From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@stanford.edu)
Date: Sat Dec 14 2002 - 13:28:26 EST
Paul C wrote > > > >> > Labour time is value, but the actual labour >> > time of one individual only counts as value to the extent that that >> > individual spends the social average amount of time on a task. >> Michael E replied > > That is the claim made by the LTV. You are now obviously understanding >> "socially necessary" as "socially average". What is the justification for >> this? Why not "socially minimum" or "socially median", e.g.? How is the >> qualification "socially" to be empirically or even theoretically specified? Paul C replied in OPE 8171 > >It is justified within the general problematic of classical political >economy from Smith to Marx, which is that society has a certain quantity >of labour that has to be distributed between different activities. In >the absence of special conditions relating to agriculture - dealt with >under the theory of differential rent - a 10% increase in the output >of a given industry will require a 10% increase in labour allocated. >In computing this increase in labour one is automatically performing >an averaging operation over the labour of all the workers currently >employed. If 100,000 are currently employed, we know that a 10% increase >in output will require 10,000 new workers of average ability. > >The value of a commodity is just the change in the division of labour >required to increase its production, and here the norm is to assume >an average. The assumption of constant returns here consists of the >minimal assumption. If one has explicit reason to think that constant >returns will not apply then one does not take average labour to >be regulating - hence Ricardos rent theory. There is another question here: how is "socially" itself to be specified? What is the explicit reason for equating "social average amount of time" on a task with the "national amount of time on a task" other than that the latter is easier to calculate because data is organized in national i/o accounts? Why does it seem to be a common sense assumption in the determination of value magnitudes that the boundaries of society are the same as the boundaries of a nation-state (see Michael Billig Banal Nationalism)? Doesn't this assumption--shared by most of the new quantitative Marxists--simply rule out a priori the theory of dependency developed by Enrique Dussel (Towards an Unknown Marx) and the theory of unequal exchange developed by Carchedi (Frontiers of Political Economy)? Yours, Rakesh >
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