Did Kalecki Accept the Labour Theory of Value?

I thought that Kalecki did not accept the labour theory of value, but Matias Vernengo raises a question about this in a comment here, and asks for the evidence.

I have to admit to relying on memories of some reading on Kalecki quite a while ago, but some further research yields this interesting statement from the Polish Marxist economist Włodzimierz Brus, which seems to be from his personal conversations with Kalecki (who had
returned to Poland in 1955):

“While recognizing the enormous significance of the Marxist approach and of many Marxian tools of economic analysis, Kalecki never felt that he had to accept every component of Marxian economics or to retain those parts of it which have become obsolete in view of new experience and of the progress of economic theory. He felt, for example, a strong distaste for the Marxian theory of value, which he considered metaphysical and (if I am not mistaken) never wanted to discuss.” (Brus 1977: 59).

Of course, Brus might be mistaken, but other writers on Kalecki do seem to agree that Kalecki pretty much avoided the subject of the labour theory of value in his writings, and his silence suggests that he did not support it (Sawyer 1985: 148; Toporowski 2004: 217; Chapple 1983: 551; King 2001: 609; Chapple 2013: 302: “He had no time for the labor theory of value”) or (at least) had no interest in defending it:

“Kalecki seems never to have declared himself in print as to where he stood in relation to the labour theory of value. He assumed that prices were fixed by firms according to their unit costs of production to which margins or mark-ups were added to secure certain levels of profit.” (Harcourt and Hamouda 2003 [1988]: 219).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brus, Włodzimierz. 1977. “Kalecki’s Economics of Socialism,” Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 39.1 (February): 57–67.

Chapple, Simon. 1994. “Kalecki’s Theory of the Business Cycle and the General Theory,” in John Cunningham Wood (ed.), John Maynard Keynes: Critical Assessments. Second Series. Croom Helm, London. 538–559.

Chapple, Simon. 2013. “Kalecki, Michał,” in Thomas Cate (ed.), An Encyclopedia of Keynesian Economics (2nd edn.). Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Pub. 301–304.

Hamouda, O. F. and G. C. Harcourt. 2003 [1988]. “Post-Keynesianism: From Criticism to Coherence?,” in Claudio Sardoni (ed.), On Political Economists and Modern Political Economy: Selected Essays of G. C. Harcourt. Routledge, London. 209–232.

King, John E. 2001. “Kalecki, Michał,” in Phillip Anthony O’Hara (ed.), Encyclopedia of Political Economy. Volume 1. A–K. Routledge, London and New York. 607-610.

Sawyer, Malcolm C. 1985. The Economics of Michał Kalecki. Macmillan, Basingstoke.

Toporowski, Jan. 2004. “Kalecki’s Arguments for Socialism,” in Zdzislaw L. Sadowski and Adam Szeworski (eds.), Kalecki’s Economics Today. Routledge, London and New York. 215–221.

Kalecki, Keynes, Wages and Capacity Utilisation

In this fascinating interview of heterodox economist Bob Rowthorn, he makes a very interesting point about the importance of capacity utilisation and fixprices in Keynesian economics, in terms of the differences between the views of Keynes in the General Theory and Kalecki (N.B. the video may start at an earlier point than I set it at in Mozilla Firefox!).



Now I have not looked carefully into this, but does anyone know any good literature about this subject, and specific references in Kalecki’s work?

The crucial point is that Keynes was opposed to nominal wage cuts (for reasons explained in Chapter 19 of the General Theory), and his analysis there seems to assume a flexprice world (Hayes 2006: 178: “The General Theory itself is a ‘flex-price’ system, but not of Hick’s Walrasian type”) as a concession to the neoclassical theory of Keynes’s day, in order to show that even flexible prices and wages do not necessarily cure unemployment.

But, once we have a mark-up pricing world with adjustments in capacity utilisation where prices are generally relatively inflexible, then expansion of aggregate demand does not simply cause inflation as it would if prices were generally flexprice.

And once we move to the real world of fixprices (the world of mark-up prices and capacity utilisation as in Kalecki’s models), Keynesian economics simply becomes an even stronger and more robust theory of modern market economies.


BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hayes, Mark. 2006. The Economics of Keynes: A New Guide to The General Theory. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.