Walt wrote: >>>OK. Your reasoning is that in Marx, the value of a good is the labor socially necessary to reproduce it. So, the amount of labor socially necessary to reproduce a given act of concrete labor is the laborer's labor power. Am I right? ... <<<
me:
> I can't speak for Gil, but "a given act of concrete labor" isn't on > the market -- it's not a commodity -- and thus doesn't have a value at > all in the Marxian system. It's the labor-power which has a value.
Gil wrote:
Yeah, Jim, but that assumes some sort of incomplete contracting situation so that capitalists can't contract for specific labor services.
no, it doesn't assume that at all. It only assumes that if one starts from the theoretical benchmark of Walrasian-style economics (with complete contracts, perfect info, etc., etc.) But we don't have to start that way (and that idealist method). I think it's reasonable to start with the real (empirical) world as one's theoretical benchmark, even though that world is at best incompletely known. In the real world, it is normal if not ubiquitous for contracts to be incomplete. Imperfect and asymmetric information are normal, not exceptions to be considered in special articles. Given this approach, it's necessary for one to say "assume that contracts are complete" in order to create with the Debreu-style utopias that have been so influential in NC-type economics for so long. It's a serious problem with the Debreuvian school that they don't do so, i.e., that they don't make their assumptions explicit vis-a-vis the real world. Gil: > But I
take Walt's point to be: what if they can, as in the case where firms engage outside contractors to perform specific tasks, and pay them if and only if those specific tasks are performed? In that case, what would be the value of the services thus transacted? That said, I agree with you it isn't the *labor* that's transacted for, even in this case--it's the concrete labor service, i.e. the thing *accomplished* by the labor. But Walt's question still arises with this amendment.
In that case, we're not talking about a pure capitalist/proletarian relationship. Instead, we're talking about either simple commodity production (by independent contractors) or a "gray area" between capitalist/proletarian employment relations and simple commodity production, a mixture of these two types of social relationships. Gray areas are important: the empirical world often deviates from abstract theory, being instead overdetermined. For example, before capitalist subjection (a.k.a. domination or subsumption) of labor applied generally, there was "proto-subsumption," which represented a mixture of usurer's and merchant's capital on the one hand and precapitalist methods of subsumption on the other. (I deliberately have not read Paul's comment, since I wanted to limit the information I have to work with in my reply. Sorry if it leads to redundancy, repetition, or pleonasm.) -- Jim Devine / "Socialist democracy is not a luxury but an absolute, essential necessity for overthrowing capitalism and building socialism." -- Ernest Mandel
