> >Would one of those important and true insights be that the value >contributed by labor power to the product of labor power exceeds the >value paid to labor by capital for its contribution? > I had said:> > > >It's analytical Marxist. Most AMs, like me, do not believe that Marx's >value >theory is more than a heuristic, and think that the important and true >insights in Marx can be stated without the labor theory of value. > >jks >
I have defended that formulation in What's Wrong with Exploitation?, Nous 1995, availabkle on the net in the old marxism spoons archive. However, I argued that it did not require the labor theory of value in Marx's canonical formulation to state it. More generally, the point is that capitalism is exploitative, a point that _can_ be put without reference to any theory of value at all--Roemer has an argument to this effect. I think that Roemer's version loses a lot of the point of Marx's socological analysis, which, as I say, can be maintained without holding that labor creates all value or that price is proportional to value understood as socially necessary abstract labor time. I will add that Jim and Chris B have cast amniadversions on the reductionism of "classical" analytical Marxism, which has largely been abandoned by its founders (Erik Olin Wright excepted, also Alan Carling). But the points I am making do not require reductionism of any sort. What remains of AM--and it does survive in places like the journal Historical Materialism--is an emphasis on clarity, precision, explicitness, and rigorous standardss of argument, along with a totally unworshipful attitude towards traditional formulations or classic texts. These are worth preserving. Because AM as a movement has evaporated, it is not worth beating up on or defending. What is worth defending is what has always mattered--intellectual honesty and care, the pessimism of the mind that must accompany optimism of the will. Leave fundamentalism to the religious. If there is a scientific dimension to historical materialism, it will survive. But it requires a skeptical temperment. jks _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx
