From: Ian Wright (iwright@GMAIL.COM)
Date: Mon Sep 13 2004 - 12:22:39 EDT
Hi Ajit I don't think anyone disagrees with the proposition that under capitalism the law of value operates with greater force, due to the existence of generalised commodity production and the labour market. That is what I take you to be saying in your footnote. But I'm glad you consider the possibility that the mobility of labour in capitalism can generate a dynamic tendency to homogenize the labour reduction coefficients, despite the immediate appearance of wage inequality, and discrimination on irrational grounds, such as gender or race. I think that the tendecy for wages to homogenize should have an equal theoretical status to the tendency for profit rates to homogenize. Workers strive for economic equality with each other and capitalists strive for economic equality with each other. But they do so according to different rules and different methods. But in reality neither tendency is realised. Most neo-Ricardian models conflate these tendencies with their actual realisations, and then attack Marx because both tendencies cannot be simultaneously realised. But as I've tried to point out before, this is a non-sequitur, a basic philosophical error caused by a failure to distinguish between mechanisms and events. The concept of "simple commodity production" has a number of meanings. The more controversial concept has to do with its existence in the past, prior to capitalism. Clearly, before capitalism, labour mobility was less, so if the law of value did operate in some locations in some periods, it will have operated with less force. The less controversial concept, but the less discussed, is the idea of simple commodity production that Andrew Trigg mentioned: basically capitalism without a capitalist class. This is a counterfactual theoretical object that is an aspect of capitalism. In the neo-Ricardian approach, if we assume zero profits and homogenous reduction coefficients then the law of value holds without contradiction. But because the neo-Ricardian approach is static it just views this result as merely an economic configuration that may or not pertain. The idea that this configuration is the attractor of a dynamic mechanism that operates over time is completely absent from the neo-Ricardian literature I have consulted. As usual, mechanisms are reduced to events so when capitalists are brought back into the picture, and profits are strictly positive, the deviation of prices from values is just another fact, the appearance of which contradicts the neo-Ricardian concept of the law of value. But the law of value is not the realisation of prices proportional to labour values, it is the mechanism with that attractor. The neo-Ricardian approach fails to analyse the dynamic relationship between the two attractors: the law of value and the law of equal profits. Instead, it reduces the mechanisms to their attractors, discovers a contradiction, and then chooses to reject the law of value rather than the law of equal profits. Is it only me, or isn't this both obvious and basically a bit stupid? My apologies for repeating myself on this list, but I'm hoping someone such as Ajit can point out what is wrong with my argument. Otherwise, I am at a loss to understand how the neo-Ricardian rejection of the Marxist theory of value has had any influence at all. It seems to me to be based on a howler. -Ian. On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 01:14:09 -0700, ajit sinha <sinha_a99@yahoo.com> wrote:
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Sep 15 2004 - 00:00:03 EDT