Hi Paul Burkett, I am interested in the implications for environomental analysis of the use value side of Marx's theory. I have not read your book, and understand that you deal with such questions in detail. It would seem that attention only to value would obscure the problem. To be simple: Marx gives the example of how the quantity of the cotton once worked up a single spinner at a spinning wheel in a normal working day pales in comparison to the quantity of cotton worked up by a single spinner in a modern factory in a single working day, though the value of this worked up cotton may be the same in both cases! This seems to me a key example. For only once we realize that Marx's theory is a dialectic of use value and value--and I agree with Steve K about this though I would characterize the dialectic in a different manner but I do think Sweezy underestimates how important use value was to Marx--do we have the basis for an analysis of capitalism in terms of resource intensiveness. In a recent post I made a point about how important both the value magnitude and use value or physical quantity magnitude of the surplus is. In order to understand the resource demands of capitalism, isn't the value of the surplus, i.e, the unpaid living labor time embodied therein, less important than physical quantity of the surplus, i.e., its use value side? For example, let's say the laboring population is fixed. The surplus value produced by this fixed laboring population could be relatively constant compared to the magnitude of the surplus in use value terms. Didn't Marx criticize Ricardo for focus on the magnitude of the surplus only in value terms (Ricardo is only interested in net revenue) to the exclusion of attention on the total size of the economy in physical terms and the size of the surplus in use value terms? It would seem to me then that value analysis is an obstacle to environmental analysis but Marx's theory is based on a dialectic of value and use value. Comradely, Rakesh
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