>>>>Why? The question is, what work does this alleged quantity do? >>> >>>Are you saying social labor time is alleged quantity like centaurs? >>>Or are you asking me what does labor in fact do? >>> >> >>No, the quantity exists, but so does the quantity that consists of >>the average ifference between the heights of all red haired malew >>orkers and all blue eyed women bosses. The latter quantity is not >>theoretically interesting. > >so social labor time would be so trivial to whom exactly?
A reasonable objection. Actually I don't think it's uninteresting, but I don't think the way it gets deployed in Capital is ultimately useful or necessary. I do think that it plays an important role, but not an exclusive one, in explaining the dynamics of market economies; Marx treated the centarlity of value so understood as definitional. I think this use is undermined not only by the fact that (as ANrx acknowledges) this is a very extreme idealization useful for a particular purpose at best, but more importantly by the fact that you can do what needs to be done without it, and sticking to the definition leads you into the sterile debates about how toi save theexclusivity and centrality of value that have haunted Marxisn political economy ever since. > >> It does no real theoretical work. . > >Of course value and value form do real theoretical work by > > >(1) keeping our focus on social, cooperative labor and its >specifically bourgeois form; But do we need the LTV for this purpose? I don't deny that at certain level of abstraction it's a useful hueristic. Butif you want to point out that there's exploitation going on. you don't need the LTV to do this, > > >(2)giving descriptive focus to the laboring activity of the working >class and the class relation of who labors for whom (who but a >technocrat would care that it may be more convenient for him to >calculate prices and profit rates from the technical conditions >alone, and even if this is possible, it does not mean that it is not >meaningful to say that so called equilibrium prices and profit rates >are not determined by labor simply because the use of labor >magnitudes may not be needed to *calculate* them given available >technical data, but what or who other than labor--Shaikh has >asked--has determined and put in place the supposedly given technical >conditions which allow for the direct calculation of prices and >profits? This is a big sentence and I am not sure I understand it. Sure, labor creates the technical conditions. Sure, whatever useful things trade as commodities are created by labor. Is your point, though, that we don't want to say that capital is productive? This point can be made without the LTV: David Schweickart (who tells me he believes in the LTV) shows one very effective way in the first chapter of Against Capital, pointing out that capital is jsut a relation of ownership,a nd owning something doesn't make it priductive. After all, Marx's critique of the political economy is not >meant for technocrats working in linear programming or businessmen >interested in the movement of prices but for a revolutionary working >class which in resisting this social order needs to understand it and >its place in it); Yes, so the point is that there's exploitation going ona nd we don't need capitalists. These points can be made very powerfully and effectively without the LTV. > >(3) by revealing the contradiction or inverse movement of use value >and unit value which is the key to Marx's dynamics; and > This is too compressed for me. > >(4)by allowing for the development of a theory of money which >overcomes an apparent syllogistic fallacy such as all commodities >potentially *have* value; money is (or was) a commodity; commodity >money does not have but *is* itself value. > > Money must thus be at once both a kind of and not a kind of commodity. > >Marx tries to explain how this paradox arises out of the >contradiction within the commodity between use value and *value*. > >Whatever the hell money is (or was in Marx's time) it is (or was) >neither the standard commodity nor a numeraire plain and simple. > Well, I haven't thought as much about money (that way) as I should have. jks _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
