From: ajit sinha (sinha_a99@YAHOO.COM)
Date: Fri Oct 06 2006 - 06:57:28 EDT
--- Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU> wrote: > >--- Jurriaan Bendien <adsl675281@TISCALI.NL> wrote: > > > >> I haven't got POCBMOC handy here to check > chapter > >> and verse, but I think > >> Fred put it quite well: > >> > >> "The real wage in Sraffian theory is a specific > >> bundle of goods, determined > >> ex-ante (prior to prices and money wages), and > >> determined independently of > >> workers' consumption choices. Moreover, it is > >> assumed that each worker > >> consumes the same bundle of goods. > >_______________________ > >This is wrong! ajit sinha > > Right. But for Sraffa there is a distributional > struggle over the net > product while for Marx > capital allots out of the product rightfully > appropriated only the > means of life to the defacto slaves who have > produced them. This > relation of defacto slavery cannot be changed by > what within a > Sraffian perspective would be a more favorable > distribution to the > working class. > > Someone somewhere argued that Sraffa explicitly and > consciously > rejected the putative rigidity in Marx's wage > theory--allowing for > the wage to appear as the result of a distributional > struggle, rather > than as an allotment by capital to wage workers for > their survival as > defacto slaves. > > Sraffa's theory may prove superior for just this > reason, but it would > be nice to clarify the difference. __________________________ Marx's simple story works this way: Historically real wages are determined around what prevailed as the real income of the class that largely became proletariat in the historical transformation of any given society. Thus historically wages in different societies could start from different levels. For example, it started at higher level in the United States than say England. However, the population principle of capitalism, which is given by labor saving technical changes, creates downward pressure on wages over time and thus wages have a tendency to fall towards what in diferent societies will be considered subsistence level. Now this prediction has come out to be wrong. The whole idea that Marx argued that 'relative' wages would fall, i.e., relative to profits, and not absolute wages, flies in the face of all evidence and arguments. To the best of my knowledge, no body has shown how a long term trend in the fall of 'relative' wages in relation to profits can be maintained simultaneously with the notion of a long term trend in the rate of profits to fall. Any way, one needs to come up with some theoretical arguments of how this could happen? One could argue that actually the rate of growth of the economy has been faster than the rate of labor displacement and a positive rate of growth of population could only be maintained through higher real wages (this is the case of Adam Smith). Or one could argue that rise in labor productivity somehow increases the bargaining strength of labor. Now if Marx's argument is taken to be correct that the dynamism of capitalism is to increase the rate of unemployment over time, then the question becomes how would labor's bargaining strength increase in this scenario? This is where the notion of norms and conventions, which allows us to bring in a host of complex political and sociological factors into play, could be of help. Sraffa's notion of rate of profits as conventionally given allows real wages to rise with rise in productivity irrespective of the rate of unemployment. Of course, it is not a complete theory yet, but it allows us to build a much richer theory. The point is that the rate of unemployment may be an important factor in determining the real wages or its trend but perhaps it is not the only factor. As I had suggested earlier on Mike L's lecture: its theoretical foundation is weak but its basic idea is good. 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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