Value, Competition and Exploitation

Abstract

1 François Quesnay: The Circular Flow of Income and Input-Output Analysis 1.1 Introduction 1.2 An early example of global economic reasoning 1.3 Input-output analysis: Surplus, multipliers and connectedness 1.4 Contemporary empirical input-output tables 1.5 Conclusions 1.6 Appendix: Further properties of matrices 2 Adam Smith: The "Invisible Hand" and Accumulation 2.1 Ruthless competition: The invisible hand in the early and rude state of society 2.2 The structure of the economy 2.3 Classical competition 2.4 CCE: Equilibrium and efficiency 2.5 Real wages and Malthusian population dynamics: Efficient pauperization v vi Value, Competition and Exploitation 2.6 Conclusions 2.7 Appendix: The neoclassical theory of the firm and capital accumulation 3 Adam Smith II: The "Invisible Hand" and "Natural Prices" 3.1 Restless competition II: Values and natural prices 3.2 Values and prices in the early and rude state 3.3 The multi-sector economy. Economic propositions and mathematical theorems 3.4 Empirical examples of wage-profit curves 3.5 Conclusions 4 David Ricardo: Long-Period Prices, Accumulation, and the Invariable Measure of Value 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Production data and labor values 4.3 Price equations and the wage-profit curve 4.4 Quantity equations and the consumption-growth curve 4.5 Income distribution, savings and the Classical closure 4.6 Differentiated saving habits and multiple equilibria 4.7 Proportions in production and relative price movements 4.8 The choice of numéraire: The foredoomed search for an invariable measure of value 4.9 Actual income shares in the open economy 4.10 Substitution and the choice of technique 4.11 Conclusions 5 The von Neumann-Sraffa Model 5.1 The von Neumann growth model 5.2 The gravitation of market prices in a square von Neumann-Sraffa system 5.3 Process and product extinction in the classical gravitation process 5.4 Conclusions Contents vii Part II Value and Exploitation: Marx's Legacy 6 Labor Values: An Axiomatic Approach 6.1 Introduction 6.2 The labor content of commodities: The real side of social interdependence 6.3 Basic principles when generalizing labor values 6.4 Simple quantitative features of the Labor Theory of Value 6.5 Pragmatic uses and applications of the notion of labor values 6.6 Conclusions 7 Labor Productivity and the Law of Decreasing Labor Content Contents ix 13.3 Theoretical aspects of wage-profit curve measurements 13.4 Wage-profit curve measurement: An example 13.5 Conclusions 13.6 Appendix 1: Linear wage-profit curves and capital intensities 13.7 Appendix 2: Capital consumed and capital advanced 14 Conclusions 14.1 The way forward References Index List of Figures 2.1 The optimal allocation of labor in corn production 2.2 Income distribution in a classical corn economy 2.3 Adjustment path towards the steady state after an increase in agricultural productivity or when agricultural taxation is reduced 2.4 Income distribution in the neoclassical manufacturer world3.1 The wage-profit curve and the conflict over income distribution with manufactured means of p...

Computational methods and classical‐Marxian economics

“…The resistance to individualist approaches is likely rooted, at least partly, in the belief that there are macroeconomic features and regularities that cannot be rationalized in terms of representative agents, but this is a feature, not a flaw, of some ABMs. 4 The literature emphasizing the existence of a classical-Marxian approach includes, for example, Meek (1956Meek ( , 1961, Garegnani (1970Garegnani ( , 1976Garegnani ( , 1984, Dobb (1973Dobb ( , 1990, Salvadori (1995, 2003), Foley (2003Foley ( , 2006Foley ( , 2011Foley ( , 2016Foley ( , 2018Foley ( , 2020, Cogliano (2011Cogliano ( , 2018, Kurz (2010), Shaikh (2016), Cogliano et al (2018). 5 Like Marx, classical authors "investigated the real internal framework of bourgeois relations of production, as opposed to the vulgar economists who only flounder around within the apparent framework of those relations" (Marx, 1976, pp.…”

“…The literature is vast here too. A representative but far from comprehensive sample includes:Morishima (1976); Semmler (1986b, 1987);Duménil and Lévy (1990);Flaschel (1990);Semmler (1990);Duménil and Lévy (1991);Flaschel (2010);Cogliano, Flaschel, Franke, Fröhlich, and Veneziani (2018).…”

2. Abstract Labour as a Historical Reality

“…The reader interested in more complex and complete treatments may find them in Howard and King (1975), Steedman (1977), Roemer (1982), Flaschel (1983;, Eatwell, Milgate and Newman (1990), Cogliano, Flaschel, Franke, Fröhlich and Veneziani (2018), who present different interpretations of Marx's value and exploitation theories.…”

“…This view has been criticised by Petrovic (1987), Steedman and Tomkins (1998), Kliman (2002;, Dìaz and Osuna (2005-6;, Nitzan and Bichler (2009), Mariolis and Soklis (2010), Vaona (2014), Screpanti (2015), Veneziani (2017). A different use of inputoutput tables is suggested by Cogliano, Flaschel, Franke, Fröhlich and Veneziani (2018), who are sympathetic to the "new interpretation" and read the Leontief's employment multipliers as total labour costs, obviously, "insofar as input-output coefficients can be interpreted as pure quantity magnitudes"(16).…”

“… See Scharfenaker and Semieniuk (2017) for a counter-argument. 11 On the consistency between Marxian and post-Keynesian economics, seeLichtenstein (2017) Cogliano, Flaschel, Franke, Fröhlich and Veneziani (2018). develop an original interpretation of Marx's theory of value and production prices and extend it to the case of differential profit rates.Shaikh (2016, 260) rejects the neoclassical notion of perfect competition and proposes that of "real competition".…”