From: Riccardo Bellofiore (bellofio@cisi.unito.it)
Date: Tue Sep 10 2002 - 07:06:55 EDT
Dear Chris and Nicky, unfortuntaley I have no time to answer to both in full. So, for the moment I have to limit myself to few, and very short, answers to some of Chris's points. >The fundamanetal value relation is >Value of a commodity is a function of livinglabour + dead labour >[labour in susbsistence goods appears nowhere here; all the dead labour is >in means of production] >Then it is realised hence >Value = c + added value >v appears nowhere here. It only appears when we ask what happens to the >added value >Value = c + v + s >But this is ex post derivation. To read this as a determination of Value is >a horrendous error of vulgar economy Marx polemicised against. > >ESSENTIALLY v is not advanced, it is produced (regardless of when wages are >actually paid; tho' it is worth recalling Marx stresses the workers always >give credit to the capitalist.). we surely agree on the first point, on the fundamenbtal value relation. on wages the situation is unclear: of course, I agree that v is not advanced, if you mean the elements of variable capital, that is (to be short) the commodities consumed by workers, and also if you refer (though here I would not use the verb produce) to necessary labour. btw, OF COURSE I cannot but agree that real wages are NOT advanced. I am a follower of the circuit approach, an admirer of Keynes's Treatise on Money, and I think that in ALL these approaches AS in Marx the wage is advanced in MONEY terms. Where there is some problem? On the fact that I think that all this notwithstanding Marx thought and said that the real wage had to be taken as given before production. how to justify and reconcile these two conflicting outlooks? I've tried to do that several times in my writings, and I have to ask readers to look there now. in short what I think is that there were GOOD reasons why Marx thought that real wages had to be thought as given, that actually this simply means that some kind of target (yes, 'equilibrium') real wage bargained in the labour market is at first supposed to be realized ex post, and that this is relevant for Marx's theory of exploitation, more than that that it actually is one of the relevant differences of Marx say from Wicksell's monetary view. so, we agree on what you say about what Marx says about wages and v. but this does not settle the issue at all. the problem is: can the idea of a real wage as given ex ante (what Marx actually assumed) be compatible with the idea that the wage is advanced in money, and that the actual real wage is defined ex post? my answer is: yes. I simply add that my view here, as on exploitation, has been heavily influenced by Rosa Luxemburg's chapter on The Wage in her Introduction to Political Economy, where more or less she said that the necessary labour has to be taken as given and pre-determined (because in Marx the real wage is taken as given), whereas surplus labour and surplus value has to be taken as variable and determined only as a consequence of class struggle and technical change. that is: for my intellectual story, the view on exploitation (= living labour and the role of class struggle over the 'use' of labour power), the view on wage (= taken as given in real terms, though in a monetary economy), and even my method of comparison (= origin of surplus value showed by Marx thorugh a counterfactual where living labour is extended over and above necessary labour) has the SAME origin (Rosa Luxemburg, plus some Schumpeter). > >Now if we turn to V2 this seems to depict a circuit where M is shown to >purchase factors including LP. But of course just because it is a circuit M >cannot be taken as given; it is in fact identical with Mprime as is obvious >in two of the circuits and obvious if one grasps what a circuit is. In a >circuit it makes no sense to speak of advances. Everything is both before >and after everything else. Of course there are orthogonal flows into and >out of the circuit, expenditures and receipts; but this makes little >difference. >More seriously, the circuit depicts already constituted capital as such a >cycle of expenditures and receipts and in this way completely mystifies the >essential relations. Although it is mid-way between the essentialities of >V1 and the illusions springing from the profit form of V3 it is closer to >the latter in being - like it - at the level of appearances (albeit >objective appearances). An intelligent bourgeois like Schumpeter could no >doubt accept the circuit as an accurate description while still rejecting >V1. >a) the truth that delta m is a function of SL appears nowhere in this >circuit; to the contrary delta m appears to result from all the purchased >factors operating together - >b) the truth that workers produce their own wages appears nowhere in this >circuit; on the contrary the depiction of the circuit hides the fact >workers give credit to capitalists. - >c) if one makes a violent abstraction from the reality of the circuit and >breaks in at M then the placing of the purchase of labour power appears as >an advance; but this is seriously misleading for all the above reasons. >(btw what did Marx say about the 'wage fund'??) here the disagreemnet is as expected, and I don't have the time or the possibility to delve on it. we disagree strongly on finance. I certainly think that, whatever marx thought and said, if we want to analyze a capitalist economy, and a true monetary economy (tthat is, to analyze surplus value extraction in a monetary economy) what is needed is a MACRO and CLASS analysis; that in a MACRO setting we have to distinguish 'bank' from 'firms' as AGGREGATES, and if you do that seriously the whole of firms need at the start of the MACRO circuit the money they cannot produce from banks. I think this is quite compatible with Marx, more than that that it resolves deep problems in the way Marx framed his argument (of course, our view on exploitation , or my view of the wage as extended in my papers, is not the actual Marx: we have always to distinguish interpretation and reconstruction). > >The appearances, in other words, distort the essential relations. I agree enthusiastically here. > >>>?? Abstract labour *is* immediately social >> >> >>disagree: it is a process, for me: it is in production 'latent', and >>though the SAME activity it is the opposite of concrete labour >>which is 'becoming' abstract labour in the full sense of the world, >>yes: with final abstraction completed in the phase of exchange, but >>still the abstract labour in the commodity it is not IMMEDIATELY >>money. money is *immediately* social. > > >There is a distinction to be made between concrete dissociated labour which >needs to be transformed into a recognisably social shape, and abstract >labour which is conceptually immediately social albeit that it is socially >visible only with money; otherwise I fear we are back to the identification >of AL with physiology which of course is non-social. > you see, here is where all precipitates. I cannot write this way. you seem to say, if abstract labour is not immediately social, labour in the production process is heterogenous. you are RIGHT. that's the problem in most vft. they don't get that if the stress is on money as general equivalent, with no INDEPENDENT and FOUNDATIONAL role for money as finance (in the macro sense above, which is denied if you go towards the idea that the circuit has indeed to be first analysed as the interlocked set of circuits: and you are back to Walras, and no true need for finance), then it's TRUE, you have abstract labour only ex post, and the 'content' as labour which is heterogenous. but then, damned the 'labour' in the value theory. you can have the link between abstract labour in production (which is only latent and potential) and abstract labour in exchange (which is private labour in the process to becoming social, that is money) ONLY if you have some monetary ante-validation, which allows to treat living labour as subject to abstraction and socially homogeneous prior to final exchange. how? only with finance (in my sense). that's where Rubin, who came near to the truth, probably failed. no finance. then, the ensuing Rubin school, if they do not do a move like mine (sorry, I have to be quick), if coherent have to finish in those kinds of positions (very different: Eldred, De Vroey, Benetti, may be Geert, maay be Nicky etc.) who jettison labour in production and time. in fact, I think that marx should have included finance more or less after his counterfactual comparison, saying more or less something of the following: "wait a minute: but how can I have living labour as socially homogeneous in production, so that extending it over and above necessary labour gives surplus labour, surplus value etc? only if I see that, now that I see that commodities are in fact capitalistically produced commodities, and that this production has to be financed, this finance is the ante-validation, and has no ground in gold as a commodity". already in K1. I understand that this answer is very quick, and I apologise for that, but now I cannot do any better. one final word on my attitude. what interests me in Marx? the fact that he is (to my knowledge) the only theorist who stresses the exploitation of labour in capitalism as a monetary economy. for me the correct view on the monetary economy cannot but incorporate the view of finance offered by the Wicksell-Schumpeter-Keynes line. if this is incompatible with Marx, then Marx is no good (but I don't believe that). is Marx's theory of exploitation sensible in a finance theory of capitalism: in my view, yes; more than that, the finance theory of capitalism resolves what are open issues in Marx, and sublates the limits of the streams which have made Marx unilateral, Ricardian (who took the Ricardian Marx) and the vft as long as it abandons labour as the 'content' of value and does not stress that the sequence: labour POWER - LIVING labour - OBJECTIFIED labour is more or less the same as the monetary sequence mapped as money as finance - production - money as the general equivalent r -- Riccardo Bellofiore Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche Via dei Caniana 2 I-24127 Bergamo, Italy e-mail: bellofio@unibg.it, bellofio@cisi.unito.it direct +39-035-2052545 secretary +39-035 2052501 fax: +39 035 2052549 homepage: http://www.unibg.it/dse/homebellofiore.htm
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