Response to Jim's recent 4-parter: Now there's a surprise, Jim and I continue to disagree on the social logic of exploitation. That's OK: we all know that PEN-L is good at eliciting ideas and positions but ill- suited for resolving issues or disagreements. So be it. Just some comments about certain of Jim's characterizations, lest PEN'rs be left with false impressions. He starts off the first post: 1) "Here we go again! For any and all bored by Roemerian economics and its follies..." Nothing I said depended on Roemer's work, although the latter provides illustrations for certain of my comments about what Marx wrote. And "we" haven't gone anywhere "again"; although the discussion relates to earlier ones on PEN-L, it reiterates nothing, since the ground is now Marx in Vol. III rather than Marx in Vol. I. 2) "More importantly, I also don't know where Gil got this "strict sense" [of exploitation] from (Roemer?)." No, from Jim. Roemer uses a less strict sense of exploitation. And since all of my arguments were cast in terms of Jim's sense of the term, it is untrue that "one of the major sources of disagreement between Gil and I has been the fact that we have different definitions of exploitation." 3) "But for Gil, it seems that the issue of the production of a surplus-product is a non-question." Utter nonsense, as any careful reading of my posts will reveal. For example, every quote from Marx I gave indicated that the return to the indicated circuit of capital or ground rent came from surplus labor, i.e, surplus product. 4) "Gil seems to mistake me for a member of the 'orthodox', 'fundamentalist' or 'Talmudic' school [of Marxism]. No, I don't. In fact I quite appreciate Jim's unique take on, and development of, Marxian themes. I made quite clear what the grounds of my criticism were: Jim's claim that his representation is "consistent with" but "goes beyond" Marx. I showed that his position is in fact not consistent with Marx, something Jim implicitly concedes when he suggests, repeatedly, that Marx was "wrong". Note he did not say this in his original post. Let's cut to the chase. The essential basis for our continuing disagreement is Jim's assertion that primary exploitation cannot be attained via circuits of exchange which do not presuppose some form of subsumption. I've shown that Marx *repeatedly* said just the opposite. Whether or not Marx provided consistent "foundations" for this position contrary to Jim's, I've indicated several passages where Marx at least implicitly affirms a position close to Roemer's: that class monopolization of a relatively scarce productive asset is generically sufficient (at least in "pre-capitalist" times) to support exploitation in Jim's sense. Roemer's work shows how this might be true. [Thus Jim at least begs a question when he says that this view "isn't part of a coherent marxian theory of exploitation." Sure it is. By the way, I've defended Roemer's analysis against Jim's and others' criticisms in an upcoming Econ & Phil paper, but that's a separate debate.] Against these textual and analytical defenses, what do we have? 1) Marx's Vol. I, Ch. 5 argument, which is logically incoherent. 2) A number of arguments raised by Jim which point to the strategic, rather than value-theoretic, implications of the labor- labor power distinction. These are certainly relevant to the *rate* of exploitation, but nobody anywhere has demonstrated that they render subsumption necessary for the *existence* of exploitation. Instead we have, again, Jim's assertions. In particular, Jim's notion of "Macro" subsumption is never demonstrated to have the properties Jim ascribes to it. A demonstration is certainly called for, because Jim is insisting that subsumption of labor is *necessary* for primary exploitation, which is a very strong claim. Gil Skillman
