[p2p-research] Can Marxian Economics Explain the Crisis?

[Kevin Carson]

On 1/12/10, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> In Negri's 70s stuff, he argues that value is no longer relevant to
> capitalism because of the closure of the passage from formal to real
> subsumption - capitalism now sets value arbitrarily, by command.  He's
> thinking of things such as Baudrillard's 'sign-value' I think, where value
> is extracted based on something akin to rent on symbols.  Spivak has made a
> similar argument about the global South and the 'expanded form of value' -
> pure value extraction does not exist, capitalism coexists with other social
> forms.  This makes it very hard to quantify 'real' value production -
> capitalists might be making 'profits' which are only partly profits, and are
> partly rents, fictional speculative income, extraction of surplus from non-
> or quasi-capitalist economies, etc.

The growing portion of profit that results from rents on IP is part of
a larger phenomenon, described by Marxist theorists of monopoly
capitalism earlier in the 20th century:  the extraction of surplus
value through the production process is being surpassed by the
extraction of super-profits through the exchange process.


-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
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Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
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Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html