> >A reasonable objection. Actually I don't think it's uninteresting, >but I don't think the way it gets deployed in Capital is ultimately >useful or necessary. I do think that it plays an important role, but >not an exclusive one, in explaining the dynamics of market >economies; Marx treated the centarlity of value so understood as >definitional. I think this use is undermined not only by the fact >that (as ANrx acknowledges) this is a very extreme idealization >useful for a particular purpose at best, but more importantly by the >fact that you can do what needs to be done without it, and sticking >to the definition leads you into the sterile debates about how toi >save theexclusivity and centrality of value that have haunted >Marxisn political economy ever since.
Justin, Let me leave aside problems with this alternative neo Ricardian method, e.g., it assumes no qualitative differences between output and inputs and no adverse natural shock to gross output (bad harvest) so that the assumption of input prices=output prices can be safely made and the number of equations thereby reduced to the number of unknowns, though this puts the whole system in the straightjacket of inherently static linear equations as John Ernst, Alan Freeman, Paolo Giusanni have argued. But let's leave that aside, and let us say that we can work from the data of physical production and the real wage. Now we are told that it is possible to calculate an equilibrium profit rate and a equilibrium, uniform profit rate from that data alone without making mention, much less giving centrality, to labor value. And in carrying out these calculations we will find that (a)the concept of the productivity of capital is incoherent, thereby fatally undermining the justification of non labor income and (b)that the system cannot be solved and closed unless the class struggle over income distribution is determined exogeneously--that is, through political struggle. While the gains of Marxist theory are thereby preserved, the advantages of doing without labor value are presumably (i) anti metaphysical--no reference to labor value that cannot be seen underneath prices and physical production data (though the idea that social labor time is meta-physical would surely not occur to those who engage in it) (ii) parsimony--why needlessly multiply the number of entities used in a theory (iii) anti obscurantism--ability to move beyond presumably obscrurantist defenses of Marx's transformation procedure which is indeed hopelessly flawed except in the most bizarre cases--identical compositions for all all capitals, the economy is on the von Neumann ray, etc. In short, the theory of labor value is excess baggage which the working class can no longer afford to carry. Now let us say that we can calculate prices and profits from data of physical production alone. But again I think you are mixing up calculation with determination. Let me requote Shaikh since you may have missed this passage in the barrage of criticism that you have received: "Notice how often the word 'determines' crops up: the physical production data *determine* values, and in conjunction with the real wage, also *determine* prices of production. but what determiens the physical production data. In Marx, the answer is clear : it is the labor process. It is human productive activity, the actual performance of labour, that transforms 'inputs' into 'outputs', and it is only when labor is sucessful at all that we have any 'physical production data' at all. Moreover, if the labour process is a process of producing commodities, then it one in which value is materialized in the form of use values. Thus both 'inputs' and 'outputs' are the use forms of materialized value, and we can they say that in the *real* process it is values that determine the physical production data...The physical *data* are then a conceptual summary of the real determination, and if we then use the data to conceptually *calculate* values, we only capture in thought their real magnitudes. Such a calculation no more determines these values than does the calculation of the mass of the earth determine determine either the earth or its mass. It merely recognizes what already exists. This is a fundamental point in a a materialist view of the world, and the 80 year failure of the neo Ricardians to distinguish real and conceputal determination reveals their long attachment to the idealist method" p. 280-1 the Value Controversy, ed. Steedman. This may now turn out at all, but this reminds me a bit of the argument between Pearsonians and Mendelians. Pearson after all thought that he could develop a purely descriptive/phenomenalist theory of heredity by making linking the character of an individual through regression equations to the average character of each ancestral generation. Once the coefficients had been empirically established, a Pearson could calculate the characteristics of progeny simply on the basis of data of ancestral heredity. But as post Mendelians we know Pearson was wrong to assume a child does not inherit from his parents alone but from a whole series of ancestors in his lineage. What happened to the progeny did not depend on what happened to the ancestors of its parents, but only on the genetic make up of its parents. We now know that the pedigrees had nothing to tell us about the nature of heredity: they were in fact only tools for inferring the genetic structure of individuals. Similarly I am saying that the physical production data do not themselves determine the profit rate, though they can be used to calculate it. What that data are good for is that they are a tool for inferring what is hidden by the fetishistic price form in and through which labor value is (mis-)represented, viz. the surplus labor time that the working class had to put at the disposal of the capitalist class for it is this time that is in fact the source of and the determinant of profits and indeed all non wage income. Why do we need references to genes when we can quantitatively link generations with data of ancentral heredity? Why do we need labor value when we can calculate the profit rate with data of physical production alone? In short, the answer is the realist one: it is genes that in fact determine the pattern of heredity; it is the surplus social labor time performed by the working class that determines the mass of surplus value and the rate of profit. It is in the interests of realistically grasping the actual process that our theories should refer to genes and labor value. Justin, I would think then that your commitment to realism (at least at levels above the subatomic one) would have you argue in favor the theory of labor value? Rakesh
