> "'To-Day' has become a mere 'symposium', i.e. a review in which everyone
> can write for and against socialism. Next No. a critique of 'Capital'! I
> was supposed to reply to this anonymous writer, but declined with
> thanks."
> -- Engels to Kautsky, Sept. 20, 1884.
I've read Wicksteed's critique of Capital now and, interestingly, it
rests upon the presumed identity of meaning between 'value' and exchange
value, against which Marx issued a disclaimer on page 152 (Vintage) and
which came up recently on Pen-l in the comments about Charles Andrews'
book. In the absense of a reply from Engels, George Bernard Shaw wrote
an utterly inadequate, although charmingly ill-informed response to
Wicksteed. Poor Shaw was way over his head.
Wicksteed didn't say much about rent in his critique of Marx. He dealt
specifically with the labour theory of value. In his critique, Wicksteed
identified what he believed was a formal and substantive error in
passing "unwarrantably and without warning, from one category inot
another, when he makes the great leap from specific utilities into
objectivised abstract labour and has give us an argument which can only
become formally correct when so modified and supplemented as to accept
*abstract utility* as the measure of value." Wicksteed then went on to
make the suggested 'modification' by interjecting Jevon's analysis of
marginal utility.
On the basis of this substitution of Jevons for Marx, Wicksteed
concluded that "value does not depend upon the 'amount of labour
contained,' and does not always coincide with it. . . [Except when]
labour can be freely directed to the production of A or B optionally."
According to Wicksteed, labour power does not possess the foregoing
characteristic, and hence its value doesn't necessarily coincide with
the amount of labour contained in it.
It appears that in this conclusion, Wicksteed fumbled the distinction
established by Marx between labour and labour power. The long Jevonian
detour thus established nothing other than to prepare the ground for a
last ditch confusion. Wicksteed seems to have forgotten that labour
power can be withheld as well as expended. Once that potential is
factored in, labour power does possess the characteristic of being
directed to the production of "A" or "B" -- that is, to labour or
leisure, a trade-off about which Jevons himself had something or other
to say (although not by any stretch the last word).
