The law of value and laws of statistics: sectoral values and prices in the US economy, 1977-97

This study replicates findings that sectoral prices and valuesare highly correlated cross-sectionally, and that deviationsbetween them are small. Yet after controlling for variationsin industry size that produce ‘spurious correlation’,I find no reliable evidence that relative values have any influenceupon relative prices. The smallness of price–value deviationsthus does not result from such an influence; it is shown insteadto result from a lack of dispersion in the data. Values turnout to be no better predictors of prices than any other randomvariable with the same probability distribution.     

Marx's value forms and Hayek's rules: a reinterpretation in the light of the dichotomy between physis and nomos

This paper argues that both Marx and Hayek objected to the dichotomybetween physis and nomos, and offered concepts which integrate,or mediate between, the two. Marx's value forms and Hayek'srules aim to grasp something neither purely natural nor purelyartificial or social, but ‘socially natural’. Valueforms and rules are natural in the sense that they pre-existagents and are taken by agents as given. On the other hand,forms and rules are social in that production relations or spontaneousorder are reproduced as the unintended consequences of agents'using forms or following rules. Thus value forms and rules standas links between agents and production relations or spontaneousorder.     

马克思与斯密:关于投机行为的不同看法

本文强调马克思与斯密对投机的认识存在分歧,主张把这种分歧追溯到他们秉持的不同的个人观念。斯密在对个人进行抽象时只强调了自利性和理性,马克思则把相互依赖、相互制约也看作个人的行为特征。因为强调人们彼此间的依赖和制约,马克思没有忽视彼此依赖和制约着的任意一方行为主体,他正视选择投机的资本家的存在,承认投机还会对资产价格进而对日常生活和生产经营活动造成冲击,在他笔下,选择投机的资本家、选择投资的资本家和雇佣工人总是结成一定的关系借以制约彼此的行为选择。因为没有把个人理解为彼此依赖和制约着的。斯密轻易忽视了选择投机的资本家的存在,他否认投机及其对资产价格进而对日常生活和生产经营活动造成的冲击,无法正确理解选择投机的资本家与他人结成的关系。     

Marx, Marxism and the cooperative movement

This paper has a dual aim: first, to draw attention to a numberof passages in which Marx explicitly extolled the cooperativemovement and thereby confute the wrong but widely held assumptionthat Marx was inimical to the market and rejected cooperationas a production mode even for the transition period; second,to argue that the continuing neglect of Marxists both of thecooperative movement and of the passages from Marx (and Engels)that present a system of producer cooperatives as a new productionmode can be traced back in part to the late emergence of aneconomic theory of producer cooperatives.     

Economics,Sociology, History: Notes on Their Loss of Unity,Their Need for Re-integration and the Current Relevance of the Controversy between Carl Menger and Gustav Schmoller

We are experiencing a situation of increasing criticism of the state in which economics is being represented nowadays. One of the remarks is that economics has become too formalized and too abstract and that the state of discipline has become increasingly unable to express many phenomena of “real life” with its concrete socioeconomic specifica. Criticism has found a way to get cumulated in different terms of economic pluralism. The claim for fostering interdisciplinary research which we also find nowadays reflects the diagnosis that our islands of shared knowledge have become too fragmented. When reflecting what is going on in recent times a view back to the end of the nineteenth century may help to contextualize recent debate. Looking at the debate between Carl Menger and Gustav Schmoller which was later classified as the first battles in social sciences helps to sort up arguments which are still on the agenda, inductive versus deductive methods or empirism versus abstract theorizing.     

Marx on Ricardo: an explanation of some important misunderstandings

Ricardo's theory of value and distribution is reconstructed by proceeding along the lines of Marx's critique of Ricardo. It is thus an anti-critique of Marx's reading of Ricardo. The chapter ‘On Value’ in Ricardo's Principles is shown to be a consistent and rigorous treatment of the determinants of prices of production. According to Ricardo labor-values merely serve to approximate more elaborate standards of value. Marx's criticism is shown to rest crucially on his own misinterpretation of Ricardo's definitions and presupposes his own – faulty – theory of surplus value. Therefore Ricardo's theory can – contrary to Marx's theory of surplus value – still be regarded as a fruitful complement to Sraffa's model.     

The Theory of the State: The Position of Marx and Engels

Marx and Engels developed their position on the state in the context of their attempt to understand and analyze society in general, in particular, capitalist society. Over the course of five decades of examination, their argument was refined, partly due to their historic investigations, partly due to the work of others, specifically by Lewis Henry Morgan, and partly due to political developments, in particular the Paris Commune of 1871. Essentially, their concluding statement on the substance of the state was that this socially determined arrangement was constituted by the instruments of coercion, both physical and ideological, with which the dominant economic class coerced other social classes. In developing their ideas, Marx and Engels distinguished between the state and government, though they clearly saw a symbiotic relationship between these structures in class societies. In the course of their investigations, they differentiated their position from those of liberal, anarchist, and other socialist commentators.

Profits and Fractal Properties: Notes on Marx,Countertendencies and Simulation Models

There are new reasons for revisiting Marx’s elaboration on the rate of profit because contemporary debates provide findings from the MEGA Project, long-term data on the rate of profit, and tools for dealing with complexity and non-equilibrium systems. This article proposes that the interplay between the tendency and the countertendencies of the rate of profit to fall can be translated into a simple system of equations, one based on each chapter of Section Three of Capital—as if Marx sought to mathematically formalise his insights. This article reviews previous debates, presents data and runs a simulation model, showing that the rate of profit behaves as fractals.     

马克思恩格斯历史唯物主义人权观简论

立足于生产方式制约社会政治生活和精神生活这一唯物史观的基本观点,一方面,马克思恩格斯阐述了人权的历史性、发展性、具体性及阶级性特征;另一方面,马克思恩格斯揭示了人权产生与发展的内在动力机制,即生产力与生产关系的内在矛盾运动。     

Marx on division of labour,mechanization and technical progress

The paper reconstructs Marx's analysis of the development of the forces of production in terms of the interaction among division of labour in particular processes of production, social division of labour and technical progress. It also brings out Marx's conception of technical progress and establishes his view of the essential interdependence among the development of the forces of production, the process of capital accumulation and the expansion of markets; it further brings out the role of competition as a fundamental driving force in the interrelated processes of accumulation and of development of the social productivity of labour.     

Worker Cooperatives in the Theory of the Firm: Marx and Veblen on Technological Determinism

This article contends that, in their treatments of worker cooperatives, the predominant theories of the firm adhere to the logic of technological determinism, and can accordingly be evaluated using the ideas of Thorstein Veblen and Karl Marx. Invoking these patriarchs’ respective distinctions between instrumental and ceremonial institutions and between the technical and social relations of production, the article argues that, contrary to contemporary theories of the firm, worker cooperatives possess an inherent but often latent advantage in implementing bureaucratic organizational structures, enjoying their instrumental/technical benefits for technology and coordination without incurring their ceremonial/social drawbacks for behavior and cooperation.     

马克思关于农村劳动力转移就业思想研究

马克思在深刻论证资本主义社会经济发展规律的基础上,运用社会化大生产的运动规律,深刻地揭示了农村劳动力向城市和非农产业流动的必然性,科学预言了农村劳动力流动必将带来的巨大社会变革。在我国,数量庞大的农民工已经成为推动我国工业化、城市化和国民经济增长的重要力量。但同时,农民工流动就业没有纳入我国经济社会发展规划,盲目流动给我国经济社会发展带来大量问题。马克思的农村劳动力转移就业理论对于指导我们解决农民工流动中存在的问题、破解城乡二元经济困局具有指导性。     

Three decades of money demand studies: differences and similarities

Recent empirical contributions on procyclical productivity have focused on the dynamic implications of persistent aggregate fluctuations on sectoral productivity. Given a permanent innovation in aggregate output, unobserved variations of labour (or capital) utilization may have only a transitory effect on measured productivity, whereas external effects should produce permanent effects. It is found that persistent aggregate fluctuations have a permanent effect on productivity of four-digit US manufacturing industries. While a number of alternative explanations of this evidence are discussed and ruled out, the findings are consistent with a simple model with external or thick market effects.     

试论马克思、恩格斯关于人与自然的和谐共生理论

I.The Coming of the TheoryThe development of productivity is the foundation of Marxistmaterialist conception of history.The process of productivitydevelopment is the contradictory movement of productivityand relations of production,and also the interaction processof man and nature.Productivity reflects the relation betweenman and nature.It is the course of material transformationbetween man and nature.While analyzing the relation be-tween man and nature,Marx has given it the intension of th…     

Say and Ricardo on value and distribution

The paper discusses the differences between the theories of value and distribution of Jean-Baptiste Say and David Ricardo. The attention focuses on fundamental issues in controversy between them. These are Say's confounding of ‘value’, ‘riches’ and ‘utility’, the theory of value, the problem of the measure of value, and the distinction between net and gross revenue; and the theory of income distribution, especially the explanation of rents and of profits. Since Say variously expressed his wish to learn from Ricardo and to absorb his doctrine, the aim of the paper is essentially to examine whether he made any progress in this regard. Whenever possible we let the authors speak for themselves.     

百年价值转形研究

价值转形问题是劳动价值论中的核心问题。1907年,鲍特凯维兹开始尝试用解非线性方程组的方法解决价值转形问题。一百年来,很多经济学家采用各种假设条件,构造价值转形模型。这些模型都不能准确反映马克思的价值转形思想。本文提出商品价值和剩余价值具有几种不同形式,解决了价值转形中的逻辑问题,并提出一个简单再生产条件下的价值转形模型。本文证明,价值决定生产价格,在价值转形中生产资料和劳动力在两部类之间不流动,并分析马克思的"两个等于"的著名论断在什么条件下成立。     

马克思恩格斯关于城乡统筹发展的思想及其启示

马克思思格斯面对资本主义工业化时期城市的扩张所引起的城乡对立和矛盾的现实,提出了丰富、系统且富有科学预见性的城乡统筹发展思想。学习和领会这些思想。对于正确认识和处理城乡关系、统筹城乡经济社会发展,无疑具有十分重要的理论和实践意义。     

Marx 200: The Abiding Relevance of the Labour Theory of Value

ABSTRACT

Marxist political economy is alive and well, and not just because of the habitual turn to Marx in response to any crisis of capitalism. Both through Capital and through the continuing evolution of Marxism, Marxist political economy offers valuable insights that can illuminate the modalities of social and economic reproduction and the relationships between (different aspects of) the economic and the non-economic. Marxism’s presence has been felt through its own internal debates and debates with other approaches to political economy, and even through its influence on those reacting against Marxism. The key to the continuing relevance and analytical strengths of Marxist political economy lies in its capacity to provide a framework of analysis for unifying disparate insights into and critiques of the contradictions of capitalism across the social sciences. The instrument for forging that unity is Marx’s theory of value, the potential of which is examined and illustrated with reference to the Sraffian critique and two key concepts in Marxian political economy: the value of labour power and financialisation. They are explored in the light of the processes of commodification, commodity form and commodity calculation.