The analysis that I am putting forward thus looks next at the three stages in the transformation of value: (1) into “prices of production”; (2) into “market prices” (oligopolistic prices, in contemporary capitalism); and (3) into “globalized prices” (in the globalized imperialist system).
The first of these transformations, taken up in the first chapters of Volume III of Capital, is indispensable to grasping the meaning of the market alienation that governs economic and social life under capitalism and to giving to the laws ruling its systemic reproduction their true stature.
The second of these transformations, that of prices of production into “market prices,” had been partially treated by Marx, also in Volume III of Capital, in the instance, among others, when he came to consider the distribution of surplus-value in regard to agrarian landownership. We have next to consider the deformations of the price system linked to the emergence of oligopolies/monopolies and above all to take fully into account the gigantic transformation of the system of expanded equilibrium resulting, after the First, but above all after the Second World War, from the accelerated expansion of a third department—of absorption of surplus surplus-value. Baran and Sweezy, with the concept of surplus that they put forward, replied to the challenge and unhesitatingly extended and enriched Marxian theory. I claim that those Marxists who still refuse to recognize the central importance of Baran and Sweezy’s contribution lack the means to put forth an effective critique of contemporary capitalism. Their “Marxism” thus remains confined to exegeses of Marx’s texts.
The central object of my reflections has been the third transformation, which allows us to go from the law of value, taken at its highest level of abstraction (the capitalist mode of production), to what I have called the law of globalized value, which is operative on the scale of the really extant polarizing system of capitalism/imperialism. It is only this transformation that allows us to take the measure of the imperialist rent which is at the origin of the polarization deepened and reproduced by the globalized unfolding of capitalism.
It is impossible to “understand the world” by a realistic analysis of really existing capitalism outside the framework traced by the treatment of these transformations of value. Equally, a strategy aiming to “change the world” can be based only on these foundations. As against this, the positivist/empiricist method of vulgar economics allows us neither to “understand the world” and to grasp the nature of the challenges confronting workers and peoples, nor, a fortiori, to “change” it. Furthermore, that vulgar economics does not seek to go beyond capitalism, which it sees as the “end of history.” It seeks only to legitimize the basic principles of capitalism and to show how to manage it.
I believe that this new edition, drawn broadly from The Law of Value and Historical Materialism, comes at the right moment. This is because the current crisis revolves altogether around different possible developments of the social and international relationships that govern the form of the law of value, under the combined effects of popular struggles in the central and peripheral societies of contemporary capitalism and of struggles between dominant imperialist societies and those of the dominated periphery—struggles that call into question the continued dominance of what I call “the later capitalism of the generalized, financialized, and globalized oligopolies.”
CHAPTER ONE
The Fundamental Status of the Law of Value
After devoting Volume I of Capital to the foundations of the law of value, Marx concerns himself in Volume II with what might seem to be a purely “economic” argument. He tries, in fact, to show that accumulation can take place in a “pure” capitalist system, and to determine the technical conditions for dynamic equilibrium.
In Marx’s illustrative examples, the system is characterized by a certain number of magnitudes and proportions, all of which belong strictly to the economic field. These magnitudes and proportions are: (a) the proportions in which labor-power and means of production are distributed between the two departments that define the main basis of the social division of labor, making possible the simultaneous production of means of production and of consumer goods; (b) the proportions that characterize, for each department, the degree of intensity in the use of means of production by direct labor; this intensity measures the level of development of the productive forces; (c) the evolution from one phase to another of these latter proportions, measuring the pace and direction of the progress of the productive forces; and (d) the rate of exploitation of labor (the rate of surplus-value).
Marx offers a series of examples in which the magnitudes are all given in value terms, and he is right to do so. But what he deduces from these examples—namely the economic conditions for expanded reproduction—could, to some extent, be deduced in the same way from a model constructed directly in terms of prices of production, in which profit is shown in proportion to capital employed and not to labor exploited. Within this precise and limited context, the two arguments, both of them “economic,” are equivalent to each other.
There is nothing, then, to prevent one from expressing directly—in terms either of value or of price—the general economic conditions for expanded reproduction by formulating a system of linear equations in which the various variable magnitudes allowed to each department, defined correctly in relation to the parameters of sectoral distribution and of evolution from one phase to the next, are related to each other by the equality in value from one phase to the next in the respective supply of and demand for consumer goods and means of production.
I have done this—in value terms, defining, with the Greek letters lambda (λ) and gamma (γ), two parameters for measuring the progress of the productive forces in each department and from one phase to the next, and then characterizing this progress by the increase in the physical quantity of use-values produced with a decreasing quantity of labor. I therefore set out a model of expanded reproduction (with progress in the productive forces) which is defined simply as follows:
PHASE 1:
Department I: Production of means of production
(meaning a hours of direct labor, using 1 unit of equipment and raw material, produce p units of equipment).
Department II: Production of consumer goods
(meaning: b hours of direct labor, using 1 unit of equipment and raw material, produce q units of consumer goods).
PHASE 2:
The progress of the productive forces is defined by the capacity of the same quantity of direct labor (a and b) to set to work a larger mass of equipment and raw material and produce by this means a larger mass of equipment and consumer goods. Or, when λ and γ measure the progress of the productivity of labor (with λ and γ both >1):
Within this very general framework I established the following set of propositions:
1. A dynamic equilibrium is possible, provided only that labor-power (a + b) is distributed between the two departments in suitable proportions.
2. The pace of accumulation (measured by the growth in the production of equipment) conditions the level of employment (a conclusion opposite to that assumed by conventional economics).
3. Dynamic equilibrium presupposes that the consumer goods produced during one phase are purchased during that same phase and the equipment goods produced during one phase are purchased at the beginning of the next. Since the surplus-value generated during one phase cannot be realized until the next phase, dynamic equilibrium requires centralized and correct management of credit.
4. If the entire economy is reduced to these two departments, dynamic equilibrium demands that there be an increase in wages, to be determined in a proportion that combines