Yoshie: I agree with Rakesh. One of the points of thinking in terms of value is, I think, to overcome the limit of economism. That is, thinking in terms of prices & wages alone can only tell us how one segment of workers fare in comparison to others, as well as whether the purchasing power of individual workers _as consumers_ is going up or down. Thought in terms of prices & wages, lower wages for other segments of workers may seem good to you, as they allow your segment to command more products & services created by them. Thought in terms of value, however, lower wages for other segments of workers essentially cheapen the value of your segment's labor power. Thus, even though your real wages as well as nominal wages are going up, you may be still losing out to the class that exploit you. Thought only in terms of wages & prices (terms of market competition), there is no objective basis for solidarity across barriers (occupational categories, national borders, productive vs. unproductive labor, races, genders, etc.) that separate different segments of workers, but thinking in terms of value allows us to discover the objective basis.
Karl: Yes. This is precisely the problem with the radical left on the Argentinian crisis. They confine politics to the limits of price and wages. Instead transcending those bourgeois limits to the real limits that entail critique they steadfastly confine themselves to the level of reformism which reflects itself in their vulgar political economy: more wages and more money. Value relations is the only basis for critique of capitalism. Value relations is the theoretical basis for revolutionary communist programmatic action --not prices and wages. Regards Karl Carlile (Communist Global Group) Be free to join our communism mailing list at http://homepage.eircom.net/~kampf/
