Re: [OPE-L] Sraffian surplus vs Marxian surplus

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

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