Начала политической экономии и податного обложения = The principles of political economy and taxation

﻿LEAVING aside the courageous efforts of people around Monthly Review and Science and Society there has, by and large, been hardly any Marxist tradition among American intellectuals. However, during the last few years the situation has considerably changed and there is now a growing interest in Marxism, particularly among the younger social scientists of America. The book under review falls within this trend.

Value and Capital

The central unifying theme in the Manuscripts is the alienation of labour under capitalist conditions of private ownership and its transcendence and abolition under communism. The doctrine of total emancipation which, as I have argued, was crucial in enabling Marx to assimilate ‘class’ and the ‘division of labour’ in his work is much more clearly articulated here and eloquently expressed. Communism, Marx argues, is ‘the positive transcendence of all estrangement’; the abolition of private property, communism: 
is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature — the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and knows itself to be this solution.27
The vision of communism Marx unfolds in the Manuscripts derives much of its force from his remarkable analysis of the alienation of labour and is clearly underpinned by a preconception of truly human, free productive activity. Man’s productive interchange with nature is in fact taken as the defining characteristic of the species: ‘the productive life is the life of the species’; and Marx is careful to point out that while an animal can also be said to engage in production it ‘only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young’.

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

We've all had the experience at some time or other of walking through a department store and being amazed at the many different articles we see there. One counter after another filled with this, that, and the other thing-some useful, some of little or no use. Almost every day a new gadget is advertised, electric blankets, or hats that look like chimneys, or a special kind of vitamin tablets. A common reaction of people as they look in shop windows is, "What will they think of next?"This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Accumulation of Capital

The article reviews the book "Monetary Economics: An Integrated Approach to Credit, Money, Income, Production and Wealth," by Wynne Godley and Marc Lavoie.

Monetary Economics: An Integrated Approach to Credit, Money, Income, Production and Wealth

Focuses on a study which dealt with production function, heterogeneous capital and the theory of distribution. Relations between the wage, the rate of interest and the product per worker in the two-commodity economy; Details on the surrogate production function; Premises of the traditional theory of distribution. (Из Ebsco)

/pdf/heterogeneous-capital-the-production-function-and-the-theory-27uoxeg24x.pdf

Heterogeneous Capital, the Production Function and the Theory of Distribution

1. THE theory of value and distribution is at present in a situation of unease and uncertainty: we no longer find the same general agreement about its basic elements which obtained until a few decades ago. Two main theoretical developments have undermined the dominant theory which explained distribution and relative prices by means of the "equilibrium" of the two "opposing sets of forces", demand and supply for factors of production. The first development in order of time has been Keynes's refutation of the doctrine according to which a competitive economic system tends towards the full employment of labour, i.e. towards that equilibrium between "demand and supply" of labour, which was to determine the wage. Keynes' concentration on the short period, and the persistence in the General Theory of many traditional premises favoured the successive attempts to reconcile his results with orthodox long-period analysis: but the weakening of the dominant theory which nonetheless resulted from his work can be seen both in the uneasiness which, in ever-changing forms, characterizes the renewed orthodoxy, and in the tendency of Keynes' direct followers towards a more radical departure from traditional theory. The second development consists in the critique of the notion of capital as a "factor of production" measurable independently of distribution.2 This critique has shown the invalidity of some propositions of the theory, like the inverse relation between the rate of interest (rate of profit) and the "quantity of capital" per worker, which are basic for the explanation of distribution in terms of demand and supply for "factors of production". The uncertainty which has resulted from these developments finds its expression in authors who think that new theoretical approaches should be explored. It is also revealed by the nature of some of the work carried out by those who adhere to the traditional approach.3 1 This paper which develops under the impact of Sraff a's production of commodities by means of commodities some propositions contained in a Ph.D dissertation of 1955-1958, is based on notes delivered at a conference on "Marx's Transformation of Values into Prices of Production" held in Siena in 1972, and used then for lectures given in Cambridge and elsewhere since

Value and distribution in the classical economists and marx

In Part I we looked for the premises from which traditional theory derived the assertion that aggregate demand would adjust to productive capacity. These premises were found to lie ultimately in the conception of capital as a 'factor of production' em ployable in increasing proportion to other factors as the rate of interest falls—the basis, as we argued, of the idea of a demand schedule for 'saving' determining the rate of interest in conjunction with the supply schedule of full employment saving. The deficiencies of that conception of capital led us to the conclusion that, contrary to what is often argued, an analysis conducted in 'real' and 'static' terms provides no basis for the belief that investment decisions can, in the long period, adjust to decisions to save. In this second Part of the paper, the problem will be approached in terms of the 'monetary' analysis of Keynes' General Theory and the subsequent controversy. In section 1, we shall use Wicksell's theory of the price level as an example of how traditional theories would link their 'real' analysis of distribution with their analysis of the money rate of interest. We shall then argue, in section 2, that Keynes's different conclusions

Notes on consumption, investment and effective demand: II

1. If we were to ask ourselves what determines the speed of capital accumulation and of growth in an economy, we would get two different answers from today’s economics. The first is the traditional one, according to which the community’s decisions to save in conditions of full utilization of resources (defined so as to allow for a normal succession of booms and slumps) will determine the trend of capital accumulation. This trend of capital accumulation, taken together with the growth of population and the development of technical knowledge, will then determine the trend of aggregate output.

Some Notes for an Analysis of Accumulation

INTRODUCTION. 1. The concept of capital, and therefore that of the ‘quantity of capital’, is intimately bound up with the question of the distribution of the social product among the classes constituting the community. In order to discuss the role played in economic theory by this concept it is therefore necessary to begin by distinguishing the two broad approaches to a theory of distribution and relative prices which can be traced in the history of economic analysis.

Pierangelo Garegnani

Papers

Heterogeneous Capital, the Production Function and the Theory of Distribution

Value and distribution in the classical economists and marx

Notes on consumption, investment and effective demand: II

Some Notes for an Analysis of Accumulation

Quantity of capital