Jonathan Nitzan says he and Bichler "do not treat risk as an 'objective' category" rather, they assume that "investors... behave as if the objective probability distribution of outcomes exists and is knowable." By the same token, even if we agree with N&B that "commodities do NOT have a definite quantity of abstract labour," what is to stop us from analytically assuming that capitalists and/or workers behave "as if" there is one commodity -- "labour power" -- that DOES contain a definite quantity of abstract labour? (I think we can safely set aside all those other commodities, whether items of consumption or capital goods, as way stations on the road to the exchange of dead labour power for living labour power.)
It thus seems to me that N&B are opting for a different transformation problem: uncertainty to risk rather than value to price. It may well be that in some limited circumstances the reduction of uncertainty to risk generates useful insights that a similar reduction of value to price wouldn't. But it also seems that operation is more in the order of a simplification than it is a "more realistic" framework. And it is a simplification that quickly loses its simplicity when we move from a subjective (investor confidence) to an inter-subjective (class struggle) construction of reality. What would happen, for example, if we were to say that "value," in particular the value of labour power, is the reciprocal reduction -- by capitalists and workers respectively -- of qualitative uncertainties (about human needs and capacities) to quantifiable risks? Don't those two non-identical, subjective estimates of risk together reconstitute an uncertainty and thus cancel out their provisional "as if" plausibility? In other words, it is only when capitalist power remains substantially unchallenged that the "will" of the capitalist to assign a probability distribution of outcomes can be evaluated in an equation "as if" it were their power to do so. But, then, what about "the limits of that power and the character of those limits." (K.M. "Wages, Price and Profit") The Sandwichman ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
