Hi Jerry, Thanks for the reply. It's not an *assumption* regarding implicit motivations. Rather it is *argument*. We cannot know for sure what any one person's motivation is. We can make some more solid judgments as to large numbers of people over a long period of time. How do I argue in this case? Well I do it via the importance of 'value'. Thus, my point regarding the importance of value has nothing directly to do with *consequences*. Rather, I am using the importance of 'value' as the key aspect guiding my judgment as to the true reason and motivation for the value debates. In turn this relies on a materialist premise: what people worry about most relates to their material circumstances, the most important of which is 'value' in the CMP. Yet, value presents itself in disguise, so people may not explicitly or fully grasp why they are debating it, or what it is. I disagree that history is replete with examples of most people talking endlessly about stuff with no relation to material reality. Give me some example and some context, and more often than not I think we will find that the issues discussed really mattered, or at least were rooted in the material circumstances of the time (which are what matters most). Re Fine: Fine's analysis of consumption (his notion of norms of consumption) is built firmly upon his LTV, in particular upon his grasp of the value of labour power. One cannot determine this value without, amongst other things (such determining wage bargaining outcomes), determining what, crudely speaking, the average consumption bundle of the working class is. This cannot be taken as 'given' but must be analysed for each industry (for, as Fine shows, their are very different norms of consumption for each industry). This is concrete analysis based upon the previous reconstruction of the more abstract aspects, such as the existence of the VLP and it's most abstract determination as a quantity of SNLT of some as yet to be determined bundle, plus moral and historical aspects (the contingencies of class struggle), also yet to be determined. That's the best I can do I'm afraid!....Sorry if I have got Fine completely wrong on this... Thanks, Andy
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