RE: Re: Binary scheme of democracy and centralism

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Sabri writes:>
However, what is more interesting is his recognition of the
"basic conflict between capitalists and workers". I guess this is
basically what led me to conclude that he doesn't know how
Marxist he is, based on my "intuition" and what I heard from him.<

I can't remember Williamson's work very well, since it got mushed up with
the other orthodox thinking that I was surveying & analyzing back in the
middle-to-late 1970s (including stuff by Alchian & Demsetz). But the idea is
that workers are willing to pay the capitalists extra income (beyond that
arising from "human capital" and the like) to monitor the lazy or
incompetent free riders. If we all pull together, we can all gain, so we pay
the cappo to make sure we all pull together. (Marx would say that being a
capitalist comes from owing wealth in a capitalist society, with such
monitoring as a side-effect of having that power. Usually, people are hired
to do it, though of course they themselves need to be supervised...)

The basic idea of transactions cost economics is that sometimes it's so
expensive to strike and enforce a deal (a transaction) that other forms of
social organization besides the market are needed. Ronald Coase founded a
whole school based on this (trivial) idea. Douglass North has produced some
interesting ideas from it, after he stopped being so free-market in his
orientation...
JD