I would dispute that one could construct a land theory of value.
Barkley says that << Primaryness ultimately resides in land
( and more generally the biosphere/ecosystem). >>
You slide here from land to the biosphere. This is significant.
It is clear that the existence of biosphere is a precondition for
the existence of human life. But the precondition for the existence
of the biosphere is solar radiation, which in turn presuposes
nuclear fusion, which in turn presupposes the laws of physics.
Whilst such reductions are obviously true, they get us not one
jot closer to a theory of value.
The starting point, land, has a certain economic plausibilty formula,
appearing as it does in the trinity formula Land, Labour, Capital
but here we have a conflation of things with social forms of
revenue rent, wages and interest. Land only has economic significance
to the extent that it is monopolised and not the land itself but
its owners then enter into social relations.
But the source of the income of the landowner is adequately explained
by Ricardos theory of rent which in turn presupposes his labour
theory of value : " rents are high because corn is dear rather than
corn being dear because rents are high". How then does Barkley
propose to construct a land theory of value?
As to an energetic theory of value, this is impossible since any
attempt to solve the input output equations to express the values
of commodities in terms of one of the produced commodities in the
system always yields a zero solution for all values. If we took
electricity as our standard, we could at a first level of approximation
express all goods in terms of the Kwh required to make them
directly. But if we then pursued this to a second iteration, by
including the Kwh that went into their ingredients, we would hit
the contradiction that one Kwh of electricity has an electricity
value of less than 1 Kwh. Thus on each successive iteration of
our evaluation we would obtain a lower value for all commodities,
the whole being a convergent series that converges on 0 electricity
content for all commodities.
The labour theory of value turns out to be a lot more subtle than
you first think.
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Paul Cockshott , WPS, PO Box 1125, Glasgow, G44 5UF
Phone: 041 637 2927 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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