Gil, You argue that Marx provides no link between surplus value and the commodification of labor power. Surplus value can be appropriated by merchants simply by manipulating exchange or through the organization of the putting out system. Marx himself underlines the former possibility but argues that it cannot be a secure basis for surplus value and does not tend to increase the value in circulation. He asks for our patience so he can lay out its new place in bourgeois society, i.e., as a derivative form of the value newly added in the industrial circuit of capital. Until recently, you have refused to give Marx your patience on this issue. But then you say wage labor is not employed in the putting out system by means of which not only does the merchant appropriate surplus value but also increase the value in circulation. So how can Marx jump to the commodification of labor power from the existence of surplus value in the circuit of capital or even surplus value in the aggregate? But Marx's interest from the very first sentence of Capital vol 1 has been a fully developed bourgeois society in which free wage labor contracts for a wage. To understand how not only surplus value is appropriated but the value in circulation is increased in such a society we need to grasp that proletarians do not alienate their labor but labor power for wages. Marx simply confines himself to the island on which workers do indeed find themselves; he later recognizes the inherent instability of the putting out system. And you yourself have given additional explanation for its instability and general collapse. But Gil I think it's time we take some stock of this six year list discussion. We have a debate about the transformation problem in which the critics refuse to use Marx's definition of surplus value and cost price (on the latter see Fred and Alejandro). we have criticisms of the falling rate of profit theory which smuggle in the methodology of comparative statics without justifying its use in the study of continuous technical change (as Ben Fine, Alan F and Andrew K have pointed out). We have one critic who insists that Marx himself should have recognized that dead labor itself is productive of new value. and we have another critic who chides Marx for not recognizing that surplus value can be appropriated via long antiquated forms of production in which wage labor was not used. I know these seem as major, decisive criticisms to many. I submit that if not for the power behind them, they would obviously be trivial. Yours, Rakesh
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