Screpanti versus Marx on exploitation: a comment

Abstract

Ernesto Screpanti recently claimed to prove that Marx's value theory is logically inconsistent. Jettisoning the value theory, he then reconstructed Marx's theory of exploitation in a manner that supposedly preserves the gist of the original. This note shows that Screpanti's proof of inconsistency is invalid and that his reconstruction contradicts the original theory of exploitation in significant ways, for instance by implying that workers who perform surplus labor can exploit capitalists.     

Reply to Cockshott and Cottrell

This note reaffirms the author's conclusion that measured price–valuecorrelations have been tainted by the influence of industrysize and are therefore spurious. ‘Deflation’ ofsectoral prices and values by costs destroys the correlationonly because the theory in question is false, as the author'soriginal paper proved deductively. Cockshott and Cottrell'sresults do not refute this proof. Deflation destroys the correlationbetween their simulated prices and values precisely becausetheir simulation model assumes that the theory is false.     

The Great Recession and Marx's Crisis Theory

To help understand why the Great Recession occurred, this article focuses on its underlying causes and employs Karl Marx's theory of capitalist economic crisis. It shows that U.S. corporations' rate of return on fixed asset investment fell throughout the half‐century preceding the recession, and that this fall accounts for the entire decline in their rate of capital accumulation (productive investment). The investment slowdown led to a decline in the rate of economic growth, which was a main cause of rising debt burdens, as were stimulative fiscal and monetary policies that delayed but exacerbated the effects of the underlying economic problems. The article also refutes the claim that the rate of profit could not really have fallen because massive redistribution of income from wages to profits took place, and it argues that it is unlikely that major crises of capitalism can be eliminated.     

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.