Labour and Value: from the Greek Polis to Globalized State-Capitalism
By David Black
1 - A Leftist Aristotle? Nature, Labor and Telos
Alisdair MacIntyre says that whereas Plato’s Republic was irreconcilable with the realm of the historically polis, Aristotle’s telos was implicitly embodied and acknowledged within the actual social practices of the time. For Aristotle, universal form only had meaning in relation to the particular: “Aristotle understood that movement from human potential to its actualization within the polis as exemplifying the metaphysical and theological character of a perfected universe.”1
In Aristotle’s concept of teleology Nature was characterized by “meaning.” Development in nature involved not just causality and mechanical motion but also the potentiality for form in the material itself. Nature, within its own order and hierarchy, was seen as always striving towards the “good.” Just as form and cosmos struggled to overcome boundlessness and chaos, so Aristotle’s city state (the polis) sought to control the “unlimited desires” of those within its walls and subdue the “untamed nature” of the “barbarians” on the “outside.” Aristotle advocated a polis in which principles of “excellence” and “justice” would be administered by an elite of educated citizens; for only those able to command the labor of others could be “free” enough to be educated in the required “virtues.” Everyone else he excluded from citizenship: slaves, women, artisans, wage workers, merchants and bankers; all of whom, he argued, would in any case be better off in a well-run Greek polis than in a barbarian camp or a tyrannical oligarchy.
Murray Bookchin points out in his Ecology of Freedom that, although Aristotle divided society into free men and non-citizens, he recognized a meaningful hierarchy within those he excluded from citizenship. For in taking into account the “higher” level of labor, in which the manual and mental are combined, Aristotle rated the “master craftsman” as superior to the artisan because of his “practical intelligence”: his teleological understanding included the “why” as well as the “how” of “good works.” Aristotle implicitly “respected” the “good” worker, whilst condemning those whose aim in life was simply to accumulate wealth, and were, in Aristotle’s words, “intent on living only, and not living well.”2
Jose Perez Adan’s Reformist Anarchism examines the influence of Thomas Aquinas’ “Aristotelianism” on anarchist economics. Aquinas argued that considerations of production and exchange had to be subservient to the concerns of a “commutative justice” which deliberated about ultimate (divine) ends as well as proximate (earthly) ones. Money was seen as simply “the translation of fixed and invariable value into an easy measure of exchange.” Usury – “generating money out of want without contributing to the creation of value” – was considered a sort of ontological disorder, because it suggested that money, rather than the labor and moral order, created value. The regulations of mediaeval guilds were seen as essential to stabilize prices and ensure the compensation of producers for their toil and costs in replacement of materials invested in production. Whereas later, in neo-classicist political economy, wages were seen as determined a posteriori by the fluctuating whims of the market, in Scholastic metaphysics wages represented an “objective value.” Aquinas argued that exchange of goods by a trader could be regarded as legitimate activity only “for the sake of public utility so that necessary things should not be lacking… and he seeks money, not as an end, but as a wage for labor.” Aquinas argued that in a famine property rights were overridden by social necessity: to prevent starvation, it would be justified to expropriate, if necessary, a supply of grain surplus to the owner’s personal needs. 3
Such “objective values” were of course anathema to the liberal advocates of free-trade and property rights in the eighteenth century. MacIntyre, writing in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? on the influence of Aristotelian and Calvinist theology on the Scottish Enlightenment, describes how an ideology had developed in Scotland which saw the basic unit of the “good” society as the household of the small-holding farmer - guided from above by definite social, moral and theological principles. Against this tradition stood the new “Anglicising liberalism” of David Hume and Adam Smith, for whom the basic unit of society was the acquisitive individual. The liberals saw land, like everything else, as just a commodity; and the continued existence of the peasantry was seen as obstacle to economic development. After the Civil Wars of the 17th century and the Jacobite rebellions of the 18th, the English bourgeoisie wanted no more arguments about how “higher” principles should govern the “natural” order of society. The time had come to recognize that society had become a mass of competing passions and needs which functioned “naturally” through transactions and exchanges. What was needed was a political and social structure to facilitate trade, protect private property and quell any “lawless” resistance. This structure, Hume claimed, was essentially what had been established by the “Glorious Revolution” led by “Dutch William” in 1688.2 - Labor and Value
Hume’s notion of the “acquisitive individual” underpinned the Labor Theory of Value. The basis of the theory was that the price of a commodity, representing its exchange value, was based on the toil of making it or the toil saved by having it. In Adam Smith’s development of the theory, the “natural price” of the commodity was what was sufficient “to pay the rent of the land, the wages of the labor, and the profits of the stock employed in raising, preparing, and bringing it to market.” William Godwin argued that the Labor Theory of Value essentially meant that labor and wealth were the same thing. Like Smith, Godwin counterposed the “natural” individual to the institutions of society. But whereas Smith argued that church and state should be persuaded to encourage, rather than hinder individual self-sufficiency and progress, Godwin saw these institutions as enemies of morality and freedom, which needed to be got rid of as soon as possible. Godwin called for social and economic reforms which would be subservient to the “final destination” (telos) of a good life for all in a free society. He recognised that the “proximate ends” – of material returns and economic stability – might help to bring the true liberty to fruition, but he insisted that they were not ends in themselves.4
Malthus led the counter-attack on Godwin’s assertion of the claims of political philosophy against political economy. For Malthus, the most serious obstacle to progress and morality was not institutions the “human nature,” which stubbornly refused to accept wage-slavery and destitution as “natural.” Whereas Smith and Hume left the question of “natural rights” unclarified, Malthus dismissed it altogether. Malthus predicted that any substantial increase in the population would lead to universal pauperization, and that Poor Law “welfare” would in time consume all public revenue. He supported the protectionist Corn Laws because he saw prosperous landowners as an ideal market (an “effective demand,” in Keynesian terms) for the output of industry (landowners, unlike the workers, being consumers-par-excellence).
Ricardo, whilst accepting Malthus’ theory of population and “welfare,” took the opposite view on the Corn Laws. Ricardo predicted that, as more and more land was cultivated to provide food for the ever-growing population, the cost of production on the least productive farms would provide the price-norm for the whole of agriculture. The landlord class would profit more and more from the ever-rising price of food and rent for land; and in the absence of free-trade, this class might monopolize the wealth of society to such an extent that the industrial capitalists would find themselves starved of investment and the system might wind down into a “stationary state.”
Ricardo argued that wages should never exceed the level necessary to reproduce the “class of laborers,” although he did acknowledge an historical aspect to the concept of “subsistence” i.e. that the provisions for reproducing the class of laborers might need to be more “generous” for succeeding generations. Ricardo’s major work, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, appeared in 1817, a time of hunger, industrial crisis and revolt. In 1820 he argued (though not publicly) that that workers should be allowed to vote, for that way they might be persuaded to vote for the abolition of the Poor Laws and the Corn Laws by workers’ leaders schooled in the Labor Theory of Value. Ricardo’s views, which were not welcomed by the “law and order” party in England, were later praised by Marx:“Closely bound up with [h]is scientific merit is the fact that Ricardo exposes and describes the economic contradiction between the classes—as shown by the intrinsic relations—and that consequently political economy perceives, discovers the root of the historical struggle and development.”5
Marx argues that although the political economy of Ricardo and his predecessors was “scientific” in its “analytical” method - of proceeding from the phenomenal forms of value to their essence (labor) - it had failed to hold the abstracted essence to account for the concrete forms it assumes in the “real” world. Marx says, in criticizing Feuerbach’s approach to the history of religion, that it is one thing to discover the “earthly kernel of the misty creations of religion” by analysis of its “apotheosized” forms but something else to develop these forms from the “actual given relations of life.” The former method (Feuerbach’s) is “easier,” but it is latter (Marx’s method to be developed in Capital) that is truly “scientific.”6
For Ricardo, the surplus value obtained in the process of production was too “obvious” to be investigated i.e. it was just a fact of “natural productivity” that the process resulted in a commodity more valuable than the inputted labor-time. Whereas Ricardo assumed that the length of the working day was fixed, Marx divides surplus value into absolute surplus-value produced by lengthening the working day, and relative surplus-value produced by lessening the necessary labor-time by making labor an appendage to the machinery. Marx also argues that the objectivity of struggles by workers to limit the working day and “control” the machinery and conditions of work gave these struggles a “scientific” content.
According to Ricardo, the exchangeable value of a commodity depends on the relative quantity of labor contained in its production process. But in Ricardo’s theory of “relative value” his labor values were expressed quantitively, and therefore, in their role as commodities-in-relation-to other-commodities, fell back to being representations of exchange-values. Marx, in discovering the qualitative relation in the value-form, not only refutes Ricardo, as the leading ideologist of the bourgeoisie, but also those who drew socialist conclusions from Ricardo’s premises. Whereas Ricardo saw money as the “medium” of exchange, the Ricardian socialist, John Gray, imagined that it would be easy to replace money with “time-chits” measured by labor-time, which could be used to buy commodities whose values would be likewise measured by the labor-time. The problem with this, in Marx’s view, was that Ricardians assumed there was no conflict between the private labor of the workers and abstracted social labor under the rule of capital. Marx says that, if it is seen as necessary to transform labors and products into exchange-values, then this view has come about because “individuals now produce only for society and in society” and because “production is not directly social, is not the ‘offspring of association’, which distributes labor internally.” 7
Judging by Adan’s account, it seems that post-Godwinian reformist anarchists tend to see in Marx’s Capital an unfortunate “deviation” from the Labor Theory of Value which seems to rule out “co-operative enterprise.” Similarly, Bookchin sees in Marx a denigration of the category of use-value, which the Utopian socialists, such as Fourier, counterposed to exchange-value through the “force of association.” Rather than beginning from the existing struggle between capital and labor at the point of production (where co-operation is enforced on the terms of capital), reformist anarchism, situates the Labor Theory of Value in the struggle “to rescue the market from monopolistic intervention.” Whether Ricardian or not, in the notions of honorably-intentioned “anti-Globalization” campaigners today there is a similar underlying assumption of identity between “private” associated labor and the social labor of the world economy. The scheme to put “Fair Trade” labels on products manufactured by co-operatives or “eco-friendly” companies in the Third World is an example of this. When the goods are put on sale alongside similar “unfair” products, which are made according to socially-necessary labor time and sell for less, the challenge to the law of value is reduced to the subjective “generosity” of the consumers.3 – Value, Price and Profit
Andrew Kliman, in Marx’s Concept of Intrinsic Value, takes up some “Common Misconceptions about Marx’s theory.” Schumpeter, for example writes:
“Marx’s theory of value is the Ricardian view… He was under the same delusion as Aristotle, viz, that value, though a factor in the determination of relative prices, is yet different from, and exists independently of, relative prices or exchange relations. The proposition that the value of a commodity is the amount of labor embodied in it can hardly mean anything else.”8
Schumpeter does recognize that Ricardo’s “absolute” values really only functioned as “exchange values or relative prices,” whereas for Marx “values” exist independently of exchange values. Schumpeter says that if we could accept Marx’s differentiation, much of his theory would become meaningful and tenable. “Of course,” he says, “we cannot.” But what if we can?
Marx, in Kliman’s account, is indeed investigating exchange value as “the mode of expression,” the “form of appearance,” of “a content distinguishable from it.” Kliman describes how Marx, in his Notebooks of 1861-3, begins to argue for the first time that since two commodities of differing materiality are qualitatively equal as exchangeable objects, then they must share a common property of substance: a “third thing,” which belongs to each commodity as its “intrinsic value.” Kliman contends that in the opening pages of Capital, Marx, rather than offering a theory of exchange ratios based on relative quantities of labor, aims “to break from the conception of value as a ratio in exchange.” Rather than a “Labor Theory of Value,” Marx’s is a “Value Theory of Labor.” Value, Kliman argues, is “an intrinsic property of the commodity itself”; whereas exchange-value is, as Marx says, “the mere form of appearance,” not its “proper content.” Whilst it is true that the common property of commodities is that they are “useful” (at least in some sense) and are “products of labor,” this labor, as labor-power, in finding its expression in value, “no longer possesses the same characteristics as when it is the creator of use-values.” What remains from the commonality of use-values, is, according to Marx, only a “residue,” a mere abstraction. Although, as use-values, commodities appear as independent, their exchange value is the relative expression of the abstract social labor time that is their substance.
Marx identifies the components of value production as constant capital and variable capital. Constant capital provides the value transferred from used-up means of production (raw materials and depreciation of equipment). Variable capital is what the capitalist spends on wages in order to obtain the labor-power of the living laborer. Living labor adds new value, whereas constant capital transfers old value created in the past. In Ricardo’ corn-model economy, prices = wages (as cost of production) + profit. However, competition between capitals leads to uniformity of the rate of exploitation of labor, so that prices tend to equal costs of production plus an average profit. Marx says that, given labor-time measured as exchange ratios, the equilibrium of profitability must be undermined if various industries, employing the same amounts of variable capital, have to input different amounts of fixed and circulating capital (the relationship between the two Marx calls the “organic composition of capital”). Firms with smaller profit rates will be starved of investment and forced either to adopt different lines of production or go under. But if the enterprises with different organic compositions of capital are owned by the same capitalist, or a like-minded group of capitalists, acting “en bloc, as totality… What we have to deal with is the collective capitalist, the total capital appears as the share capital of all the individual capitalists together.” 9 This insight is concretized by Raya Dunayevskaya in her 1946 critique of claims by Stalinist economists that Russia had overcome the “law of capitalism: the average rate of profit.” The Stalinists argued that this “law” had been overcome because in the Soviet Union capital was distributed according to the state plan rather than being allowed to flow to the most profitable industries. Dunayevskaya argues that this “different” method of distributing profit is simply another way of extracting surplus-value from the workers through social-capital: the very source, not of equilibrium but of class conflict.104 - Capital and Temporality
For over a hundred years, critical interpreters of Marx’s Capital have objected to his argument that the accumulation of capital through abstract labor produces a tendency towards crises. They have produced alleged proofs of inconsistency regarding Marx’s “transformation” of “values” into “prices” as relating to his “Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit” in Capital Vol. III; and they have sought to “correct” Marx by producing their own alternative “models,” in which the values of inputs and outputs of production are treated as static, and in which values and prices are treated as two separate systems. But in recent decades a number of theorists (such as Kliman), who argue for a “Temporal Single-System Interpretation” (TSSI) of Marx’s Capital, have claimed that the critics have either ignored or misunderstood the fact that Marx defines the profit rate as the expansion of value over time.
Kliman points out that for Marx, the commodity’s value is determined by the average amount of labor currently needed to produce it – average, that is, across the whole industry. The new value created by living labor varies in proportion to hours worked, the intensity of the work, and the complexity, or level of skill required from the laborer. A single hour of average, socially necessary labor always yields the same amount of value, independently of any variations in productivity. This is the basis for Marx’s claim that although productivity is boosted by technological change, the displacement of workers by machines tends to reduce the amount of new value added in production.
There are two ways of measuring value: by money and by (average, socially necessary) labor-time. Marx says that price, on its own, is the monetary expression of the value received in exchange for the product; whereas value is what is transferred from constant capital or newly produced by living labor. But according to the “physicalist” school, there is no need for the value-price relationship, because profit can be measured in purely physical terms. In the simple case of Ricardo’s Corn Model, grain – as seed-corn - is the input of the means of production, grain as food is the wages of the workers, and grain is the profit of the capitalists, who either consume it amongst themselves (and servants and lackeys) or invest it as seed-corn for further production. The physicalist economist Okishio assumes that the value of the grain per bushel sold at harvest time will be of the same value per bushel as it was when the fields were sown. In other words, he assumes that input prices are the same as output prices, and so values them simultaneously. But this assumption is unwarranted. In the case of grain, the values at harvest might be lower than six months later, when the precious corn seed is sown. In that case the profit might be nil. The point is that even when physicalists like Okishio move on to more complex models, of multi-commodity economies in which machines are employed, they still stick to a physicalist and simultaneist method which sees no need to implicate “value” in a relationship with labor-time. They further argue, in opposition to Marx, that rises and falls in the rate of profit are determined by levels of technology-driven productivity.
Kliman points out that all of the physicalist and simultaneist critiques of Marx can be traced back to one written by Dmitriev in 1897; if they weren’t influenced by Dmitriev they repeat him by accident, having a common method. Kliman takes a simple case of Dmitriev’s method to illustrate his general procedure. In complete contrast to the corn-model, imagine a machine which lasts for one year and which needs no human labor; and that in one year four of these machines produce five machines of the same type and that the four wear themselves out in the process. Thus Dmitriev’s machine industry is able to generate an ever increasing output unrestrained by any natural resource limitations and with no additional cost in wages. The rate of profit in Dmitriev’s model is 25% because he assumes that the extra machine will have a positive price. But, Kliman suggests, it is quite plausible that under such circumstances the machines’ cost would fall to zero; and if the machines were free then not only would there be no value, but there would be no profit. But even assuming that the machines were not free, Dmitriev makes another fatal error: like Okishio he assumes that the machine’s input price equals its output price. In contrast, Marx’s theory, which allows for living labor, implies that the value of the output transferred from the inputs, plus new value added by the living labor, will decline. It also implies that the total value of Dmitriev’s five new machines will equal the total value of the four original machines, and therefore the profit will be zero. Lastly, it might be pointed out that Marx’s claim that the value per machine declines is what tends to happen in the real world.5 - Counteracting Tendencies to the Falling Rate of Profit
Let us consider an industry in which the rate of surplus value is 200% If 20% of the total capital advanced is spent as variable capital, then the rate of profit will be 2 X 20% (= 40%). But if the percentage of the variable capital falls to 15% then the rate of profit falls to 30%. If the capital advanced in an industry is say $1 million and 5 workers are employed to supply 5 hours each of surplus labor per day, then the profits will be 25 unpaid hours of labor-time (expressed monetarily). But if, with technological innovation, only 1 worker is are needed per $1 million, then the total daily surplus labor must fall to 5 unpaid hours of labor time (or monetary equivalent – after all there are only 24 hours in a day - and so must the rate of profit.
There are however counteracting tendencies to the Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit. Probably the most important one is the tendency of the rate of surplus value to rise as a result of rising productivity, which produces more surplus value. The rising productivity lowers the value of the goods workers consume, so assuming that the workers’ physical standard of living is unchanged, the value of their wages goes down – in both money and labor time terms. In one period a worker on a 40 hour week may produce the subsistence value of her labor-power in 10 hours, thus allowing the capitalist to expropriate the remaining 30 as surplus value. But if more efficient technology is introduced, she may produce a sum of value equivalent to the value of her labor power in say 5 hours. The value of her wages falls by half, because the capitalist now expropriates 35 hours of her 40 hours of labor-time instead of 30; although she can still buy the same amount of goods, i.e. her wage remains the same in physical terms. This then offsets the Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit.
Another counteracting tendency related to rising productivity is the devaluation of the means of production. Profits can rise if the lowering of the value of the capital advanced cheapens the cost prices of constant capital inputs; although investors may incur losses because capital value advanced in the past is wiped out by this devaluation, and so there is a tendency towards a “debt crisis.” Of course Marx is aware of the fact that no capitalist will voluntarily introduce a new productive technology if it reduces the rate of his of her profit. Marx adds however that each innovation makes the prices of commodities cheaper and that competition makes the new procedures universal and subjects them to the general law of value: “A fall in the rate of profit ensues – firstly perhaps in this sphere of production, and subsequently equalized with the others – a fall that is completely independent of the capitalists’ will.” This then, is the tendency at work, given that the surplus labor per dollar invested falls; although in principle, because of the counteracting tendencies, there can be more surplus labor, though there’s less living labor per dollar invested.
Kliman points that Marx does not predict that the rate of profit will display a declining trend in the long run. Nor does Marx say that the Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit will bring on a final crisis; rather the Law is constantly overcome by crises. These two points are related: since the devaluation of the means of production is made manifest through crises, the counteracting influences operate to some extent in and through crises. As Dunayevskaya says of the Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit, because of the constant revolutions in new techniques that reduce the time necessary to reproduce a product, “there comes a time when all commodities … have been “overpaid.” The crisis… follows.” 11 Value as “self-moving substance” suffers interruptions due to “revolutions in value”: technological development causes the destruction of already existing sums of value advanced by individual capitals, which cannot meet the changing conditions. What is truly independent is not the capitalist, but value – autonomized, circulating and self-expanding.6 - Beyond Capital, Beyond Value
Marx’s critics, who interpret his analysis of the transformation of the product of labor into a commodity as an argument for a labor theory of exchange ratios, thus conflate value with use-value and fail to see the nature of commodity production itself as source of contradiction. As empiricists, they are more concerned with quantitatively determining how things behave rather than (as was Aristotle) with what things are. To know the nature of the “commodity itself,” Kliman says, is to know that it is a “value in addition to a use-value, an artifact which exists only in a specific kind of society.” In Marx’s words (to Adolph Wagner), “neither “value,” or “exchange value” are my subjects, but the “commodity”… the simplest social form in which labor is presented in contemporary society.” Marx thus approaches “value” not from a concept, but from a “concretum,” the commodity. Kliman, in Marx’s Concept of Intrinsic Value, points out that at the same time Marx appropriates Hegel’s concept of the “concrete totality”: for both of them, “that which is concrete is a unity of diverse elements.” The empiricists and positivists, demanding firm ground for “solid” scientific analysis, fail to see that “Marx was thus laying the ground for his subsequent analysis of capitalism’s contradictions.” In political economy, although value in exchange is clearly a social activity, it is equally an “object-object relationship.” Kliman concludes that in “getting behind” this fetishized relationship Marx reveals “the relationship of the individual product to its producer. The enquiry into value has thus shifted … to one that refers to a subject-object relation… an alienated one,” in which the labor the worker expends in producing the commodity “can take on an autonomous form.” Ricardo, on the other hand, had conceived the labor-value relationship as causal and therefore external to each other:“The subject matter remained always the relations among the commodities themselves. Conversely, by clearly distinguishing between value and exchange value, Marx in effect created a category that expressed an internal relation between labor and value, worker to product.”12
If capitalist production is, as Marx puts it, “the rule of things over man… the inversion of subject into object and vice versa,” then the concept of “value, i.e. the past labor that dominates living labor” does, as Kliman claims, take on “a much greater meaning.” In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx conceives of an immediate post-revolutionary change, in which the worker would be paid according to the amount of work s/he does: for the “same amount of work… given to society in one form, he receives back in another.” The “revolution” would have to overturn the relationships in the factory, in which, as Marx puts it in the Grundrisse,“…the association of the workers... is not posited by them but by capital. Their combination is not their being, but rather the being of capital. To the individual worker it appears fortuitous. He relates to his own association with other workers and to his co-operation with them as alien, as to modes of operation of capital.” [p505]
Any “anti-capitalist” revolution worthy of the name would have to break with the totalizing and all-consuming “logic” of capital from day one of any revolutionary transformation. In “teleological” terms, the first stage of a post-value-producing society - proximate aims - would have to contain the higher goal of breaking down the division between mental and manual labor – the “final” destination.(Published in Hobgoblin #6 2004)
1 Alisdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988) 149-53. Jose Perez Adan, Reformist Anarchism 1800-1936 (London: Merlin Press, 1992).
2 Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1982) 106-9, 221-2.
3 Jose Perez Adan, Reformist Anarchism 1800-1936 (London: Merlin, 1992) 216-223.
4 Ibid 184-86.
5 Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value II, 166. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969).
6 Karl Marx , Capital Vol. I (London: Penguin, 1976) 493-4.
7 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973)158-9.
8 I have have made use of the following texts by Andrew Kliman:
‘The Transformation Non-Problem and the Non-Transformation Problem’ (with Ted McGlone), Capital and Class #35.
‘A Physicalist Approach to, and Critique of, Marx: A Conceptual History’ (paper presented at International Working Group on Value Theory symposium at the University of Greenwich, 29 June, 2000)
‘Marx’s law of the falling tate of profit today’, in Explorations in Dialectical and Critical Theory (Chicago: News and Letters Pamphlets, 2002) 49-55.
Marx’s Concept of Intrinsic Value – On the unity of value, fetishism and the analysis of capitalist production in Capital (Chicago: News and Letters Pamphlets, 2003) 3.
[Note 2009. As well as these texts I am indebted to years of correspondence and discussion with Kliman. He bears no responsibility for my analysis. Kliman’s book, Reclaiming Capital – A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency is now published (2008) by Lexington Books.]
9 Karl Marx, Capital Volume II (London: Penguin, 1978) 509.
10 Raya Dunayevskaya, ‘The Nature of the Russian Economy,’ (1946/7) in The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism: selected writings, (Chicago: News and Letters Publications, 1992).
11 Raya Dunayevskaya, State-Capitalism and Marxism (1947). Available at:
[http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1947/decline-profit.htm]
12 Kliman, Marx’s Concept of Intrinsic Value, 25.