Review of Radical Political Economics

The movement of peasant-artisan household enterprises from petty commodity production to petty capitalism may be significantly affected by family demographic and life-cycle factors through their impact upon productive capacity, capital accumulation and material wealth. This finding supports Lenin's thesis that family cooperation is the foundation of capitalist cooperation, and negates Chayanov's labor-consumer balance theory of the peasant family economy with its emphasis on simple reproduction.

In this paper, we report our attempts to use Marxian value categories to describe some aspects of the behavior of the Mexican economy between 1970 and 1975. We find that Mexican workers were much more exploited than either United States or Puerto Rican workers; that relative surplus value explained more than half of the change in the rate of exploitation, that technological change was biased against the capital producing sector, and that profit rates in both value and price terms were much higher than the ones in either the United States or Puerto Rico.

Contract farming is promoted by agribusiness as a more efficient method of crop and livestock production. Evidence suggests, however, that contracts diminish control by farmers over their operation while increasing their exposure to risk. Conventional models accounting for the spread of contracting emphasize technological factors (e.g., economies of scale, crop perishability, technological complementarity between different stages of production are misleading and inadequate). An alternative model emphasizes the utility of the "subcontracting" organization of production for large agribusiness corporations. A close examination of the spread of contracts reveals that most agribusinesses have pulled back from integration in favor of contracting out and that contracting spreads wherever (1) processors are few in relation to producers, (2) producers are specialized, (3) auction and local terminals have declined in number, (4) there is a surplus of farm operations and credit is tight, (5) farmer's are poorly organized and (6) government supports are weak. The trend toward contracting will continue so long as agribusiness concentration continues, government supports deteriorate, and farms become more specialized.

The paper reviews recent theoretical and empirical work by neo-Marxists suggesting that capitalist firms are inefficient, either technically or by Pareto criteria. The paper examines potential inefficiencies due to the division of labor, unemployment, labor segmentation/fragmentation, and bureaucracy/supervision. It is argued that technical inefficiency claims are incapable of being validated. While Pareto efficiency arguments may be warranted, presently existing socialist societies and experiments offer little persuasive evidence. Further empirical and theoretical work will be required to sustain efficiency arguments.