In response to Ricardo's quotes from Marx, I had written: >> but labor still plays a role. Who repairs and programs the machines? Isn't supervision a kind of labor?<< Ricardo Duchesne replies: >That's right. The question then is: if this is the only role labor is playing, how can we continue to hold the ltv? The only way out is to say that science and techonology represent past embodied labor...< isn't the repair and programming of machines a kind of labor that is actively leading to the creation of commodities? It isn't that different from running a 19th century spinning machine (the kind of thing Marx wrote about). And of course science and technology can take the form of "embodied" labor when they involve equipment, robots, etc. In response to another quote from Marx, I wrote: >> This is very much Marx: capitalism tries to abolish the role of labor in producing value and surplus-value. But it can't do so. So there is crisis. Absent the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by something else, however, value dominates, i.e., labor remains the source of societal wealth...<< Ricardo responds:>You are moving into Marx's theory of crisis, which is a different issue.< I don't think it's a different issue. In old Chuck's presentation of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, for example, the minimization of the role of the value- and surplus-value-creating commodity (labor-power) is crucial to the actual fall in the rate of profit, which he sees as bad for capitalism even if it's not explicitly part of his (confused and incomplete) crisis theory. I'm not saying I agree with Marx's theory of the falling profit rate, but the point is that crisis theory is _relevant_. It cannot be dismissed. (This is always true for Marx: the various components of his thought cannot be compartmentalized; each is relevant to all the others. Cf. Ollman's ALIENATION book.) Also, the "crisis theory" I sketched suggested that capitalism's dynamics undermines the incentive to mechanize all the way. in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ. 7900 Loyola Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90045-8410 USA 310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950 "The only trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They're too damned greedy." -- Herbert Hoover
