re 4657: > >To re-ask the question, then, given your interpretation above of the "value >of labor power", can we infer from Marx's argument in Chapter 6 that >capitalists must purchase *labor power*--simply the capacity to work--in >order to appropriate surplus value? From your previous post once removed, >I got the impression that in your reading, Marx sidesteps this question by >simply assuming it away. Is this impression accurate? > >Gil Gil, In order to extract surplus value in a free exchange society in which labor is carried out by formally free proletarians--that is, assuming the basic institutional set up of a developed capitalist society--entrepreneurs have to find on the market a commodity whose use value posseses the peculiar property of being a source of exchange value. In Steve's K terms, the dialectic of use value-exchange value allows Marx to specify that it cannot be labor time but rather labor capacity which proletarians alienate on the market. This basic distinction is novel. It seems that you are demanding that Marx derive from the concept of surplus value itself the necessity of the universalisation of the form of wage labor. But Marx already assumes that labor is carried out by formally free wage workers--he accomodates himself to this fact theoretically as capitalists do practically. But this does not sidestep the question of the source of surplus value. In fact it makes the question even more puzzling. And it can't be answered unless we analytically separate labor power from labor as they are separated in fact. So even if you prove that capitalists can extract surplus value from other than formally free wage laborers--in some cases and in some times and in some pockets--you will not have undermined the distinction between labor power and labor. Moreover, you agreed with me long ago that as a mode of production, capitalism simply depends on the mobility of labor power, i.e., on free wage labor. But that is not the argument Marx is making here. He already assumes complete dependence on free wage laborer; he wants to explain the mystery of surplus value in such conditions. What do you think Marx is trying to prove in ch 6? Again, what is it precisely that you think proletarians sell on the market? Yours, Rakesh
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