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The Marxian value product is an alternative measure
to the conventional "value added" (net output). The value product comprises
total variable capital (roughly, salary and wage income of productive
labour including social wage levies, but net of income tax) plus total
surplus value (roughly, gross profits plus net taxes paid but excluding
real depreciation of fixed capital), and this represents the new value produced
in an accounting period. Long before a standard system of national accounts was
devised with product measures such as GNP and GDP (i.e. in the 1930s), Marx
was already drawing a distinction between Gross Output and Net Output, except
that he calls this "the value of production" and "the value product"
respectively. This is made explicit in a manuscript he wrote called "The Results
of the Immediate Process of Production", which is available in English in the
Pelican edition of Das Kapital. He understood already quite well in
the 1860s the idea of the valuation of the social product as the sum of
incomes generated by production, even although macroeconomic statistics had
not yet been developed, beyond some simple national income measures, and Keynes
had yet to invent his income-product identity.
J.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 1:10
AM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] creative
destruction
Yes I meant a zero sum game in terms of exchange values.
That can be disguised by an increase in use values, (products of
labour - value product?) and by an increase in the amount of labour power into
the market eg by migration.
Regards
Chris
At
2003-07-14 15:10 +0200, Jurriaan wrote:
Chris:
Marx does not say
that profit and wages are a true
zero sum game, this is an inadequate description. This zero-sum game is only
a special case, namely the case in which the value product is constant or
declining. If the value product is increasing, then both wages and profits
can rise, such that the gain of wage earners does not imply an absolute loss
by investors, both gain, but in different proportions perhaps. The objective
of Marx's concept of the rate of surplus-value is rather to counter the
concept of "shares in the value product", which suggests that it concerns a
distributional issue which does not involve a structural conflict of
interests. It is the structural conflict of interests, however, which
constitutes the true zero-sum game. This point is important since, when the
value product is increasing rapidly, and all social classes are making
gains, then an optimistic ideology develops that there are no more social
classes and that real equality of opportunity exists, because no matter what
you do, you can make gains, and this promotes altruism. Conversely, a
declining value product creates a pessimistic, cynical ideology according to
which it is more important to look after one's self-interest, and
expectations of being able to realise gains decline also, it seems possible
to achieve less than before.
Regards
J.
- ----- Original Message -----
- From: Chris Burford
- To: PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Sent: Monday, July 14, 2003 9:08 AM
- Subject: Re: [PEN-L] creative destruction
- I had a double take on reading this, as it took me some time to check
out it is by Schumpeter.
- Apart from the reference to steel and to a 'biologic term' it could
have been written by Marx could it not?
- - at least that creative destruction is an essential feature of
capitalism if not the essential feature
- Marx assumes that profit and wages are a zero sum game. In crises of
overproduction capital, one way or another, must be destroyed, for the
system to get going again. No?
- Chris Burford
- At 2003-07-12 16:55 -0700, Michael wrote:
- I never gave this passage much thought. Look at the example he
uses -- US
- Steel, which was a project to limit competitive and eventually,
probably
- inevitably became a stodgy burnt out testimony to failure. Am
I the only
- one to see an irony?
- 83: "The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the
- organizational development from craft shop and factory to such
concerns as
- U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation -- if
I may
- use a biological term -- that incessantly revolutionizes the
economic
- structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one,
incessantly
- creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is
the essential
- fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and
what every
- capitalist concern has got to live
in."
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