On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 12:28 PM, Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote: > This kind of comment is so common that it's driving me crazy: what in > heck does it mean that Marx's so-called labor theory of value > "applies"? For some reason, the most respected academics think they > don't have to be clear about their definitions and meanings (or > thinking) when criticizing Marx. The usual (unstated) theory is that > the whole point of Marx's law of value (a more accurate phrase) is to > explain prices, so that it "applies" when price = value.
Why is "Law of Value" a more accurate phrase? Is it a physical law comparable to the Law of Gravitation or the Law of Evolution? All of this Marx exegesis and critiques and defenses of the Good Book seem a bit overdone to me. How is this more rewarding or even different from arguing about the Torah or the Quran or for that matter, the holiest book of the USA, the Constitution? I'd be *much* more interested in someone addressing what I think is the more potent and interesting comment from Brian's email: IOW the basic Marxist premise, the labor vs capital dialectic, is so > dramatically over-simplified as to be inherently inaccurate; it is a least > a trilectic of variables. Free market competitive economics is as badly > over-simplified in the opposite direction often even worse in that it > commonly becomes a uni-lectic, so to speak, since vendor competition is > only part of the value, itself, and nowhere ever the be all and end all. > They both ignore vital components that are vital to the consideration to > the point that neither one of them is actually capable of being applied, > unless so drastically modified as to be untrue to the original premise. > -raghu.
_______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
