Time to try to answer some of Barkley Rosser's questions.
1. There were two main aspects of my postings on the LTV, relating
respectively to the formation of prices in capitalist economies and to
the issue of rational costing in a planned economy. In my last posting
(part 12) I argued that these questions were at least loosely
connected; nonetheless they are analytically separable. Barkley's
questions seem to pertain primarily to the second question; at any rate,
I shall answer them in that light.
2. Barkley raises two concerns, regarding (1) the putative
*uniqueness* or special privilege of the LTV among X-content
theories of value, and (2) the *adequacy* of the LTV for a rational
costing. Basically, he seems to reckon that the LTV is neither unique
nor adequate. I shall deal with these points in turn.
3. Uniqueness: Barkley is right to say that in principle any Sraffian
"basic," X, may be selected as the base for an X-content theory of
value; but as I remarked in LTV defense, part 12, there are two
further requirements on non-labor X if the resulting XTV is to be at all
meaningful, let alone genuinely relevant. X must *not* be prodicible
using only labor and natural materials that are for practical purposes
inexhaustible; and X must be treatable as homogeneous, as a tolerable
approximation. Question to Barkley: Would he dispute that?
4. On a couple of occasions, Barkley has floated "land" as a suitable
X. But what does he mean by "land"? I presume he doesn't mean
literally floor-space on the planet, so to speak, but is using "land" in
the generic sense to refer to non-reproducible natural resources (?).
But in that case, land clearly fails the homogeneity requirement: it has
no natural units. The embodied "land"-content of a certain commodity
might be say (x bauxite, y uranium, z crude oil, p iron ore, q
germanium, ...). How are these elements supposed to be added up?
In terms of their mass, their volume, or what?
5. Barkley has said that labor too is heterogeneous. Well, yes it is;
but at an intuitive level, adding up hours of human labor-time seems
much more meaningful than adding up kilograms or cubic meters of
oil, iron ore, uranium, etc. How may this intuition be supported?
Labor is the supremely flexible resource. With the exception of
certain talents that require an extraordinary genetic endowment,
people can be taught to do almost anything (but try to teach a
Norwegian hillside to grow olive trees, or germanium to power a jet
engine). And this means that while specific labors do differ in their
particular skills, these particularities can, for the most part, be "cashed
out" or reduced in terms of further labor inputs (i.e. the labor-time
involved in education and training). I think that Bob Rowthorn has
written on this point; Paul Cockshott and I certainly address it in our
book on socialism. As a secondary point, given the highly complex
division of labor that characterizes a modern economy, most goods
are likely to contain (directly or indirectly) quite a thorough mixture of
different sorts of specific labors.
6. In light of the above, I don't see that Barkley has seriously
damaged the uniqueness claim I made on behalf of the LTV. It would
take very special circumstances (where a *specific* natural resource,
homogeneous to a tolerable approximation, is definitely the limiting
factor on production, economy-wide) to make a non-labor XTV a
serious competitor to the LTV.
7. I now turn to the question of *adequacy*. Here I would second
what Paul C. has already said. No scalar X-content figure can be
expected to give a fully adequate representation of the cost of
producing a given good (not even if X is labor) -- but then, *neither
can any other scalar one chooses to attach to the good*, be it a
Sraffian price or an actual market price. The claim on behalf of the
LTV is that labor-content (a) accounts for most of the bits carried by
actual prices in capitalist economies, and (b) provides an
indispensable basis for rational costing in a planned system. Focussing
on the second of these points, we would readily agree that labor-
content, while an indispensable basis, is not enough. A calculus of
labor-time must be supplemented by other decision criteria. But how?
8. Take Barkley's example of over-fishing leading to the destruction
of fish populations. Suppose the marine biologists are able to tell us
the maximum annual tonnage of catch consistent with the continued
reproduction of the fish population. This should then be a
*parameter* for the planning of fisheries. Other things equal, one
wants to use the fishing method that minimizes the total labor-time
required per tonne of catch; but if something about that method will
lead to the destruction of fish stocks, it is out of bounds. The
requirements of environmental stewardship properly override the
labor-time calculus.
9. More generally, consider the moves towards environmental
protection in advanced capitalist economies. Are these an *effect* of
the working of the price system? Of course not. The banning of
CFCs, the mandating of lead-free gasoline, the limitation of sulfur
dioxide emissions, and so on, are accomplished by governmental
regulation, in response to pressures from the general population or the
environmentalist lobby or the scientific community. In a democratic
socialist economy, the same pressures would operate. Just as the
imperatives of profit-maximization are (sometimes) overriden by
environmental/conservationist concerns under capitalism, so may the
application of a labor-time calculus, in a planned system, be
constrained by the same concerns. Paul and I have argued in our
book that it is a mystification to suppose that environmental issues,
involving non-reproducible resources, can be "factored into" a scalar
representation of cost: they must, if people regard them as important,
be imposed as external constraints on narrowly "economic"
calculation.
==========================
Allin Cottrell
Department of Economics
Wake Forest University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(910) 759-5762
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