[OPE-L] Marxians on Sraffa; Sraffians on Marxians

From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Mon Oct 09 2006 - 12:27:56 EDT


Just to respond briefly to Ajit Sinha, I did grapple with PCBMC around 1987,
but gave up because the concepts did not make sense to me at the time. Bear
in mind I am not a qualified economist. I cannot say my knowledge of Sraffa
is very good, as I think I mentioned before. I do admire his achievement
though - in the sense he attacked the marginalist concept of capital - and I
am willing to work through the whole argument, though not just right now,
because of other things going on and I do not have a copy of PCBMC handy
here.

As I see it, the issue is not whether there is wage slavery or not, but
whether the distributional conflict is determined by relations of production
or not, i.e. whether the distribution of gross product is determined by the
ownership of productive assets and products, or not. Seems to me that Marx
is saying you cannot analyse *distributional* conflicts in separation from
the conditions under which output is *produced*, you need one theoretical
framework for this, encompassing both production and distribution. His
substantive argument being, that the employer already owns the surplus,
prior to its distribution.

Jurriaan


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