John, I isolate this question to respond to now because in some ways it's the easiest. I'll address your other questions soon. You ask, with respect to the thought experiment I posed in 4243, >Prior to embarking on this journey, I'd at least wonder why Marx >never went in this direction. Steve might answer this issue differently, but to me the reason is fairly obvious. There's an old quote, referring to scientific progress more generally, to the effect that we now see as far as we do because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Clearly the same thing is true here. Using his labor value theory as an analytical vehicle, Marx arrived at substantive claims about capitalism that vulgar political economy did not identify. He evidently thought that the vehicle was necessary for arriving at these claims, and by reading the details of his argument a century and a quarter later we can see, with the benefit of hindsight, why he might reasonably have thought this. But also in hindsight, and aided by theoretical and historical developments since Marx wrote, the possibility emerges that his labor value theory is at best unnecessary for establishing or extending these substantive claims (and I would add something stronger, to the effect that allegiance to the labor theory of value has directly led to some central issues of political economy being posed and/or resolved in fundamentally wrong ways, but let that be for another post). If this possibility is a reality, Marxism's theoretical project could only be advanced by recognizing this point and refining the theory accordingly. So the fact that Marx required his labor value theory *then* should not give it any presumptive claim to our allegiance *now,* particularly if thought experiments similar to the one I've posed (on which more in an upcoming post) indicate that this theory is at best superfluous. To connect this to an analogy I drew in post 4243, it may as a historical fact be true that Copernicus arrived at his cosmological system by contrasting available astronomical data with the predictions of the Ptolemaic system. But that doesn't imply that contemporary astronomers need to follow his same intellectual path through the tortured complexities of Ptolemaic epicycle analysis. Gil
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