Re: (OPE-L) Re: subjects and objects in capitalism

From: Ian Wright (ian_paul_wright@HOTMAIL.COM)
Date: Tue Sep 30 2003 - 16:40:32 EDT


Without wishing to sound too dismissive, Kevin is making the classic
mistake of conflating use-value and exchange-value. Use-value
(which is of course a psychological relation between a mind and
an object of desire) is a condition for the possibility of the
emergence of exchange-value (an objective relation between
different concrete labours) in an economy.

I think the problem arises from this:

>The labor theory not only of Smith, but of Ricardo and Marx, lacked any
>mechanism or philosophical basis.

Which is not the case, as the law of value is precisely the
*mechanism* by which subjective evaluations of the value
of goods become constrained by objective conditions not
under subjective control, namely the total available social
labour-time.

I would sincerely recommend that Kevin reads my paper,
"Simulating the Law of Value", which explicates in great
casual detail how this mechanism operates in the case of a
simple commodity economy, and how subjective utility
evaluations coexist with objective determination of the
value of commodities by labour-time.

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