inputs used to produce them, while the values of the outputs depend on the values of the inputs used to produce them. On the neo-Ricardian side, L. von Bortkiewicz’s work was carefully studied by P. Sraffa in the period 1943-1945, and, later, largely expanded and generalized in his famous book Production of commodities by means of commodities [7]; while on the Marxist side it was P. Sweezy who made the TP known in 1942 [8], especially in the Anglo-Saxon world. In this way the TP became a major issue in the Marxist and neo-Ricardian currents of economic sciences, involving a large number of researchers such as J. Winternitz, K. May, F. Seton, P. Samuelson, M. Dobb, and R. L. Meek, just to cite a few. Mainly based on the results of the mentioned P. Sraffa's work, the contemporary neo-Ricardian interpretation generally presumes that production prices and general rate of profit can be obtained directly from technological matrices (for sector expenditures of means of production) and real wages, as prerequisites. However, the final reformulation of the Sraffian approach to the TP in Marxian terms was fully accomplished only in 1977 by I. Steedman, who, at least temporarily, settled the controversy clearly in favor of the Sraffian school [9]. It had become gradually clear that so-called von Bortkiewicz-Sraffa corrections to K. Marx's economic system were not minor points, but, on the contrary, implied a general revision of various key concepts, e.g. the tendency of the profit rate to fall had to be rejected, and the value system, although formally legitimate, was found to be completely redundant, depriving the concept of working class exploitation of a firm an objective base.At the same time, there appeared a different way of addressing the TP, called Iterative Solution to the Transformation Problem (ISTP). It was developed more or less simultaneously by A. Brody, N. Okishio, A. Shaikh [10], M. Morishima [11], and then perfected by M. Morishima and G. Catephores [12], followed by A. Shaikh and E. Tonak [13], although the ISTP had an interesting precedent in an old article by K. Shibata published in 1934. As a matter of fact, an accurate analysis shows that the ISTP is only a clever mathematical iterative way of solving the system of price equations for the given neo-Ricardian postulates, but is not an alternative approach to solve the Marxian TP.Since the 1980’s there has been an increasing number of responses to the dominant neo-Ricardian interpretation of K. Marx's theory. The first was the so-called New Solution, or better New Interpretation (NI) of the TP. It was first presented, independently, by G. Duménil [14] and D. K. Foley [15]. Since then, it has been developed by A. Lipietz, M. Glick and H. Ehrbar, J. N. Devine, S. Mohun, A. Campbell, F. Moseley etc. It had been the Sraffian attack on the special and privileged status of the so-called "variable capital" (i.e. wages and salaries) in the Marxian system that prompted the two mentioned Marxist economists, G. Duménil and D. K. Foley, to react questioning the legitimacy to consider the variable capital in a dual way through the two aspects of the goods consumed by workers: their prices and their values. However, a critical analysis of the NI is given by A. Saad-Filho [16], as well as by T. Nakatani and Dong-Min Rieu [17].The birth of the NI was later followed by an even more radical approach [labeled Single-System Interpretation (SSI)], where the existence of the dual system (prices and values) is altogether rejected: prices of production and average profit rate depend on the value- based general profit rate, so there is no distinct price system; prices influence value magnitudes, so there is not distinct value system either. In this way, it was possible to recover the three famous Marx’s aggregate equalities (MAEs): the sum of all the values coincides with the sum of all the prices; the sum of all the profits coincides with the sum of all the surplus values; the economy-wide price-based and value-based profit rates are identical. The SSI was originally proposed by R. A. Wolf, B. Roberts, and A. Callari [18,19], but critical comments on this approach are contained in a long article by J. G. Loranger [20].The most drastic rejection of the two von Bortkiewicz-Sraffa corrections came only with the so-called Temporal Single-System Interpretation (TSSI) [21,22], in which the valuation is temporal, so input and output prices can differ. This approach was proposed independently by A. Freeman and G. Carchedi on one side, and by A. J. Kliman and T. McGlone on the other. In the TSSI the original Marxian conditions of transformation are seen by the authors as logically consistent since the approach is based on the use of dynamic transformation models. However, a critical analysis of this temporal approach was carried out by G. Duménil and D. Levy [23], later followed by Dong-Ming Rieu [24].Needless to say that all the three non-Sraffian interpretations in general, and the TSSI in particular, immediately started a lively controversy which has been lasting for more than two decades and was carefully summarized by one of the TSSI proponent, A. J. Kliman, in his stimulating and provocative book Reclaiming Marx's Capital [25]. A particularly interesting topic in this debate is the possibility to describe K. Marx's simple reproduction schemes in the framework of TSSI, since L. von Bortkievicz made use of one of these schemes (namely, a three-sector model) to prove the supposed inconsistency of the original Marxian transformation method. Now, TSSI is seen by its proponents as the exact philological reconstruction of K. Marx’s method; so A. J. Kliman and T. McGlone had necessarily to provide a refutation of L. von Bortkievicz’s proof of K. Marx's errors concerning the simple reproduction scheme. This has been done in 1988 (actually for a slightly simpler two-sector model [26]), showing that a reproduction equilibrium exists between cycles even though input and output prices differ.Despite the ingenuous character of all the three aforementioned non-Sraffian approaches and the huge effort to philologically reconstruct K. Marx’s genuine thought, one has to honestly admit that the TP has not yet been completely resolved: 1) The NI is actually unable to recover all the three MAEs at the same time [25,27], having to give up either on the labor theory of value (i.e. the sum of all the values coincides with the sum of all the prices), or to the surplus-value theory of profit (i.e. the sum of all the surplus values coincides with the sum of all the profits).2) Both the SSI and the TSSI succeed in their common task, but, as clearly noted by G. Duménil and D. Levy [23], after paying the price of a complete redefinition of the concept of value: the value of a new commodity is now the sum of the labor needed to produce it plus the prices (expressed in standard labor equivalent), not the values, of goods and tools consumed in this production process. In this way, following an old idea by W. Mühlpfordt, one has deeply modified the labor theory of value, which, strictly speaking, should be now called “labor theory of new added value”. Once again, whether this is a plausible labor theory of value in Marxian terms or not is still a matter of debate [28].3) As we have seen, the TSSI is rigorously applying K. Marx’s transformation algorithm (although not once, but several times), while the SSI is not and has established its own algorithm. However, as pointed out by F. Moseley [28], the final effect is that the TSSI gives up on the important concept of a stable “equilibrium price”, or better, as recently shown by D. Colognesi [29], regains it only asymptotically where the SSI equilibrium prices are exactly recovered.4) Finally, but this is really an extremely controversial point, there is the question of the so-called “physicalism”, raised by A. J. Kliman [25]. According to this author, the fact that in the reproduction schemes all the prices, values and profit rates can be derived from physical data only (i.e. the quantities of goods and tools utilized in the production process) is thoroughly incompatible with K. Marx’s theory, where, on the contrary, “the value rate of profit determines the price rate, and the physical rate plays no role at all” [25]. In addition, it also claimed that any “simultaneist” approach (either Sraffian, or NI, or even SSI), in which input and output prices/values are determined at the same time, would necessarily lead to mere “physicalism”. For this reason, only the TSSI would escape from the “physicalist” trap, managing to fully accomplish the TP in the spirit of Marxian economic thought. Needleless to say, this statement is not accepted by most of the Marxist economists.Given the mentioned TP scenario and taking inspiration from the important remarks by F. Moseley [28] that associates the value theory described in volume I of Capital with the microeconomic point of view, and the price theory described in volume III of Capital with the macroeconomic one, we have conceived the idea to explore the TP from a slightly different perspective: the labor theory of value would absolutely hold at the microeconomic level (i.e. the individual production sector), while the formation of an average profit rate and, consequently, of the various production prices would give rise to a change in the physical side system in order to guarantee its steadiness, as wisely noted by V. Kalyuzhnyi in his two pioneering papers [27]. Consequently, the labor theory of value would become confined to the so-called “net product” at the very end of the economic process, just before the final consumption. This would result in an apparent violation of the labor theory of value, at least in its strict sense, but actually would ideally reply to F. Engels, who, in the introduction to volume II of Capital, asked the economists (nine years before the publication of volume III) the following intriguing question:"… how can and should a uniform average rate of profit be formed, not only without the violation of the law of value, but just on its basis?" [30]. [1] K. Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy, vol. III (Penguin, London, 1991).[2] E. von Böhm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and the Close of His System (Augustus M. Kelley,New York, 1949).[3] K. Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy, vol. I (Penguin, London, 1990).[4] R. Hilferding, Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx (Evergreen Review, New York, 2009).[5] L. von Bortkiewicz, On the Correction of Marx’s Fundamental Theoretical Constructionin the Third Volume of Capital, in appendix to Ref. [2].[6] L. von Bortkiewicz, Value and Price in the Marxian System, reprinted in InternationalEconomic Papers 2, 5 (1952).[7] P. Sraffa, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. Prelude to a Critiqueof Economic Theory (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1960).[8] P. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (D. Dobson Ltd., London, 1946).[9] I. Steedman, Marx after Sraffa (NLB Editions, London, 1977).[10] A. Shaikh, The so-called transformation problem: Marx vindicated (mimeograph) (NewSchool for Social Research, New York, 1973).[11] M. Morishima, Marx’s Economics: A Dual Theory of Value and Growth. (CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge,1973).[12] M. Morishima and G. Catephores, The Transformation Problem: a Markovian Process,in Value, Exploitation and Growth, M. Morishima and G. Catephores eds., Chap. 6(McGraw-Hill, New York, 1978).[13] A. Shaikh and E. Tonak, Measuring the Wealth of Nations (Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge, 1994).[14] G. Duménil, De la Valeur aux Prix de Production: Une réinterprétation de latransformation (Economica, Paris, 1980).[15] D. K. Foley, The Value of Money, The Value of Labour Power and the MarxianTransformation Problem, Review of Radical Political Economics 14, 37 (1982).[16] A. Saad-Filho, The value of money, the value of labour power and the net product: anappraisal of the ‘New Approach’ to the transformation problem, in A. Freeman and G.Carchedi eds., Marx and Non-Equilibrium Economics (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 1996).[17] T. Nakatani and D.-M. Rieu, On the ‘New Interpretation’ of Marxian labor theory ofvalue, Kobe University Economic Review 49, 51 (2003).[18] R. A. Wolff, B. Roberts, and A. Callari, Marx's (not Ricardo's) ‘transformation problem’:a radical reconceptualization, History of Political Economy 14, 564 (1982).[19] R. A. Wolff, A. Callari, and B. Roberts, A Marxian Alternative to the traditional‘Transformation Problem’, Review of Radical Political Economics 16, 115 (1984).[20] J. G. Loranger, A profit-rate invariant solution to the Marxian transformation problem,Capital and Class 82, 23 (2004).[21] see the various contribution by A. Freeman, G. Carchedi and W. de Haan in A.Freeman, G. Carchedi eds., Marx and Non-Equilibrium Economics (Edward Elgar,Cheltenham, 1996).[22] A. J. Kliman and T. McGlone, A Temporal Single-System Interpretation of Marx’sValue Theory, Review of Political Economy 11, 33 (1999).[23] G. Duménil and D. Levy, The Conservation of Value: A Rejoinder to Alan Freeman,Review of Political Economy 32, 119 (2000).[24] D.-M. Rieu, The Temporal Single-System Interpretation of Marx’s Value Theory: ACritical Appraisal, Korean Economic Review 19, 81 (2003).[25] A. J. Kliman, Reclaiming Marx's Capital: A refutation of the myth of inconsistency(Lexington Books, Lanham (MD), 2007).[26] A. J. Kliman and T. McGlone, The Transformation non-Problem and the non-Transformation Problem, Capital and Class 12, 56 (1988).[27] V. Kalyuzhnyi, The Full Solution of a Problem of Commodity Values Transformationinto Production Prices, Ukrainian Journal Ekonomist 6, 25 (2006); V. Kalyuzhnyi, TheTransformation Problem: Erroneous Arguments of Tugan Baranowsky, Bortkiewicz andSteedman, unpublished (2014). Available at SSRN:http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2520362%5B28%5D F. Moseley, Money and the totality (Haymarket Books, Chicago (IL), 2016).[29] D. Colognesi, La TSSI alla prova: l’andamento a tempi lunghi negli schemi marxiani diriproduzione semplice, appendix I in V. Orati, Marx “scienziato”: disvelato (Wolters Kluver ,Padova, 2018).[30] K. Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy, vol. II (Penguin, London, 1992).
I am not sure that the Party has a rigid take-it-or-leave-it position on the so-called "transformation problem" nor that it really needs one. After all, no one would be barred from joining if they didn't agree with whatever position was taken on the subject !Having said this, we have suggested that it is a false problem as here:www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/z-marxism/tand here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2017/no-1353-may-2017/book-reviews-money-and-totality-dirty-secrets-how-tax
iBefore I deal with this anti scientific drivel in detail. It worth briefly noting that this issue flaired up just after the publication of volume III. And Fred dealt with it in his ‘infamous’ supplement to volume III which is an excellent document and must read. But cut the crap and go back to the basic price argument it was thus; necessarily dropping and forgetting all ideas of value etc etc which is ok and also needed. The price of everything was determined by the requirement to make a general, average or normal rate of profit. Which is correct according to Karl’s analysis. Although even that isn’t strictly true as a capitalists making something in particular will just sell at the highest price they can. If that realizes a higher than average rate of profit then other capitalists will emulate them if they can and increase supply and decrease the price until it equilibrates to an average rate of profit. It is the identical process to that in the idealized ‘Rubin’ simple commodity production. If a maker of Blue Suede Shoes can get 40 hours of other peoples labour for 20 hours of other peoples; the other people switch to making Blue Suede Shoes. Or in the labour power commodity market if intellectual polyglot translators see the bottom dropping out of that market due to computers then they might want to retrain as well into what is good. With that example computers will do a rough translation of a big document and then a polyglot will just need to tidy it up. All the hard work is done. Anyway the price of stuff is determined by the rate of profit or accumulation of wealth or stuff. However what is missed is that rate of profit or accumulation of wealth or stuff, or surplus value was a total enigma, or the subject of raging debated in the 19thcentury to economist then. According to their models. Eg Ricardo and Adam Smith. The so called volume IV was an analysis of that. Karl went through a scientific [Logical] process of reductionism and dragged it down until there was nowhere else possible to go. To arrive at a basic hypothesis that made sense of and anticipated the average rate of profit determining prices. I have just started reading Paul Sweezy’s the theory of capitalist development. It is quite good really and I am onboard with his analysis of chapter one. He is understandably the anti Christ for post 1970’s neo Marxists as with his total un offending innocence as regards chapter one being about simple commodity production.
Dave B wrote:I have just started reading Paul Sweezy’s the theory of capitalist development.It is quite good really and I am onboard with his analysis of chapter one. He is understandably the anti Christ for post 1970’s neo Marxists as with his total un offending innocence as regards chapter one being about simple commodity production.If what our Study Guide here says on this book is accurate, then you are going to be disappointed as you read on.http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/study-guides/books-and-pamphlets-marxian-economicsSo he's a bit of an Anti-Christ for us too, but for a different reason — for being an underconsumptionist, which comes out again more prominently in the book on Monopoly Capital he wrote with Baran.I see he has something to say on the subject of this thread:
Quote:Chapter VII on ‘The Transformation of Value into Prices’ contains a fallacy about the organic composition of capital invested in luxury industries having no effect on the rate of profit and is important only because Michael Kidron bases his argument in Chapter 3 of Western Capitalism Since the War about arms production offsetting the falling rate of profit on it.On the general topic, surely the "neo-Ricardians" and others using their mathematical model make the elementary mistake of assuming that once a commodity has been produced it keeps its value, whereas its value can vary after it has been produced for other reasons, e.g. a new, cheaper method of producing the same commodity being adopted or becoming more widespread (in which case its value will fall). They can't take this into account because their calculations(deliberately) ignore money and so end up in effect adopting the view that the value of a commodity is the actual amount of labour needed to produce it. This is a Labour Theory of Value but not the one Marx adopted, as for him it's the amount of labour needed to reproduce it. I suppose that's why they are called Ricardians not Marxists.
ALB wrote:On the general topic, surely the "neo-Ricardians" and others using their mathematical model make the elementary mistake of assuming that once a commodity has been produced it keeps its value, whereas its value can vary after it has been produced for other reasons, e.g. a new, cheaper method of producing the same commodity being adopted or becoming more widespread (in which case its value will fall). They can't take this into account because their calculations(deliberately) ignore money and so end up in effect adopting the view that the value of a commodity is the actual amount of labour needed to produce it. This is a Labour Theory of Value but not the one Marx adopted, as for him it's the amount of labour needed to reproduce it. I suppose that's why they are called Ricardians not Marxists.The price or money-form of commodities is, like their form of value generally, a form quite distinct from their palpable bodily form; it is, therefore, a purely ideal or mental formMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 3 (1867)
patreilly wrote:The price or money-form of commodities is, like their form of value generally, a form quite distinct from their palpable bodily form; it is, therefore, a purely ideal or mental formMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 3 (1867)To extend Marx's words:
Marx wrote:The price or money-form of commodities is, like their form of value generally, a form quite distinct from their palpable bodily form; it is, therefore, a purely ideal or mental form. Although invisible, the value of iron, linen and corn has actual existence in these very articles: it is ideally made perceptible by their equality with gold, a relation that, so to say, exists only in their own heads.[my bold]Yeah, nice quote, patreilly, about Marx's 'idealism-materialism'.This passage only makes sense in terms of Marx's ideology.This is not 'matter' nor simply 'material', but the relation between 'ideal-material', which requires human conscious, not 'matter-in-itself'.'Matter' only 'exists' in the form 'matter-for-us' – thus, being our social product, we can change it.This is nothing whatsoever to do with Engels' 'materialism'.
iI wouldn’t be surprised if Sweezy is going to come up with some crap like Rosa did. But that is not the point really the issue for me is what chapter one is actually about; where you choose to take it a long way after that is another point. I am finding about up to 40 pages in that he seems to understand chapter one like I do. Which is no longer mainstream; in fact was attacked for his simple commodity theory by the vulgar Marxists which was why I thought I would give him a go. I read bit of him before and I was really impressed with his mathematical manipulation/ transformation of Karl’s rate of profit equation; Turning ; P’ = s/ [c+v] Into P’ = (s/v) / [c/v+v/v] And thus; P’ = s’/ [ c/v +1] Getting P’ expressed by s’ , rate of surplus value or exploitation] and c/v the organic composition of capital thing. Or in other words the ratio of our wages to the value of the stuff we work with. Which might be 500 or something for steel workers and 5 for sweat shop labourers kind of thing. Rosa’s under consumptionism thing and maybe Paul’s wasn’t their fault it was Karl’s with his two departments of capital that excluded the third of fixed capital. In fact Karl cocked that up, fixed capital, right from the start in volume one. It was a fault in the analysis. The [surplus] value that workers produce and can’t buy back because they don’t. Is used or exchanged to expand , accumulate productivity enhancing fixed capital. It wouldn’t surprise me if Paul fell into the same mistake as Rosa because he ignored fixed capital in his equation as well. It should be or the correct version is the Sweezy- Balmer transformation;P’ = s’/ [ Fx/v + c/v +1] When it comes to the ratio of our wages to the value of the stuff we work with Fx/v can be about 100 x what. It is about that where I work and we are even a more than general higher c/v set up eg expensive raw materials coming in and having a bit of value added to it. When you come up with a scientific theory or hypothesis by a process of serial simplifications which are documented and noted. And then apply it to the real world then you realize that you have to go back a bit and tweak it but make sure that it is not a fundamental deal breaker. So in a dynamic, which means unstable changing environment, with the empirical market you need to change value to the amount of labour time required to reproduce something. Just like the caveat of SNLT that knocks original works of art on the head and people being shipwrecked with crates of coca cola and gold etc. And then there is the peculiar issue of old use values. So you might have a old TV set or bicycle that is working ok. Bicycle is important for me, part of its use value is of course how long it is likely to last before one thing goes wrong with it then another and use value restoration costs mount and you end up throwing ‘good money after bad’. Hence there is often a catastrophic temporal nature to use value? On profit or surplus value volume IV should have been volume one really. On the abuse of the skilled labour argument. Karl analysis was based on comparing concrete skilled labour which is a use value for the capitalist class with unskilled concrete labour of the same use value to the capitalist class. So it is qualitatively comparing like with like, as far as they are concerned. But a quantitatively good programmer is worth five crap ones because they are more productive. But the ergo flaw that ‘skill’ in general or generalized is more productive is a leap. I mean Karl even talked about capitalism de-skilling things and brain dead Irish muscular Navies earning more than intellectuals. There is a tendency amongst the intelligentsia as they find themselves that their remuneration levels are an accurate reflection of their ‘productivity’. So a left leaning university professor will justify and rationalize their wages on the basis that their work is more socially productive somehow. Or more socially useful hour per hour than toilet cleaning. In the late 19thcentury the capitalist class that ran mills and organized production etc said the same thing. They were wage workers like everyone else; it was called the wage of supervision argument. I think I will stop here.
I have read Sweezy’s 1942 book now.
Actually he is not a Rosa collapse theorist; that is the one theory that he completely rejected.
He summarizes and discusses all the various under-consumption and overproduction theories of which there were several.
He considers under-consumption and overproduction as two sides of the same coin.
Later he appears to take the view that capitalism will become more monopolistic by which he means certain industries will become dominated by just a handful of companies.
And that may or could lead to under-consumption and overproduction.
However he does do a more modern post Marx analysis of capitalism and some of the issues he raises are interesting and thought provoking whether you go along with his analysis of it or not.
I think he gets a bit carried away with himself with his monopoly theory towards the end of the book.
The big downside is that he clearly did not think Russia was state capitalist.
He discussed the theory that fascism re Germany and Italy were state capitalist following on from the Rizzi – Burnham stuff?
But rejects that as well because for they didn’t meet his criteria for it.
He doesn’t analyze the Russian system at all however it seemed to me that his own state capitalist criteria that he applied when analyzing fascism did.
His analysis of the opening chapters of volume one agrees with my own and in 1942 didn’t seem to be aware of any controversy with that simple commodity production analysis.
And like Engels thought
……….This makes clear, of course, why in the beginning of his first book Marx proceeds from the simple production of commodities as the historical premise, ultimately to arrive from this basis to capital — why he proceeds from the simple commodity instead of a logically and historically secondary form — from an already capitalistically modified commodity. To be sure, Fireman positively fails to see this. ………
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/pref.htm
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