Rakesh: My time is really scarce so only a brief comment on your #4464: >To be sure, the value of a commodity is determined not as cost price >+ surplus value, as Andrew K, Alejandro and Fred all have it, but as >the direct and indirect labor time which it embodies, though of >course that labor time is socially determined. This part Ajit and >Allin have correct. I'm sorry to say that you haven't understood my position. Cost price + surplus value are simply the monetary representation of what you call "direct and indirect labor", i.e. past + living labor in Marx's most usual terminology. I think you would agree that in capitalism is simply imposible to advance "indirect labor", no matter under what assumpion you're working, i.e. price = value, price = production price or whatever. Or, do you think that capital is advanced as a *labor-time* magnitude? (this is not a rethoric question...) If you are working under the premise that prices = produciton prices, then the *value* of the commodities is, as always, the labor time necessary to reproduce them, but the labor time corresponding to constant capital and variable capital cannot be the labor time *embodied* in the means of produciton and wage goods. It is rather the labor time *represented* by the money that capitalists actually advance. This is nothing strange if you think that money-prices are simply forms of value and then they always represent *amounts of labor time*, not necessarily the labor time embodied in a commodity. If you are producing yarn under the average conditions and you advance $500 in cotton representing 500 hours of past labor, this is the amount of *labor time* which enters in the *value* of yarn, no matter if the labor time objectified in this cotton during the past production cycle is 400 hours. The part of the social cost corresponding to the new cotton to be produced is what effectively capitalist pay for it at the beginning of the circuit. This is the "past labor" transferred during the subsequent produciton process. What is socially necessary to produce yarn in this process, on account of the cotton input, are 500 hours of labor time coming from a preceding circuit. Capitalist do not pay the equivalent of 400 hours. The other, dualistic, intepretation argues that past labor is 400 hours because it conceives the "system of values" as a self-centered entity which has nothing to do with the real process of determination of prices. It's a shadow reality, an empty and imaginary "concept" (Skillman's "epycicle") which is important only in videogames you can play with the aid of Excel. It's, in fact, a separated "theoretical entity" of whatever real process and this is why is not strange that the "right wing" of the dualistic authors trashes it as "redundant", while the "left wing" cherishes it either as the gist of socialist planning or an "invisible reality" from which, supposedly, we could demonstrate the explotation of the working class. Alejandro Ramos
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