Re: globalisation/Landauer/Grossmann

[djones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (jones/bhandari)]

My reply will be brief; I am going to study Alan Freeman's recent "Marx
Without Equilibrium" (Capital and Class, Summer 1995)  and restudy
Grossmann's "Marx, Classical Economics and the Problem of Dynamics" to see
what insights they provide.

1. In this piece, Grossmann pays careful attention to the implications of
what he attempts to establish as a tendency towards the overproduction of
fixed capital.

Grossmann's student Blake also attempts to establish why crisis appears
first as an overproduction of not consumer goods but producer goods (a
problem for underconsumptionist theory if true of course).  What I want to
underline here is that we should not deduce from the limits of the extended
Bauer model that Grossmann simply failed to treat fixed capital.  What he
has to say may well turn out to be profound.

2.  innovation does not render current constant capital useless; it can
still be a tool of great potential usefulness.  The surplus labor whose
extortion the functioning fixed capital makes possible however will simply
not be validated as socially necessary or very little of it will be so
validated.  And if the innovation is of a Schumpeterian radical kind
(railway over mailcoach)the functioning capital may indeed not be able to
transfer any of its value to a commodity the value of which could be
manifested in exchange.

As for your questions about Grossmann's treatment of price and Landauer's
analysis of the mechanism through which the rate of profit falls on total
capital, I am hoping that Freeman's piece will help me.  As you must now,
Freeman points to your work (John Ernst) as the earliest formulation of the
theory which he is advancing.

Rakesh




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