From: ajit sinha (sinha_a99@YAHOO.COM)
Date: Mon May 29 2006 - 06:48:12 EDT
--- Ian Wright <wrighti@ACM.ORG> wrote: > The error in Sraffa's dated labour representation is > that the price of > money-capital, r, is not reduced to its labour cost. > It's a real-cost > accounting error to not reduce it. ______________________ Ian, I don't understand what you mean by "price of money capital r", no such concept is there in Sraffa. The dated labor aproach only shows that the price of a commodity can be resolved into only wages and profits in the case that there is some positive wages. This is referring to Adam Smith's idea that price is resolved into wages, profits, and rent. The method of Smith was silightly different but the work I'm doing on Smith now will show that his method was robust. The idea that Sraffa is alluding to Smith here is also clear when he at the outset declares it as "cost of production aspect", a term Marx used for Smith's "additive theory". In any case, the purpose of this chapter was to show that the Austrian notion of quantity of capital determination on the basis of 'period of production' was logically flawed. Now getting back to your concern, You should notice that A in the equation represents the gross output of the commodity a, thus the question of capitalist's consumption or non-consumption has no meaning here. ____________________________ > > It necessarily follows from Sraffa's surplus > equations that > money-capital is a commodity and r is its price, > once the physical > distribution of the surplus is specified. Section 4 > of the paper > deduces this result. _________________________ There is no such thing as a commodity called "money capital" in Sraffa. ____________________________ > > There's a simple low-dimensional numerical example > of a corn economy > at the end of the paper that presents the Sraffian > real-cost > accounting error. The results hold for arbitrary > numbers of > commodities. ___________________________ I have not read your paper and my computer advises me not to open your web because its address is of a type that may contain problems. So if you send me your paper by attachment, I'll read it and get back to you after sometime, as I can't promise to read it rightaway. But I think you are on a wrong road. Bringing any idea of capitalist consumption in the problem of value and price determination is a red herring. ____________________ > > For precision and clarity, we should first answer > this question: Do we > interpret Sraffa's surplus equations to represent a > state of > self-replacing equilibrium or not? ___________________________ What do you mean by "self-replacing equilibrium"? Do you mean something like Marx's simple reproduction schema? In any case, I don't think Sraffa's equations care for equilibrium at all. But other Sraffians disagree with me. I have just completed a paper which critiques Garegnani's interpretation of Sraffa's prices as centre of gravitation. I'll send you the paper privately and not burden the list with it. ___________________________ > > If the answer is "no", then real costs in general > are undetermined, > including labour-value. Nothing much can be said > about real costs as > we're talking about a novel distributional event > with an undistributed > surplus. ______________________ I don't understand why you keep introducing your terms into Sraffa? There is no such thing as "real cost" or determination of "real cost" in Sraffa's book. And the idea that if the system is not in equilibrium then neither cost (real or whatever) or labor values are determinable is simply wrong. You must mean something more than what you are saying here. _______________ > > If the answer is "yes" then real costs in general > are determined, > including labour-value. But in this case Sraffa's > real-cost accounting > is faulty, as manifested in the dated labour > representation. ______________________ Ian, you are taking a wrong road. Stop and rethink. First of all, I'll advise that a good way of understanding the whole business of value theory is not to first join a team and try to play for that team. What I mean is that there is no need to start of my saying, "I'm going to defend or prove that Marx was right". I started of that way, and that led me to waste a lot of time. I think that the most non-materialist aspect of Marx's theory or philosophy is the notion of labor-values. The concept is completely metaphysical! Don't you think that it is possible for us to imagine an economy where all productive labor is replaced by robots. Still this economy will have division of labor, capitalists, prices of commodities, profits. And you can also imagine wage labor, who are relegated to doing only unproductive labor. What will happen to the concept of labor-values in this economy? Again, think of another example, in agriculture a wage laborer who is paid subsistence wage and a horse work to produce surplus corn. Why is that it is the wage laborers labor produces value and surplus value and not horses? Think of an answer in materialist terms and not metaphysical terms. Cheers, ajit sinha __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
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