At 11:15 27/03/01 -0800, you wrote:
Steve Keen:
> understanding this crisis involves an
>appreciation of the role of credit money and debt, and this requires a
>non-commodity theory of money which is antithetic to the commodity approach
>to money derived from a labour theory of value.
What on earth is the problem about understanding the role of "credit money
and debt" in the present crisis from the point of view of the labour theory
of value (to be more correct the Marxist law of value)?
There is a global surplus of capital. It is unable to continue accumulating
surplus value at the same rate and it comes up against the limited
purchasing power of the masses - all on a global scale. Unless they can
exploit new markets, sizable sections of capital will have to be destoyed,
and that unfortunately will include living labour alongside dead labour.
One of Steve Keen's strengths was and probably still is, from Barkley's
comments, that he argues the similarity of Marx's description of a crisis
to a limit cycle, and he is alert and creative to the application of
non-linear dynamics to economic affairs.
Nevertheless titles by him such as "the Demise of the Labour Theory of
Value" do not make him compatible with Marxism, because unfortunately his
point is not that Marx had conceptualised a "law of value" rather than
limiting himself to a classical labour theory of value.
Steve Keen specifically denies that labour is the only source of exchange
value, and therefore of surplus value. That is what is not marxist about
his thinking. He believes Marx made a simple logical blunder at key points
in volume 1 of Capital.
What he thinks is the strange attractor around which the limit cycle
circulates I cannot remember, but he is as dogmatic as he claims his
opponents to be, in saying that whatever it is it cannot be exchange value
based on the law of value.
Chris Burford
London
