From: ajit sinha (sinha_a99@YAHOO.COM)
Date: Sat Jul 01 2006 - 08:49:09 EDT
--- Jurriaan Bendien <adsl675281@TISCALI.NL> wrote: This is actually what Marx says about it: "Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish. And every child knows, too, that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society's aggregate labour. It is self-evident that this necessity of the distribution of social labour in specific proportions is certainly not abolished by the specific form of social production; it can only change its form of manifestation. Natural laws cannot be abolished at all. The only thing that can change, under historically differing conditions, is the form in which those laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself in a state of society in which the interconnection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products. Where science comes in is to show how the law of value asserts itself." And here we really get to the crux of the issue - Marx is talking about a social and physical necessity for matching society's needs with the products of human labour, through economic exchange. That is the "ontological basis" for talking about a "law"; somehow, this necessity has to be reflected in trading ratios and relative prices. The question then was how specifically this law would assert itself, but if there cannot be any evidence for the law, as Thomas Sekine argues, we cannot even answer this question. _________________________ Take a look at couple of my papers listed below for a discussion of a few conceptual issues related with the above explanation of Marx's theory of value. ‘Some Critical Reflections on Marx’s Theory of Value’, in Value and the World Economy Today, (eds.) R. Westra and A. Zuege, Palgrave, 2003. ‘A Critique of Part One of Capital Vol. 1: The Value Controversy revisited’, Research in Political Economy Vol. 15, 1996, pp. 195-222. 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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