Gary, You write in 7534: > Nor does it address a point I have now made a number of times: I >really don't see in what sense Marx's accounts of crisis, or technical change >or labor intensity, or even money,need to be grounded in his labor value >analysis. With some relatively painless modification, every substantive point >(or at any rate, every empirically defensible point) he makes on these issues >can be made just as easily if one were working with a Sraffian account of >value & distribution. Before anyone starts objecting that the modifications >aren't painless, that they do violence to Marx's depiction of capitalism, let >me reiterate my response to this objection: I have yet to see a defense of >Marx's value categories that demonstrates their indispensability to a >scientific explanation of observable phenomena; in the end the defense always >rests on an ideological or metaphysical claim that I simply do not find >convincing. But I don't understand what is ideological or metaphysical in maintaining descriptive focus through value or labor time analysis on the social relations between classes (see Frank Roosevelt, Amartya Sen, and others). As noted before, the so called surplus can be seen in non value terms simply as a physical quantity of use values, but that does not mean it's metaphysical or ideological also to understand the surplus in value terms as the materialization of alienated unpaid labor performed by one class for another (see Carchedi). Both the physical and value surplus are real entities; a value surplus is not a value in the normative sense, and so the implicit resort to a dubious positivism to dismiss the value dimension as ideological or metaphysical is out of place. Now one can say that surplus value is metaphysical because the quantity of alienated unpaid labor has no economic significance--that is, what matters economically is the size of the surplus in physical or use value terms, not the size of the surplus in value terms. What matters for economic analysis and the profit rate in particular is how big the surplus is in physical terms; whether it embodies a great or small quantity of unpaid labor time matters not a bit--you would seem to be implying. So in an almost fully automated economy--and this is as a crucial thought experiment for economics as Schroedinger's Cat is for Quantum Mechanics as Spencer Pack noted in Reconstructing Marxian Economics--what would matter for the economy and the profit rate is how big the physical surplus is, not how little unpaid labor time the physical surplus of an almost fully automated economy must perforce embody. But this after all is a hypothesis. And... at first blush.... it seems to be massively invalidated by the history of the most automated economy in the post WWII era--Japan where the profit rate has in fact fallen precipitiously. It is after all in Japan that the productive powers have been put on newest basis, upon the basis of the most advanced mechanization; and it is in automatistic Japan that the falling tendency of the rate of profit has been closing on the system. One has difficulty explaining this outcome with a use value or physical surplus theory of profit determination but not with the TSS value theoretic theory of profit determination (Ernst, Giusanni, Kliman, Freeman and other missing OPE-Lers) . Though again I think there are problems with the TSS interpretation in terms of how the MEL is handled (Foley) and how the indirect stimulative effects of a rising physical surplus are ignored (me). Unfortunately, I haven't found David Laibman's criticisms persuasive, but then Frank Thompson would. > Nor do most of Marx's results depend on the adoption of his value >categories (with the possible exception of the law of the falling rate of >profit, the contingent nature of which marx himself acknowledged). > I guess this comes to a difference in interpretation. Grossmann after all argued that Marx's whole system, including the reorganization of the structure of his magnum opus, was governed by the prospect of the shortage of surplus value. > >> >>This is another example of the superior explanatory power of Marx's >>theory: Marx's theory is able to explain the exchange-value of gold as >>the real world money commodity, including rent, and Sraffa's theory >>cannot. >> >Hang on. Sraffa's model can indeed explain the exchange value of gold as a >money commodity, as it explains the value of any produced commodity. Fred and >others may not find the explanation satisfactory, and that's fair enough. Good I find it unsatisfactory, and thought that you were backing off using gold as the numeraire. My main interest in that discussion has been to argue using the invariance condition of surplus value=profit on account of using gold as the unit of account. At any rate, the adjustment period required for gold to exchange at either value or price of production has to be much longer than it is for freely reproducible commodities. They are working in different time zones, so to speak, and should not be dealt with in the same system of equations. I also think demand plays a different kind of role in the determination of the exchange value of money than it does with freely reproducible commodities. And we seem agreed that the gold sector could not earn the uniform profit rate, though you think mathematically this is no problem for your theory. All the best, Rakesh > But >it is simply wrong to say that Sraffa's system can't address the issue. > >Ciao, > >Gary
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 24 2002 - 00:00:03 EDT