Gil writes: > >My point is just that you don't need >a labor theory of value, understood as a notion that commodity prices are >somehow "regulated" by underlying labor values, in order to advance Marx's >critique, and in some cases reliance on labor value theory is >counterproductive. Gil Doesn't this kind of miss the forest for the trees? I think Marx's point was that capitalist societies operate on the basis of money value calculations, particularly profitability calculations, and that the basic macroeconomic determinants of profitability are the ratio of the value of output to the value of capital (what Tom Michl and I call the "productivity" of capital) and the ratio of profit to total value added (which is a transformation of the rate of exploitation). I take the essence of Marx's theory of value to be the observation that you can't change the rate of profit in the macroeconomy without changing one or the other or both of these variables. I don't see why Ajit has such trouble with the idea that money represents labor time. It seems sort of intuitive to me. Duncan -- 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
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