raghu wrote: > 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?
Better Marx scholars than I (e.g., Paul Zarembka) point out Marx used this term, except when he referred to others' work (e.g., that of Ricardo). I see this "law" as more like the "law of demand and supply" than the law of gravitation. Like S&D, it's more of an heuristic for understanding the real world than a set of empirical generalizations that always work. (I've never heart the theory of evolution called a "law," but I guess it is one of those. I don't get the point of capitalizing "Law.") > 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... I don't like exegeses either. CAPITAL isn't a Good Book like the Bible. It's a book presenting a specific theory of how capitalist society (and commodity production in general) operates, its "laws of motion." One might call it "scientific" in the social-science (soft) sense of the word. That means that it can be wrong. Good Books, by definition, are never wrong. Because I don't like exegeses, I present only my interpretation. Though my interpretation is based on reading and discussing CAPITAL (and various interpretations and debates), its key basis is not textual quotation but instead that it makes this very long and hard-to-understand book understandable to me. I do quote Marx on occasion, but it's only because some quotes are so apt. > I'd be *much* more interested in someone addressing what I think is the more > potent and interesting comment from Brian's email: Of course, I was presenting what I thought would be interesting to Brian. And I didn't have the patience to read all of the stuff that Brian forwarded. >> IOW [in other words?] 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. << I guess this person is saying that Marx sees so-called "free market competitive economics" as unrelentingly bad, presenting the mirror image of the Chicago-school view that free markets and competition are by nature totally good. FWIW, Marx doesn't present a critique of "free market competition" of that sort. In volume I, he assumes that product and labor-power markets fit the 19th century liberal political economists' conceptions (perfect enough competition). He ignores the standard criticisms of the Chicago school by more sophisticated modern economists (externalities, imperfect information, etc.) He concludes that _despite the assumed perfection of markets_, the structurally-based inequality between the two main classes involves exploitation of workers by the capitalists. That's at a very abstract level in volume 1, but he moves toward the real world in later volumes, including ones (like his book on Wage Labor) that he never started. In any event, my point is to learn from Marx rather than to be restricted by his thought. For example, I think that Marx's theory of exploitation can be added to a more sophisticated (non-Chicago) understanding of markets without any loss. I don't understand what's meant by >> since vendor competition is only part of the value, itself, and nowhere ever the be all and end all. << >>They [Marx and free-marketeers?] 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.<< He seems to be criticizing Marx for being abstract. Since Marx himself believed that abstraction was only the starting point, that's missing a lot. People can apply Marx's theories on a more concrete level (and have done so). -- Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, at the very least you should know the nature of that evil. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
