re 4174 > >[I like that line about Cassinis and Roemers] I didn't realize that we >were in the business of drawing blood here, Rakesh. If you'll read the >post in which I made this comparison (OPE-L 4242), you'll find that I >wasn't characterizing value theorists, but asking a question: wouldn't it >be a theoretical advance, in something like the same sense that moving from >the Ptolemaic to the Copernican cosmology was an advance, if all of Marx's >substantive claims about the nature and basis of capitalist exploitation >could be established without the labor theory of value? Gil Gil, If we are interested in the social equivalent of the laws of motion of the planets, Marx's substantive claims cannot be established if simultaneous equations are used instead of the labor theory of value to determine profits and prices. You have then cast doubt on any theory built on a putatively unobservable 'entity' such as Fred's macro entity of the mass of surplus value (ether?), compared to a theory which takes as its primary data technical conditions and the real wage. It is further implied the Bortkiewicz transformation calculation has the same destructive result for the postulation of value (as one of the two equalities supposedly has to go) as the Michelson-Morley experiment for inference of ether. Yet Gil I do not share the same skepticism towards unobservables in science, I don't think the mass of surplus value is all that unobservable, and I think the Bortkiewicz calculation procedure for equilibrium prices of production suffers from various misinterpretations of Marx's sequential, dynamic theory (Carchedi, Freeman, Giusanni). Finally, I find your school to be altogether disinterested in the laws of motion, so the astronomical analogy seems ill suited to your war on the Marx's dynamic theory of value. Rakesh
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Dec 31 2000 - 00:00:04 EST