----- Original Message ----- From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <j.bendien@wolmail.nl> Sent: Friday, January 25, 2002 2:45 PM Hi Jerry, As regards the operation of the law of value in the context of the world market, I discovered that some important Marxian work on it was done in Germany but unfortunately it isn't translated in English. German readers might like to refer to Ch. Girschner (Politische Ökonomie und Weltmarkt. Allgemeine Weltmarktdynamik in der Marxsche Kritik der politischen Ökonomie), Tilla Siegel (Kapitalismus als Weltsystem), and Klaus Busch (Die Multinationale Konzerne). Girschner's book is recent but the other two are probably out of print - though you could probably interloan them. It would be useful if an academic could get a grant to have them translated ! As we know, Marx uses the term "law" quite loosely to refer to necessary connections, developmental tendencies, causal mechanisms etc. He was interested in discovering the "law" or "lawfulness" in socio-economic phenomena, in other words causally necessary relationships, or why and how things by necessity develop in a certain direction. He grounds his social science on the necessity for people to produce and reproduce the conditions of material life, the basic premise of historical materialism. I assume that Marx took the law of value (the conservation of labour in commodity circulation, or the correspondence between commodity values and socially necessary labour-time) to be something quite obvious, the scientific challenge was rather to explain how the law specifically asserted itself, how it worked itself out in reality, i.e. how exactly markets and labour expenditures adjusted to each other over time and followed a certain (necessary) path of development - which is what he does in Das Kapital. I think Marx would probably have agreed with Engels that the law of value is older than the capitalist mode of production, insofar as fairly sophisticated commodity exchange also occurred prior to the rise of the capitalist mode of production. But it is probably also pertinent to speak of the "unfolding" of the law of value, i.e. the law only comes fully into its own, or gains its full expression, in the context of a type of society featuring a universal market, as is the case in full-fledged capitalism. Sincerely Jurriaan
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