In 5657 Chris quotes Marx: >"Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however >incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. >But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that >particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why >the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of >the value of the product" > social labor time can only be represented by way of the value of the commodity because due to class relations, viz. the private control of production, producers only have contact with each other through the objects of their labor. If not for the class relations of private, commodity production by means of wage labor, labor time would not be represented by the value of its objectifications. But Marx's critique of classical economy's blindness to the historic preconditions of the phenomena of which it attempted a not wholly unsuccessful scientific investigation goes back to at least the Notes on Mill (more importantly, Marx accepts Richard Jones's critique of Ricardo's rent theory because Ricardo fails to understand that the laws that he attempts to lay out depend on historical preconditions such as the mobility of labor power, the emergence of industrial capital, etc, and not just transhistoric factors such as differential fertility and proximity to the market). How we are to characterize this kind of critique and the errors which it exposes raises important questions about the nature of Marx's theory of scientific knowledge. > It is because capital >cares about time that labours are commensurated by time, and not v.v. >Once the form-determinations are in place the illusion arises that labour >time is value. But, Chris, why do you say that capital cares about (labour?) time rather than (say) abstract wealth? Or what is the relation between time and the abstract form of wealth? It would seem that capital cares about abstract wealth the measure of which may then be labor time? Best, Rakesh
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Jun 02 2001 - 00:00:08 EDT