>R, I think we have reached the point of diminishing marginal >returns. I agree with Fred Guy: the work on the LTV for a century >has been a desperate, inward-turning attempt tos how that it can be >made coherent in the face of increasing masses of fatal objections, >and it's not doing real work. It's at most a heuristic for--and not >exaplantrion of--the importsnt points you make, that commodities are >the products of labor, and that any society has to make large scale >decsiions about hwo to divide up its socially necessary labor. But I >think we have a stand off here, and probably should move on. jks
Justin, you expect us to move on after you characterize my attempts as inward turning--this is exactly what the Marxian law of value is not! And these are not the points I am after, as should be clear to you after years of debate. There is a willful ignorance on your part that is disturbing to say the least. You are trivializing what the law of value is meant to explain so that you can walk away from it without loss. This is in fact dishonest. And please do not use the hot and heavy rhetoric unless you can explicitly name the fatal objection. We were dealing with the redundancy charge which even if true is not by any means a fatal objection, for all it shows in itself is that calculation by value is inconvenient and derivative. Even Sen doesn't think much of the charge on which you seem focused. You have yourself killed no thing in this discussion. Or do you really think GA Cohen's piece on the labor theory of value is definitive? Moreover, note that I raised the question whether and how any theory other than labor value makes sense of moral depreciation and the paradoxes to which it gives rise. You give no reply. And we need to be clear yet another thing. Freudianism and Marxism would clearly be falsifiable if people were not to act irrationally and capitalist development were to crisis free, respectively. As Grossmann demonstrated, the law of value finds its confirmation not only in the recurrence of general, protracted crises but in its accurate prediction of (and specification of) the kinds of techno-organizational changes that are needed by both individual capitals and the capitalist class-as-a-whole for an exit from crises of a general and protracted type. The law of value which was applied by Mattick Sr to the accumulation of fictitious capital in the form of govt debt was confirmed by mixed economy going up in stagflationary ashes and by the limits of Keynesian intervention since then. The law of value is not confirmed at the level of exchange ratios but rather more like the law of gravity is confirmed when a house falls on one's head. Rakesh
