Structural Heterogeneity in Capitalism. A View from the Abstract Labour Theory of Value

This paper proposes an interpretation of the heterogeneity that is found in the productive structure of specific capitalist societies as the coexistence in the same market of capitalists and simple commodity agents competing amongst them. The text focuses on the analysis of two aspects: (a) the competition that capitalist agents exert over simple commodity agents, which permanently breaks them down and removes them from different economic places which eventually makes them collapse and reduce to the status of proletarians. (b) The persistence of some simple commodity agents who resist this competition, and not just as something inertial, but as a result of the same action of capital, which calls into question the forecast made by Marx himself on the tendency of capitalism to become a society composed exclusively by a narrow oligarchy of capitalists and a wide mass of proletarians, while the third classes would be liquidated. This brief analysis is performed with a one-good model and numerical illustration for the first part, and a simple model of simultaneous algebra for second.