[OPE-L:3271] Re: Re: Re: starting points

From: Duncan K. Foley (foleyd@cepa.newschool.edu)
Date: Fri May 19 2000 - 18:14:08 EDT


[ show plain text ]

Wicksell bases his critique of Marx's theory of money on the dependency of
"socially necessary labor time" on demand. He argues that it is not true
that "money comes to the market with a value and commodities with a price"
determined in production because of this point.

Duncan

>At 17:18 18/05/00 +0530, you wrote:
>>
>>____________________
>>Ajit:
>>
>>Marx's price theory is nothing but Sraffa's.
>
>
>I would agree, but perhaps the other way round, Sraffa was just formalising
>Marx's theory.
>
>I accept Ajits point about the ambiguity of Marx's definition of socially
>necessary labour time. There is a conceptual slide between a technical
>definition and a definiton based upon effective demand.
>
>For consistency the references to effective demand determining value
>should be dropped. One should stick to a technical definition defined in
>terms of the mean labour required to produce commodity X averaged over
>the firms currently producing it. One would calculate this by adding up
>the total number of X.s produced per week let this =n,
>let the number of workers employed
>directly and indirectly to produce these X.s be y, let the working week
>be w hours.
>then the value of an X is yw/n hours.
>
>No need to refer to demand conditions at all.

Duncan K. Foley
Leo Model Professor
Department of Economics
Graduate Faculty
New School University
65 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10003
(212)-229-5906
messages: (212)-229-5717
fax: (212)-229-5724
e-mail: foleyd@cepa.newschool.edu
alternate: foleyd@newschool.edu
webpage: http://cepa.newschool.edu/~foleyd



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed May 31 2000 - 00:00:10 EDT