On 5/27/2011 12:12 PM, Jim Devine wrote: > under Marx's law of value, what's wrong with the following? > > "Can’t machines produce surplus-Value? After all, capitalists hire or > rent machine-power (the use of a machinery during a specific period) > and can then use it to create machine services in production, more > than paying for the cost of hiring the machine-power. This creates > surplus-Value, right?" >
Machines do not produce value, therefore they do not produce surplus-value either. The above argument seems to confuse value and price. For Marx value comes before price. Value has nothing to do with the observation that a capitalists might hire machine-power for a price that is less than the price of the machine's output. All this tells us is that the hire price of the machine was not equal to the value of the machine. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
