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 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
