[OPE-L:3479] Re: "Debunking Economics" and Marx's value theory

From: Paul Zarembka (zarembka@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU)
Date: Sun Jun 11 2000 - 08:09:35 EDT


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Steve, How do your citations compare to the careful reconstruction by
Lapides, *Marx's Wage Theory in Historical Perspective: Its Origins,
Development and Interpretations*, 1998? Does minimum wage mean for you
biological subsistence? Paul Z.

***********************************************************************
Paul Zarembka, supporting RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY
******************** http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka

"Steve Keen" <stevekeen10@hotmail.com> said, on 06/11/00:

>I argue that Marx clearly and properly
>equates to the value of the means of subsistence--is not the actual wage,
> but the minimum wage. I have cited these references numerous times
>before on OPE (has anyone ever read them, I wonder??), but here we go
>again:

>"The natural price of labour is nothing but the minimum wage." (*The
>Poverty of Philosophy*, p. 55 [though this clearly predates his
>dialectic analysis, the dialectic made this insight more profound]);

>In a section of the *Grundrisse* entitled "*The minimum of wages*", Marx
>shows that the statement that labour receives only its value is an
>assumption, to be dropped at a later stage of analysis:

>Quote: "For the time being, necessary labour supposed as such; i.e. that
>the worker always obtains only the minimum of
>wages. This supposition is necessary, of course, so as to establish the
>laws of profit in so far as they are not determined
>by the rise and fall of wages or by the influence of landed property. All
> these fixed suppositions themselves become fluid in
>the further course of development." (p. 817)

>And so on; there are several other instances. Whenever Marx compares the
>wage to the value of labor-power, he speaks of the "minimum wage".



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