[Marxism] Supply and demand?

[bauerly@xxxxxxxx]

Democracy Now! looked into the 18 course meal at the G8 summit.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/9/as_global_food_crisis_tops_g8

The meal featured flown in specialty items- caviar from Russia, European wine
and cheeses etc.  This gets to the heart of the commodity debates.  Is there
really a food shortage due to biofuels etc?  Likewise is there a oil shortage
when leaders can fly halfway around the world and have their specialty meals
also flown in?  Or, is it the maldistribution of food and resources based on
the capitalist profit imperative that is driving the rising prices?

All of you claiming peak oil or decreasing supply need to address two
fundamental issues.  First, answer Sartisans figures that do not show declining
oil production.  Second, how do you explain the rapid increase in gold, silver
and food, when there clearly is no supply shortage of these commodities?

The liberal notion that some how spot markets are ?physical? or real, while
futures markets are ?mere speculation? which can have no impact on the ?real?
price of oil or any other commodity (food), is a retreat to bourgeois economics
of classical political economy.  The corresponding theory of supply and demand
based on the fundamentals of the oil market offer an equally egregious
acceptance of the Smithian assumption of the thing that needs to be explained. 
This illusion, you will remember, is the very idea which Karl Marx set out to
dispel one hundred and fifty years ago when he began work on what he would come
to claim was to be a six volume treatise against this illogical type of
classical political economy.

Brad


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