From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Fri Dec 01 2006 - 22:46:17 EST
>Quoting Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU>: > >> >> So contrary to the LTV, there can be a positive rate of profit and >> relative prices in a totally automated economy. > >Are these real prices or Kantorovich's shadow prices? Paul, Is the difference here between spontaneous and administered prices? My criticism of the Dmitriev/Pack/Sinha scenario is a bit different than Ian's. I don't the the fully automated economy is a horse which can speak but a different species than a capitalist economy. For Marx the law of value has a historical and relative validity: the law of value holds when the quantitative and qualitative allocation of social labor time must be solved through reactions to the divergence of prices from the values of the commodities by which social producers are alone related. Prices and profits are not always regulated by the law of value; there is not in all social formations objectivity in the illusion that a powerful, quasi magnetic property of commodities is their value to which their respective prices are drawn even against political or external interference (for example price controls). The value of the products of social labor as a real causal power is a socially objective illusion in a general commodity society. Things in the saddle/And ride mankind--this is exact economic theory! Socially objective illusion is of course a difficult and revolutionary idea as Gideon Freudenthal has shown (Science in Context 10, 1). As he has also argued, the meaning of critique in Marx's magnum opus is analogous to Kant's in Critique of Pure Reason: it meant to restrict the range of justified application of the categories of political economy. So too with the law of value. That prices and profits can or would be determined independently of it in social formations other than bourgeois society is in no way a disproof of its historical and relative validity. For this reason I think that the exercise of determining prices and profits in a totally automated economy has nothing to tell us about the validity of the law of value in the conditions specified by Marx. Rakesh > > > >---------------------------------------------------------------- >This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.
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