Rakesh, you write >Gil, it is not immediately obvious how there can be surplus value >since workers are free to sell their labor (so it seems) to the >highest bidder. We have to understand what it is that workers >alienate on the market (once we do, the basic confusion in Ricardian >value theory between cost of production and quantity of labor is >eliminated or so argues Marx). I agree that it's not immediately obvious how there can be surplus value, and I agree that we have to understand what it is that workers alienate on the market, if that's what they do. > What precisely do you think workers >sell on the market? Themselves? Their labor? Their labor capacity? >What is that? Is it a commodity? For the moment, the issue isn't what I think. You've already heard what I think, and you haven't found it at all compelling. So now I'm trying to find out what you think Marx has established via his argument in Vol I, Part 2 of Capital, so I can determine the root of our disagreement. So again I ask: may I infer from what you've said that in your reading of Marx, it *can't* be inferred from his Ch. 6 argument that capitalists must hire labor power as a commodity in order to appropriate surplus value? N.B.: when I use the phrase "labor power as a commodity", I intend the same sense Marx uses in this passage from the first page of Chapter 6: "...our friend the money-owner must be lucky enough to find within the sphere of circulation, on the market, a commodity whose use value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value....The possessor of money does find such a special commodity on the market: the capacity for labour, in other words labour-power." Gil
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