Capital & Class

It is now a little more than two years since Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, and, since then, the constant theme in the news from the Soviet Union has been one of change. This has been reflected in the style of leadership, and in the slogans adopted by the new administration, such as ‘reconstruction’, ‘renewal’, and ‘acceleration’. There has also been much talk of new policy directions, but how significant have the changes really been, and what are their consequences for Soviet society?

Last December the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) began its latest round of talks in Uruguay. David Ransom here provides a succinct account of the grim realities which have overtaken Uruguay as it turns increasingly towards the local giant, Brazil, itself facing crisis.

After the Chernobyl accident several countries reassessed their commitment to nuclear power, leading to the cancellation or postponement of orders for reactors. Martin Spence examines the impact of these developments upon the world's nuclear industry. Through an assessment of the forces which have promoted nuclear technology, he concludes that the industry is far from being in a state of terminal decline

A study of the crisis of the special steels sector in Sheffield reveals major weaknesses both in traditional strategies for restructuring such as nationalisation and in new ones such as local economic strategies. Strategic choices in the sector are constrained by interdependence with sectors like the automobile industry and by the political and economic restrictions of the EEC. Meanwhile creeping privatisation continues. The authors argue that any alternative strategy must operate at each of these levels to be effective.

The main camps in the ‘value’ debate are sketched and it is argued that it is wrong to reduce all ‘surplus theory’ to the Sraffian approach. There are a plurality of surplus approaches and the Marxian one is uniquely equipped to answer the fundamental Marxian questions. The great virtue of the Marxian approach resides in its double structure of prices and value which places economic activity in the context of a broader redistributive class process. Nevertheless, it is recognised that the Steedman-type points in cases of joint production still have a critical force. Consequently, it is demonstrated how they might be overcome with a different method for tackling the transformation

It is argued that the purpose of the Labour Theory of Value is to provide a theory of capitalist exploitation, not a theory of relative prices. As such, the Morishima-type approach to the Steedman critique offers a convincing restatement of the Fundamental Marxian Theorem associating profit with the performance of surplus labour time. By comparison, the Roberts approach involves some strange arithmetic and the importation of a hybrid price/value term which makes it difficult to infer the Fundamental Marxian Theorem.

‘The assumption is that growth is good and more is better. It is as if economists had never heard of cancer.’ (p.8 Ekins)

‘Scientific materialism… is now a dying orthodoxy.’ (p.345 Harman)

‘No man or woman in their right mind would behave in the family as they do in the market.’ (p.99 Galtung)