Yeah, we post-Sraffans always get this from believers in the LTV: "It's too deep you
someone with your analytical equipment to understand." No doubt. but HK have a
sympathetic thoughvery critical treatment of what is living and dead in the TLV in
their The Political Economy of Marx, 2d ed. They argue taht it fails as a
quantitative theory of price or an account of crisis, but is valuable as qualitative
way of indicating that capiatlism is exploitative. However, that way of accepting the
LTV means giving up talk of "value magnitudes" and that sort of thing. In fact, one
might almost just as well say that capitalism is exploitative and leave it at that. I
have argued why you might want to say a bit more in a paper on What's Wrong with
Exploitation? Nous 1995. --jks
In a message dated Fri, 22 Sep 2000 11:51:40 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Jim Devine
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
[Re: [PEN-L:2154] Re: Re: Re: a profound comment on the "transformation
problem"]
I wrote:
His main point seems to be a relatively common-sense explanation of
the "solution" to the "transformation problem" that Fred Moseley
advocates. See the latter's article in the current _Review of Radical
Political Economics_ or in the book he edited, _Marx's Method in
Capital_. It's a very simple solution, basically saying that there's no
problem at all, since prices and values normally differ, but total prices
= total value, while total property income = total surplus-value.
Justin responds:
For a crisp demolition of this "solution," see M.C. Howard and J.E. King, A
History of Marxian Economics, vol II., pp. 276-80. --jks
I don't want to get into a debate on this issue, but my impression from
reading (and writing book reviews of ) both volumes of that book is that
Howard and King do not understand the "labor theory of value" at all. They
implicitly assume that Marx was simply presenting a gloss on Ricardo (as
Paul Samuelson, Ian Steedman, Jon Elster, and many others do). That is,
they assume that the bear that Marx was hunting for was some sort of theory
of prices, as with Ricardo's 98 percent labor theory of prices. They don't
even ask what the purpose of Marx's work was here! (This is partly due to
the way that many of Marx's followers often use the phrases "labor theory
of value" or "law of value" without defining what they mean.)
Since I reject their assumption that Marx was a minor post-Ricardian on
these issues, I find their analysis to be basically irrelevant (though
they're entitled to their point of view).
However, their survey of the literature is valuable. (It's a dirty job and
someone's got to do it. I especially liked their stuff on little-known
Marxian political economists.)
However2, heir summary of the rational core of Marxian political economy at
the end of volume II is a little sad (p. 394). It's dealing with:
(1) the inescapable class nature of capitalist society;
(2) the problems of reproducing that society over time;
(3) the contradictions of the system (which seems to be a restatement of
#2); and
(4) the concept of uneven development.
To their credit, though they don't say so, this list excludes
Ricardo-Sraffa (neo-Ricardian) economics from Marxian political economy,
since R-S economics simply assumes away problems of reproduction and issues
of uneven development while allowing others to plumb the depths of the
class nature of society. (R-S takes the latter for granted.) Often,
Sraffians such as Steedman simply assume away Marx's post-Ricardian
innovations, like the distinction between labor and labor-power, to assume
that "labor values" are technically-fixed coefficients.
The problem, of course, is that there's much more to Marxian political
economy than this list. (I think that others can think of additions to the
list.) Some of these elements overlap with Keynesian economics, R-S
economics, institutionalism, and even neoclassical economics, but what
characterizes Marxian economics is that these elements are unified as part
of a mutually-interacting totality. (As Lukacs pointed out, the concept of
the totality is central to Marxian method.) It's true that Marx never
finished the job of showing how this totality fits together in a coherent
way, but that's one of the main jobs of Marxian political economy. (Might
not it be boring if Marx had finished the job?)
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
