Outstanding book. Excellent selection, Patrick.
Patrick Bond wrote:
So, I studied with David Harvey and my bias is not only towards
bringing in qualitative aspects of capital/labour power relations, as
well as the capitalist/non-capitalist relationship (especially
accumulation by dispossession). In addition, I think Harvey's main
point about the transformation problem in Limits to Capital (p.68) was
that price divergences are bound up in crisis tendencies. But this is
not 'irrational', it reflects more profound and intractable
contradictions. The transformation problem "performs an obvious
ideological and apologetic function at the same time as it mystifies
the origin of profit as surplus value... But even if the capitalists
could penetrate beneath the fetishism of their own conception, they
would still be powerless to rectify a potentially serious state of
affairs. Competition forces them willy-nilly to allocate social labour
and to arrange their production processes so as to equalize the rate
of profit. What Marx now shows us is that this has nothing necessarily
to do with maximizing the aggregate output of surplus value in
society. We find in this a material basis for that systematic
misallocation of social labour, and that systematic bias in the
organization of the labour process, that lead capitalism into periodic
crises."
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Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Chico, CA 95929
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fax 530-898-5901