"Transformation problem" [was US Consumer Confidence...]

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 17:03 28/03/01 -0500, Barkley wrote:
> Charles,
>      Most of those who insist on the falling rate of
> profit as an inevitable law attempt to get around
> the transformation problem one way or another.
> This is the case with Kliman-McGlone, without
> getting into the technical details.  The approach
> of Moseley is separate from what one thinks of
> the transformation problem, I think, although I
> stand to be corrected if wrong.  His approach
> involves defining some workers as productive
> and others as unproductive, and then doing the
> calculations from there.
> Barkley Rosser


It was a fair, if typically mischievous, challenge to ask what people
thought about the detailed debates on OPE-L. But a broad reply like that of
Charles also was fair.

In broad terms it is  quite reasonable to accept a tendency to a falling
rate of profit under capitalism but see countervailing forces. At times of
a crisis there is a superfluity of capital, partly in the form of debt,
partly in an excess of commodities. That comes into sharp contradiction
with the limited purchasing power of the masses.

The sort of technical discussions on OPE-L, some of which are arcane, are
not necessary for everyone to grasp. The term "transformation problem"
should, I submit, always be put in inverted commas, because critics and
doubters of marxism like to emphasise what they see as the problematic
nature of marxism. IMO through failing to see Marx's calculations as
illustrative of the fundamental forces which he is describing in a
dialectical model they want exact literal translations, expecting a living
economy to work like a piece of clockwork machinery. Who problematises
whom, is one of the basic rules in politics.

Where the new marxist economists have made important technical progress, is
in posing models of the economy that are "non-equlibrium" and challenge the
idea of a one to one mechanical interpretation of Marx's dynamic analysis.

I don't belittle all technical economic discussions as arcane. I think
Barkley's contributions staking out the ground for the importance of
non-linear processes including chaotic phenomena in economics, are
progressive and not-coincidentally compatible with marxism.

However, even though "the transformation problem" is extremely boring, I
note that Barkley does not necessarily imply inverted commas around it. He
does not appear to think it can be dismissed, as I do, as an artefact of
mechanical thinking applied to Marx's dialectical materialist model.
Without expecting him to be definitive, could he summarise in one paragraph
which handling is most relevant. Why is it a "problem" and why does it help
to consider some workers as productive (of surplus value presumably) and
some as unproductive?

Chris Burford