> >I have defended that formulation in What's Wrong with Exploitation?, >Nous 1995, availabkle on the net in the old marxism spoons archive. >However, I argued that it did not require the labor theory of value >in Marx's canonical formulation to state it. More generally, the >point is that capitalism is exploitative, a point that _can_ be put >without reference to any theory of value at all--Roemer has an >argument to this effect.
I have had an extensive argument with someone influenced by Roemer, though he criticizes Roemer for not appreciating the distinction between labor power and labor. But I'll ask you a question: how do you understand the logic by which Marx discovered the distinction between labor power and labor or--to put it another way--that what Mr Moneybags pays for in what is indeed a fair exchange is labor power, not labor time itself? Or do you think said distinction is as superfluous as the so called labor theory of value? Or do you think Marx's understanding of that distinction has to be modified? > I think that Roemer's version loses a lot of the point of Marx's >socological analysis, which, as I say, can be maintained without >holding that labor creates all value Justin, Marx does not say that. He says that *abstract, general social* labor creates all value. Value as expressed in the exchange value of a commodity does not derive from the subjective or *personal* estimation of the toil and trouble involved in its production. Value does not derive from the useful qualities of the commodity that derive from the *concrete* labor that went into its making. The value of the commodity is not related to the time individual producers put into their making but rather the time socially necessary to reproduce that commodity. The value of a commodity is a represenation of some aliquot of the social labor time upon which divided in some form any and all societies depend. It is not personal, subjective and concrete labor time that is connected with the value of a commodity. These are very rough qualifications, but Marx spent a lot of time elucidating these qualifications--along with the monetary sides of value--that he thought escaped the classical economists who were thus at a loss to understand capitalism as historically specific form of social labor and the crises by which it was riven. >or that price is proportional to value understood as socially >necessary abstract labor time. Marx did not think price is proportional to value; contra Bohm Bawerk, he did not come around in vol 3 to implicitly recognizing the productivity of capital. Vol 3 was written before vol 1. I also find it puzzling--as did even Amartya Sen who is by no means a Marxist--that self proclaimed sympathetic critics would find value--abstract, general social labor time--of little descriptive interest in in itself merely because it is not a convenient way of calculating prices with given physical data. I can understand how Samuelson would embrace the redundancy charge and the eraser theorem but the alacrity with which academic sympathizers accepted such criticism is little short of astonishing, I must say. Or should we say socialists of the chair rather analytical Marxists? > >I will add that Jim and Chris B have cast amniadversions on the >reductionism of "classical" analytical Marxism, which has largely >been abandoned by its founders (Erik Olin Wright excepted, also Alan >Carling). But the points I am making do not require reductionism of >any sort. What remains of AM--and it does survive in places like the >journal Historical Materialism--is an emphasis on clarity, >precision, explicitness, and rigorous standardss of argument, along >with a totally unworshipful attitude towards traditional >formulations or classic texts. These are worth preserving. I thought Cohen's theory of history was a a more rigorous version of Plekhanov's classic texts? I must say that I found Brenner's criticism of Cohen rather persuasive. > >Because AM as a movement has evaporated, it is not worth beating up >on or defending. What is worth defending is what has always >mattered--intellectual honesty and care, I am not convinced that Marx was given a fair hearing. the pessimism of the mind that must accompany optimism of the will. > Leave fundamentalism to the religious. If there is a scientific >dimension to historical materialism, it will survive. Not necessarily because Marx's scientific theory threatens the ruling class. This is a science whose existence and (paradoxically) dissolution depends on the political victory of the working class. At any rate, I think this recent argument about crisis indicates how deeply Marx thought about micro foundations. In order for surplus value to be realized capitalists have to expand the scale of production but each capitalist does not do so in order to realize surplus value for the capitalist class as a whole but because hitherto such expansion in the scale of production has yielded for each capitalist growing masses of surplus value from a surfeit of which no capitalist has ever suffered. The expansion stops not when surplus value is not realized but when despite realization of surplus value it hadn't paid to expand--perhaps not enough was left over for the capitalists' own consumption. Investment demand falls off and the crisis then appears as overproduction in the market and is experienced as realization and financial crises. I have been proposing this simple idea. Jim is convinced that I do not understand his theory, and I admit that I am having a lot of problems understanding a theory in which greater purchasing power is the solution, though not 'the solution'; and in which the underconsumption undertow remains the source of pessimism even as the profit share diminishes because wages and employment at home and abroad are at their heights and consumption seems to be the only thing holding up; and most importantly imbalances break out seemingly because at some arbitrary point accumulation has become too imbalanced for imbalances to be overcome by the confidence of the business class??? Help!!! Rakesh
