From: Riccardo Bellofiore (riccardo.bellofiore@UNIBG.IT)
Date: Tue Jun 01 2004 - 05:15:34 EDT
At 0:22 -0700 1-06-2004, ajit sinha wrote: >--- Riccardo Bellofiore <riccardo.bellofiore@UNIBG.IT> >wrote: >> Ajit, >> >> on your first point, I wonder how you can think a >> proposition can be >> formally incorrect if it follows necessarily from an >> argument >> according to which all the social product represents >> in money nothing >> but living labour, extracted in a specifici social >> way: the problem >> may be how to articulate price and value, not that >> value is "nothing >> but" that monetary expression in that definite >> social form. >________________________ > >Riccardo, Let's leav aside the problem of what is a >"social product". It is not clear what you mean by >"all the social product", though. If you mean gross >product, then not many Marxists would agree with your >statement. My guess is that you mean net product. >Well, then now look at what could "living labour" >mean. Here you are talking about all the direct labor >performed in one production period. All these direct >labors are of different kinds, such as carpentary, >masonary, etc. They are different kinds of concrete >labor. So unless you somehow add up these concrete >labors you cannot put the so called "living labour" >against money, and that's your problem. No: because I have ante-validation through bank finance to production. I agree with you that without some social validation before exchange labours cannot be added. My point for me is that labour as labour, that is as activity, for Marx was clearly BOTH concrete and abstract (not immediately social, but tentatitvely so: Rubin). The point is that to secure this point the validation must be monetary, and must be ex ante. > >My point was not that a statement such as "the value >of a commodity x is 10 hours of socially necessary >abstract labor" is wrong. Actually I think it is >right. But I want Rakesh or you or anybody else to >first commit that it is either right or wrong, so that >we can move to next logical stage of the problem. Now, >it appears that you think that the above statement is >right. Then we have to think how does one arrive at >the measure of "10 hours of labor". >______________________ I think that to arrive to that - after one and forty hundred years - we have to change in some way the structure of the argument. Realize that Marx's was not an individual price theory (first); second, translate it in "macro" terms; third, assume that supply meets demand, not because of Say's Law but because of something akin to the principle of effective demand with short-run firm's expectations realized. One done that, I guess that you can say that value is C + mLL, where C = MPp also at the individual level. But I am interested in reading your discussion with rakesh going on. riccardo -- Riccardo Bellofiore Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche "Hyman P. Minsky" Università di Bergamo Via dei Caniana 2 I-24127 Bergamo, Italy e-mail: riccardo.bellofiore@unibg.it direct +39-035-2052545 secretary +39-035 2052501 fax: +39 035 2052549 homepage: http://wwwesterni.unibg.it/dse/homepage/bellofiore.htm
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