Relative Surplus Value: The Class Struggle Intensifies

By Mazda Majidi

Republished from Liberation School.

Toward the end of our earlier introduction to surplus value, the heart and motor of the class struggle, we wrote that:

The rate of surplus value for the capitalist is the rate of exploitation for the worker. By merely prolonging the working day, the capitalist accrues more (absolute) surplus value. Increasing the working day from eight to 10 hours results in two more hours of surplus value for the capitalist and of exploitation for the worker.[1]

For any working period—whether it be a day, an hour, or five minutes—part of the period is “necessary labor” and another part is “surplus labor.” The former is when the worker produces the value of their own wage, and the latter is when the worker produces surplus value for the capitalist. The ratio between the two is the rate of surplus value for the capitalist and the rate of exploitation for the worker.

Absolute surplus value, Marx says, is “produced by prolongation of the working-day” [2]. In other words, if the ratio between necessary and surplus labor is fixed, then prolonging the working day will result in more surplus value for the capitalist and a greater degree of exploitation for the worker.

Capital’s entire reason for being is to produce surplus value, to increase the exploitation of the working class. As a result, there’s a logical impulse for each capitalist to extend the working day as much as possible. Yet not only might this produce problems for capitalism as a whole (in that it could exhaust the supply of labor-power available), but the working class fights back against exploitation, and at times is able to force limits to the length of the working day.

What happens, then, when political legislation limits the working day to, say, eight hours? This is obviously a limit to capitalist accumulation. For capital, however, “every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome” [3]. Relative surplus value is capital’s strategy for overcoming this limit.

Relative surplus value

If absolute surplus value is produced by lengthening the working day, then relative surplus value is produced by “the curtailment of the necessary labour-time, and from the corresponding alteration in the respective lengths of the two components of the working-day” [4]. Let’s say the working day was previously 10 hours, and that 10 hours was divided between four hours of necessary labor and six hours of surplus labor. If the working day is reduced to eight hours and wages remain the same, capital will lose two hours of surplus value. The only way to overcome this barrier and to reclaim those two hours of surplus labor is to reduce necessary labor by two hours.

How can this happen?

Remember that necessary labor time is variable capital, or the value of labor power. The value of labor power is, like all values, determined by the socially-necessary labor time required for its production and reproduction, which as we saw in the last part was largely the product of class struggle. The value of labor power can be represented by the bundle of commodities that go into the worker’s production and reproduction, like the value of housing, clothing, education, child-rearing, electricity, and so on.

If the conditions are right, the capitalist can—and sometimes does—merely decrease workers’ wages in this scenario. The state can also step in and provide some of the basic commodities that factor into the value of labor power. However, in Capital, Marx sets these aside because he wants to show us how it can happen within the very logic of a “perfectly” functioning capitalist system.

Two interrelated forms of relative surplus value

There are two interrelated ways that capitalists drive down necessary labor. One way it happens is by decreasing the value of the commodities that factor into the value of labor power:

Whenever an individual capitalist cheapens shirts, for instance, by increasing the productiveness of labour, he by no means necessarily aims at reducing the value of labour-power and shortening, pro tanto, the necessary labour-time. But it is only in so far as he ultimately contributes to this result, that he assists in raising the general rate of surplus-value.[5]

The second form explains the reason the capitalist producing shirts ends up raising the rate of surplus value even though they don’t intend to.

To understand this, we have to distinguish between two values: individual value and social (or real) value. Remember that part of the reason Marx calls value socially-necessary labor time is because it’s the average labor time required to produce some useful good or service “under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time” [6]. This is the social or real value: the average of all production times.

The individual value is the labor time required for production in a particular factory or under a particular capitalist.

Capitalists are always in competition with each other. They’re subjected to “the inherent laws of capitalist production” the “external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist” [7]. Each capitalist is always seeking to gain an edge over their competitors, and as a result, they’re trying to produce more (and sometimes better) commodities faster.

If the socially-necessary labor time required to produce a commodity is two hours, then every capitalist wants to find a way to produce it in less time. If a capitalist can, by employing some new method or technology, produce the same commodity in one hour, then the individual value of the commodity is half of the social value. As Marx writes:

“If therefore, the capitalist who applies the new method, sells his commodity at its social value… he sells it… above its individual value, and thus realizes an extra surplus-value” [8]. Suppose the social value of a shirt is $4 but a capitalist’s individual value is $2. In this case, they can gain an extra $2 in surplus value.

However, whereas previously a working day of eight hours was represented by two shirts, it’s now represented by four shirts. In order to sell the extra shirts, the market needs to be twice as large or the capitalist will sell the shirt at, say, $3—above its individual value but below its social value. In this case, necessary labor is shortened, and the capitalist captures more relative surplus value.

The contradictions of relative surplus value production

Just as capital sees barriers as obstacles to overcome, each new limit it surpasses only creates new contradictions and intensifies existing ones. There are several contradictions that arise from the pursuit of relative surplus value.

The first contradiction is that the capitalists are producing more commodities in terms of use values, yet each commodity contains less value (and therefore exchange-value). This can potentially benefit workers. If wages remain the same, they can either spend less on shirts or purchase more shirts than before. Such a scenario will depend on the class struggle, of course.

This drive to decrease necessary labor can also contribute to a crisis of overproduction. All capitalists are trying to decrease necessary labor time, which means more and more commodities are produced in a given time frame. For the commodities to be realized (sold), there must be an expansion of the market. But at some point, there will be a glut in the market, and there will be more commodities than can be sold at a profit.

The third contradiction is that the “external coercive laws of competition” compel competing capitalists to decrease their own production times, and “this extra surplus-value vanishes, so soon as the new method of production has become general, and has consequently caused the difference between the individual value of the cheapened commodity and its social value to vanish” [9]. Consequently, the overall rate of surplus value also declines, and the need for even faster production re-emerges. Moreover, the competing capitalists don’t only want to match the new innovation and production time but they want to beat it, thereby exacerbating the above contradictions.

Initial methods of producing relative surplus value

There are two initial methods of producing relative surplus value that don’t entail capitalism revolutionizing the means of production. These take place when capital “formally” subjects production to its command, meaning that it takes existing production processes but without fundamentally altering their nature.

One is cooperation, which is a quantitative distinction that leads to a qualitative change. Merely by bringing workers together in one place, capitalists help facilitate the cooperation of workers. “Even without an alteration in the system of working, the simultaneous employment of a large number of labourers effects a revolution in the material conditions of the labour-process. The buildings in which they work, the store-houses for the raw material, the implements and utensils used simultaneously or in turns… in short, a portion of the means of production, are now consumed in common” [10].

Cooperation results in “an increase in the productive power of the individual” worker as well “the creation of a new power, namely, the collective power of masses” [11]. A collective of workers “working in concert has hands and eyes both before and behind and is, to a certain degree, omnipresent” [12]. Importantly, this doesn’t cost capital anything, although it looks like it’s a power of capital itself.

This is the beginning of the collectivization of labor or the production of the collective laborer, which is another contradictory process because “as the number of the co-operating labourers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital” [13]. Workers can more easily agitate and organize, distribute literature and build class consciousness when we’re together in one place.

The other is the division of labor. Capitalism also, without revolutionizing the production process, produces relative surplus value by increasing the division and specialization of labor. When the worker is no longer producing the entire commodity but merely performing one action in the production process, the productivity of labor increases. In other words, “a labourer who all his life performs one and the same simple operation, converts his whole body into the automatic, specialized implement of that operation” and “takes less time in doing it” [14].

Taken together with cooperation, it also decreases any gaps in the labor process: the worker doesn’t have to get up and move to different stations, sit back down, use different tools, and so on.

Capitalism encounters a crucial limit to these methods of relative surplus value production, namely that it is still the workers who are the active agents in production or who serve as the “regulating principle of social production” [15]. The production processes above still rely on the workers’ bodies, skills, knowledges, and so on. Living labor still had the upper hand over dead labor, or the means of production.

Real subjection: Machinery

Marx says capitalists first take existing production processes as they find them and “formally subject them” by, for example, lengthening the working day or instituting cooperation. In order for capitalism to come into its own, it had to totally or really subject labor to its command, and it could only do so by taking the skill and knowledge of the worker and absorbing it into machinery, so that machinery, and not the workers, would drive production; so that dead labor dominates living labor.

Thus is born the industrial factory:

An organized system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automation, is the most developed form of production by machinery. Here we have, in the place of the isolated machine, a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demon power, at first veiled under the slow and measured motions of his giant limbs, at length breaks out in the fast and furious whirl of his countless working organs.[16]

The worker becomes, Marx says, “a mere living appendage” to the machine [17].

As constant capital, the machine can’t produce new value; it can only transfer its existing value to the finished product. However, machinery can produce relative surplus value by decreasing necessary labor time for the individual capitalist and lowering the value of labor-power.

Yet again, this is never finished. It’s only when the capitalist employs new labor-saving technologies that they can produce relative surplus value.

During this transition period… the profits are therefore exceptional, and the capitalist endeavours to exploit thoroughly ‘the sunny time of his first love’.[18]

The love doesn’t last, as other capitalists match or beat the new technologies with more productive ones. The overall rate of surplus value is driven down and, moreover, there are fewer workers engaged in production. The capitalist ends up investing more in machinery and less in labor-power and, overall, surplus value decreases (this is also tied to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall).

This explains why, as Marx and Engels wrote in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, “the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society” [19]. The search for relative surplus-value in the face of the limits imposed on capital by the class struggle compel the constant revolutionizing of productive forces like technologies and machinery.

Contradictions intensify

There are numerous other key impacts technological transformations have on capitalism, workers, the class struggle, colonialism, imperialism, and more. Marx addresses many of these, some of which previous Liberation School articles cover [20]. For this introductory article, we want to touch on just a few more issues.

In their ruthless search for surplus value, capitalists work to increase the productivity of labor and the mass of commodities in the world. They produce unemployment and induce crises of overproduction. As Marx puts it:

The enormous power, inherent in the factory system, of expanding by jumps, and the dependence of that system on the markets of the world, necessarily beget feverish production, followed by over-filling of the markets, whereupon contraction of the markets brings on crippling of production. The life of modern industry becomes a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, a crisis and stagnation[21].

The expansion and intensification of capitalism’s command over life and work is accompanied by an enlargement and escalation of its internal contradictions. The capitalist system produces ever more and ever greater misery and destruction.

At the same time, this destruction of the worker, the earth, and its inhabitants produced by modern industry—which is spurred on by the search for relative surplus value—can lay the foundations for socialism: “By maturing the material conditions, and the combination on a social scale of the process of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of production, and thereby provides, along with the elements of the formation of a new society, the forces for exploding the old one” [22].

There’s nothing deterministic or mechanistic about this argument. Marx isn’t saying it will automatically happen or that it will only or universally happen after a certain level of technological development takes place. It’s important to remember that Marx’s case study in Capital is England, where the capitalist mode of production was most developed [23].

Absolute and relative surplus value as tactics

Absolute and relative surplus value are dialectically related. On the one hand, Marx says, they’re the same in that relative surplus value is absolute in the sense that it lengthens the part of the working day that the worker works for the capitalist (by reducing necessary labor time), and absolute value is relative because it compels an increase in the productiveness of labor.

On the other hand, when we look at the matter practically, they’re distinct. The difference between the two, he writes, “makes itself felt, whenever there is a question of raising the rate of surplus-value” [24]. In other words, sometimes capital will try to get absolute surplus value, and other times it will try to get relative surplus value.

They are each class tactics in its arsenal of exploitation. If workers can limit the working day, capitalists will go back to relative surplus value. But if capital can lengthen it, either by peeling back legislation or by destroying the entire concept of the working day, like it’s done with the “gig economy,” then it will pursue absolute surplus value.

For the working class, it’s imperative to know the tools in capital’s arsenal. When we fight for a normal working day and a living wage, we can make gains by limiting absolute and relative surplus value, but capital can change tactics and exploit us in different ways. If capital can’t increase absolute surplus value by lengthening the work day due to the united struggle of the workers, it will try to increase relative surplus value by increasing the intensity of work through introducing new technologies to the productive process. Conversely, when capital is unable to overcome the workers’ resistance to increase relative surplus value, it will look for ways to extend the workday. For example, capital might increase the number of salaried workers, whose wages do not increase when they work longer workdays.

Class struggle is conducted in many spheres–political, ideological, cultural, and of course the most easily observable, economical. The economic struggle between workers and capitalists over the rate of absolute and relative surplus value, and hence the rate of exploitation, is yet one more facet of class struggle between labor and capital.

Notes:

[1] Ford, Derek and Mazda Majidi. (2021). “Surplus value is the scass Struggle: An introduction,”Liberation School, March 30. Availablehere.
[2] Marx, Karl. (1967).Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1): The process of production of capital, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers), 299.
[3] Marx, Karl. (1993).Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (rough draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books), 408
[4] Marx,Capital, 299.
[5] Ibid., 299-300.
[6] Ibid., 47.
[7] Ibid., 257.
[8] Ibid., 301.
[9] Ibid., 302.
[10] Ibid., 307.
[11] Ibid., 309f1. In a footnote, he quotes John Bellers, who writes “As one man cannot, and ten men must strain to lift a ton of weight, yet 100 men can do it only by the strength of a finger of each of them.”
[12] Ibid., 310.
[13] Ibid., 313.
[14] Ibid., 321.
[15] Ibid., 347.
[16] Ibid., 360.
[17] Ibid., 398.
[18] Ibid., 383.
[19] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. (1848/1967).The communist manifesto, trans. S. Moore (New York: Penguin), 222.
[20] Hernandez, Estevan, John Prysner, and Derek Ford. (2019). “A Marxist approach to technology,”Liberation School, December 9. Availablehere.
[21] Marx,Capital, pp. 425-7.
[22] Ibid., 472.
[23] In fact, later on he wrote that the Russian “rural commune” can “by developing its basis, the common ownership of land… become a direct point of departure for the economic system towards which modern society tends.” Marx, Karl. (1881). “First draft of letter to Vera Zasulich,” trans. A. Blunden. Availablehere.
[24] Marx,Capital, 479.

Firm Level Price Determination: A Comparison of Theories (Perfect Competition, Imperfect Competition, and the Theory of Real Competition)

By Ezra Pugh

“The best of all monopoly profits is a peaceful life,” (John Hicks, 1935).

“The division of labor within society brings into contact independent producers of commodities, who acknowledge no authority other than that of competition…the ‘war of all against all,’”      (Karl Marx, 1867)

George Stigler defines the term competition as “the absence of monopoly power in a market,” (Stigler 1957, 14). This could seem a curiously narrow definition to the businessperson or the worker. But this notion has been ubiquitous in the teaching of economics for decades. It originates, of course, from the Neo-Classical theory of perfect competition. Abstraction is necessary to any theoretical investigation. Assumptions must be made for the purpose of conducting analysis. But in flattening the meaning of a term like competition in such a way, is there a risk that some essential insights may be lost?

Perfect Competition

Perfect competition is the foundational parable of orthodox economics. A perfectly competitive market is an abstract ideal with a number of specific attributes:

•          There is a very large number of firms, such that no single firm can affect the overall market for its product.

•          There is a very large number of buyers for the industry’s product.

•          Each firm produces exactly the same undifferentiated product.

•          Firms, and their consumers, have perfect knowledge of all relevant economic information related to their industry and its product.

•          Firms have unrestricted power of entry and exit in their industry.

•          Firms are entitled to a ‘normal rate’ of profit, which is included in its operations costs.

• ·         Marginal costs drop at first then eventually increase with each unit sold. As a result, average cost is also upward sloping.

From its perspective, a firm in perfect competition is just a speck, dwarfed by the size of the market it competes in. The market can absorb whatever the firm can produce, provided it is sold at market price. The firm’s perceived demand curve is horizontal, or perfectly elastic. As a result, the demand curve is identical to its supply curve. The overall demand curve of the market, however, is downward sloping.

The firm must accept the prevailing market selling price for its good. If it sets its price above the prevailing price, even by an iota, the firm will lose all of its sales to the myriad other sellers. If it sets its price below, it will not be able to make enough profit to survive. A firm in a perfectly competitive market is therefore known as a price-taker, as it is powerless in the face of market pressures. Consequently, “a perfectly competitive firm has only one major decision to make—namely, what quantity to produce,” (Greenlaw 2018, 189).

Being rational, the firm’s motivating goal is to generate profit. Its profit (r), is defined as total revenue (TR) minus total cost (TC). Total revenue is made up on the products price (P) multiplied by the quantity produced (Q) minus the average cost per unit (AC) multiplied by the quantity produced. This can be written as:

To maximize its profit, the firm must continue producing more output up until the point its marginal revenue equals its marginal cost – the point where an additional unit of output contributes no more profit. Marginal revenue (MR) and marginal cost (MC) are defined thus:

Because the market price the firm experiences does not change based on its output, the firm’s marginal revenue is a constant. Each additional unit sold adds the same value, which is equal to the price of the product. If marginal revenue is equal to price, and profit maximization occurs when marginal revenue equals marginal cost, the firm should produce up until the point where its marginal costs equals the price of its product.

The firm’s average cost is its total cost divided by quantity produced, and is assumed to initially fall then eventually be upward sloping. Because innumerable sellers all sell the same good, in the long run (which generally does not have a specific definition), all ‘economic’ profits—those which are above the assumed ‘normal’ profits—are eventually eroded completely away. If positive economic profits existed, more firms would enter the market, increasing supply and lowering price. If economic profits are negative, firms would leave the market, causing the opposite effect. As a result, in the long run perfect competition causes sellers to produce their goods at the lowest point on their average cost curve.

“When profit-maximizing firms in perfectly competitive markets combine with utility-maximizing consumers, something remarkable happens,” we are told, “the resulting quantities of outputs of goods and services demonstrate both productive and allocative efficiency,” (Greenlaw 2018, 206). Productive efficiency is attained because in the long run, firms produce at their absolute lowest cost. Allocative efficiency is achieved because the resulting goods’ price is equal to its marginal cost—precisely the value of the ‘social cost’ of producing it.

Imperfect Competition and Monopoly

But of course, this state of affairs does not resemble the world in which we live. This utopian optimality, we are told, is distorted and mutated by the anti-competitive behavior of firms and government. Due to that meddling, we live in a world of imperfect competition—monopoly, monopolistic competition, and oligopoly. Paradise lost. In monopoly, a firm is the lone provider of a good, in monopolistic competition many firms produce differentiated products, and in oligopoly a small cabal of firms control the marketplace and exert price pressure.

The culprit which creates each of these distorted market types is barriers to entry. Whether natural or legal, barriers to entry prevent firms who would otherwise enter a market from entering. The few firms which are active in the market have control of too large a slice. As a result, they can affect the market price based on how many units they produce. Instead of a horizontal perceived demand curve, the firms in imperfect competition face a downward sloping demand curve.

To maximize its profit, the imperfectly competitive firm still produces at the level where MR = MC. But because of its outsized effect on the market, P no longer equals MR. With each unit produced, the increased supply exerts downward pressure on the price, which effects the price of all other units produced by the same amount. If such a firm produces too much, it can hurt its own bottom line. Because it supplies as much as it wants and not what consumers want, a true monopoly will have perpetual positive economic profits at a level which depends on the elasticity of the product’s demand schedule. Monopolistic competition, however, will in the long run result in a total erosion of economic profit as firms enter the market, all producing at a point on the AC curve, albeit not at its minimum point. As a result, none of these markets is productively or allocatively efficient. The amount of goods produced is below what consumers would have wanted under perfectly competitive conditions, they are more expensive than they are socially worth, and firms inefficiently do not produce at their minimum average cost. Customers are robbed of potential utility. Such markets are sadly the norm, because, we are told, “firms have proved to be highly creative in inventing business practices that discourage competition,” (Greenlaw 2018, 220). This is a great state of affairs for the firms, however, because “once barriers are erected, once a barrier to entry is in place, a monopoly that does not need to fear competition can just produce the same old products in the same old way,” (Greenlaw 2018, 229). Managers can kick back and watch the profits roll in.

Historical Overview

Sketched out above is the dominant parable in economic thought and teaching. Interestingly, almost none of this resembles the real world. How did we get here? An outline is sketched below.

Adam Smith is generally credited with establishing economic thought, or Political Economy, as a distinct field of study. His work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) is regarded as the first modern work of economics. A key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith was interested in observing economic phenomena, describing them, and discovering the hidden patterns within. David Ricardo furthered and built on Smith’s ideas, advancing theories on rent, trade, and value. Over the course of the three volumes of Capital (1867), Karl Marx extended this theoretical framework even further with sharpened historical and class analysis, building a signature value theory in the process. Along with others, these thinkers are referred to as the Classical economists.

But in the 1870’s there occurred what is known as the Marginalist Revolution. The Long Depression (1873-96) caused a crisis of confidence in the capitalist world. Interestingly, it was during this period that the most utopian theoretical depictions of capitalism were popularized. W.S. Jevons (1871), Carl Menger (1871), and Leon Walras (1874) independently and almost simultaneously developed this new theoretical paradigm. They perceived fundamental flaws in the theoretical framework and methodologies of the Classical economists and sought to “pick up the fragments of a shattered science and to start anew,” (Jevons 1879/1965, Preface lii). The Classicals believed that the ultimate source of an item’s value was the amount of labor embodied in it and that market prices were connected to costs—prices of production. The Marginalists vehemently disagreed. “Value,” wrote Jevons, “depends entirely upon utility” (Jevons 1871/1965, 1). Echoing this sentiment, Menger wrote “there is no necessary and direct connection between the value of a good and whether, or in what quantities, labour and other goods of higher order were applied to its production” (Menger 1871/2007, 146). Value then stemmed from a buyers utility gained from a good; that utility being an index of the good’s scarcity.

Jevons and Walras both used advanced mathematics to express their ideas. Adopting algebra and calculus, they could express complex ideas with greater accuracy than was possible previously. "Why should we persist in using everyday language to explain things in the cumbersome and incorrect way, as Ricardo has often done,” wrote Walras, “when these things can be stated far more succinctly, precisely, and clearly in the language of mathematics?" (Heilbroner 1997, 226). Walras pioneered what is known as general equilibrium theory—the notion that a complex balance of supply and demand can exist in and between markets.

It is during this period that supply and demand curves and the modern theory of perfect competition are introduced. In order to make their highly abstract models functional and defined, economists had to make assumptions that did not necessarily fit with, and often outright contradicted economic reality. "The pure theory of economics, it must precede applied economics,” wrote Walras, “and this pure theory of economics is a science which resembles the physic-mathematical sciences in every respect," (Heilbroner, 224). Actual people and actual societies faded from the picture in favor of platonic ideals. This fundamental methodological shift opened up many new avenues of exploration for economists, but the descriptive and predictive usefulness of the new models was not necessarily clear. Perfect competition became the theoretical jumping off point for all ‘rigorous’ analysis, and Marshall (1890) systematized the theoretical structure into what would recognize as modern Neo-classical economics. Dobb notes, "at the purely formal level, there can be little doubt that the new context and methods, with their mathematical analogy if not mathematical form, resulted in enhanced precision and rigor of analysis…the cutting knives of economic discussion became sharper -- whether they were used to cut so deeply is another matter" (Dobb 1973, 176).

In the 1920s, unease with the dominance of perfect competition was growing. Sraffa (1925) aimed a potentially devastating critique at the then-dominant Marshallian partial equilibrium theory, demonstrating that the theoretical structure was not capable of dealing with non-constant returns (increasing or decreasing costs) adequately (Mongiovi 1996). The next year, Sraffa (1926) suggested a solution might be found using the lesser utilized monopoly theory as a starting point. Even in competitive markets, monopolistic tendencies could easily be observed because 1.) firms can exert some control over their own prices, and 2.) they frequently experience increasing returns (decreasing costs). Sraffa argued that these circumstances are not the exception, “rather they are normal and persistent features of the economic landscape, with 'permanent and even cumulative' consequences for market equilibria. When these influences are operative, each firm is to be viewed as having its own distinct market; prices are set so as to maximise profits on the supposition that the relevant demand curve is not perfectly elastic,” (Mongiovi 1996, 214). Building on these ideas, Robinson (1933) and Chamberlain (1933) independently, but simultaneously, developed the theory of imperfect competition that is taught today. Eventually abandoning Marshallian theory altogether, Sraffa’s publication of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960) is credited with establishing a distinctive Sraffian or Neo-Ricardian school.

Real Competition

In Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (2016), Anwar Shaikh erects a theoretical framework independent of perfect and imperfect competition. Formalizing insights developed by the Classical economists, a theory is built which is both analytically sound and corresponds to observed economic phenomena. The theory of real competition, as it is called, “is as different from so-called perfect competition as war is from ballet,” (Shaikh 2016, Ch. 7.I.). The classical economists stressed themes that were either diminished or omitted completely by Neo-classical economists, including conflict, class, and temporality. In Capital, Volume 1, Karl Marx writes that the economic realm is bellum omnium contra omnes, ‘war of all against all,’ (Marx 1867/1990, 477). All evidence of this is lost in the parables of perfect and imperfect competition. But in Capitalism, the theory of real competition “pits seller against seller, seller against buyer, and buyer against buyer. It pits capital against capital, capital against labor, and labor against labor,” (Shaikh 2016, Ch. 7.I.). Abstracting away from the essentiality of conflict to capitalist production and distribution makes Neo-Classical analysis not only unrealistic, but totally misleading.

But even on pure theoretical grounds there are issues with the theory of perfect competition. For one, there is a fundamental contradiction within the assumptions. Firms are assumed to have perfect knowledge of the market in which they are competing, yet their perceived demand curve is assumed to be flat. These two assumptions cannot hold at the same time. “If firms are assumed to be sensible in their expectations, then the theory of perfect competition collapses. More generally, even mildly informed firms would have to recognize that they face downward sloping demand curves under competitive conditions,” (Shaikh 2016, Ch. 8.I). If a firm in a perfectly competitive market has perfect knowledge, it would quite easily deduce that the market signals it is receiving are being received by every other firm, and those firms will react in a predictable manner. As a result, the firm would know that it does not face a flat, perfectly elastic demand curve, and would act in exactly the same manner as a monopolistic firm, with just the same results.

Another problematic assumption within the orthodox framework is that firms are entitled to a normal rate of profit, which is included within its cost structure. The action of competition completely erodes excess profits away but leaves normal profits intact. This, of course, is wildly unrealistic because “no capital is assured of any profit at all, let alone the “normal” rate of profit. Indeed, all capitals face losses at some point, and a certain number drown in red ink in every given interval. It is therefore completely illegitimate to count “normal profit” as part of operating costs,” (Shaikh 2016, Ch. 7.I.). The prospect of making a loss is the dark cloud that hangs over every business manager, driving them unceasingly into conflict with agents both inside and outside the firm. Abstracting away from this motive force fundamentally misdiagnoses the motivations of economic agents.

In the theory of perfect competition, a firm’s only decision is how much to produce. Likewise, in imperfect competition, pricing and quantity decisions are mechanically connected. But in the works of the Classicals and in the theory of real competition, firms are active price setting, cost cutting entities. Neo-Classical theory stresses that firms will flock to higher profit rates at a given price. But once firms have the power to set their own price, the picture becomes more complicated. In their endless search for higher rates of return, firms cut prices to attract more buyers and increase market-share. In the process, “the advantage in this perpetual jousting for market share goes to the firms with the lowest cost,” (Shaikh 2016, 7.II.). If firms have the power to cut their own prices, they have the power to starve out other firms—even ones that are potentially more profitable at initial prices. Neo-Classical theory stresses that firms will adopt whatever method yields the highest profit at a given price, but “when costs differ, there is always a set of prices at which the lower cost firm has the higher profit rate. This does not mean that [it] has to drive the price down to that level. It has only to get the message across to its competitor that the future has arrived,” (Shaikh 2016, 7.VII.). This is demonstrated in Table 1 below. Pricing wars, which are extremely common occurrences in the real economy, highlight the conflictual nature of economic relations—"these are the operative principles of warfare: attackers try to impose greater losses on the other side. We will see that such behavior is the norm in the business world. It follows that the highest profit that is sustainable in the face of price-cutting behavior is generally different from the price-passive profit assumed in theories of perfect and imperfect competition,” (Shaikh 2016, 7.II.). Only the theory of real competition deals with this common behavior adequately.

Conclusion

Contrary to Hicks’ assertion, a peaceful life is not included in a firm’s profit—no matter their degree of monopoly. There is perpetual conflict generated both inside and outside of the firm that must always be contended with. For real firms, “price is their weapon, advertising their propaganda, the local Chamber of Commerce their house of worship, and profit their supreme deity,” (Shaikh 2016, 7.II.). Abstraction is a necessary tool for analysis. But the specific method of abstraction used in the theories of perfect and imperfect competition does not serve to elucidate truths that would be otherwise unattainable. Neo-Classical economics was formulated during a crisis of capitalism to create a utopian vision in order to justify capitalist social relations. Capitalist relations have been shown to be the most powerful and productive in history, but that does not justify obscuring their fundamentally destructive and chaotic elements. Competition is not merely the absence of monopoly power—it is the struggle of all against all.

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