From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Mon May 29 2006 - 12:47:14 EDT
> 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 Ajit you miss the point of Marx's theory. Say a better horse at the same price is brought on, some labor dismissed and the quantity of corn increased. But each unit of corn would have less value and represent less surplus value per unit. Why? Because this is the way society signals to itself that less of its inherently limited social labor time should now be applied to production of each unit of corn. Anyways, this ontological equivalence of labor and draught animals makes no sense. Social labor is ontologically primary. Only if social labor recognizes and makes use of land, means of production, draught animals are they factors of production. For horses to work, social labor has to be organized and allocated first. This is why social labor has ontological primacy. Rakesh
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