Re Andrew's 4327 > Anyway Marx's argument seems to me to amount to >the following: > >IF a machine were, in general, to contribute more value in >production than it initially costs THEN the laws of free exchange - >ie. supply and demand - entail that its price will go up until equal to >the sum of (present) value contributed. This is simply the 'law of >one price': the machine and its contribution to production are >merely different forms of the same commodity (the potential form >and the realised form), rather than being two distinct commodities, >hence their price (present value) is the same. What do you think? But if a machine will tend to be exchanged for the money form of the labor time it represents or embodies--this being a supply side condition for the production of machines, as I think you suggest--then why isn't the working class only exchanging its labor power *at some discount* for the money form of the labor time which it agrees to perform? So what if profit comes from the performance of greater labor time than for which the working class has *agreed* to be paid--this is not necessarily exploitation. It's just a time preference for present consumption. I even heard a famous liberal Princeton sociologist and race expert suggest that African Americans have, as always, an acute case of this working class disposition (notice how little they save while buying BMW's and other fancy cars out of their income range, she noted about the putative quintessential American consumer). At any rate, all agreements have been made in the light of day. Moreover, as Gil has argued why do we assume that equal labor times are being exchanged on the market in the first place? It's obvious that capitalists are exchanging their goods at the same markup relative to their investment regardless of the relative quantity of labor they have employed--so why do we characterize the market as fair labor time exchange? "Value" obviously has nothing to do with what we observe in the market, so why make it the core of one's explanation of observed behavior? Why not just to stick to the surface, like Karl Pearson and BF Skinner? all the best, r
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