From: Diego Guerrero (diego.guerrero@CPS.UCM.ES)
Date: Mon Mar 05 2007 - 13:16:33 EST
Hi, Ajit, You wrote: > What kind of argument is that? Are you saying that we > are blind and you are blessed with exceptional eye > sight? Actually, Marx was quite proude to proclaim > that what he had found couldn't be found by just > "looking at the real world"! ··· Which > is the connection you > make? May be that a commodity is sold for $100 > because its price is $100? Of course! Cheers, ajit sinha ______________________ I am not blessed at all. Moreover, I am myopic. However, on the subject of theories of value, I can distinguish between clarity and obscurity. So I see a group of people that are in search of clarity and at least three groups in search of obscurity. People who like clarity tend to think in this manner. If I enter a restaurant's kitchen and see a set of physical things and relationships between, say, eggs, oil, a pan, a cooker..., etc., but no people cooking, and check that in these circumstances no omelette is being created from the mere existence of eggs and all those things... If I repeat the same operation one million times and no omelette can ever, ever be seen. If I see later for the first time a person cooking the eggs and then it happens that an omelette does appear..., then I tend to deduce from all this that this person's work is the active explanation of the existence of the omelette. I would tend to think that this person's labour may have something to do with the price of the omelettes being actually sold in the restaurant's market. Now, if I see once and again the same phenomenon in all firms--I mean absolutely all firms--no matter how important and valuable are the physical things that stand still each one in front of the others when no labour is being made, and see that always-always--happens the same thing, I can deduce that the use value and therefore the value of things created when labour does intervene may be related with labour itself. Then I begin to think that the labour theory of value is a reasonable theory, so that the price of the product of all those processes might be explained in terms of those labour processes. People who like obscurity tend to think differently. 1. For instance, they belong to the species that having never seen anybody cooking an egg from one or more omelettes or seen an egg being created from an omelette without the intervention of labour either, say seriously that the price of the egg can be explained in terms of omelettes on the same basis as others say that it can be explained in terms of labour, and this usually arguing that the case for this is just that they are able to do some beautiful calculations beginning from omelettes and eggs. And when you reply that, even if it is possible to say that other things enter directly OR indirectly in the production of all commodities, the truth is that labour is the ONLY ONE that enters directly AND indirectly in the production of all commodities, they don't know what to say but still think they are right, and then I begin to think that this theory is not reasonable at all. 2. Other people who like obscurity tend to think in another similarly unreasonable way. They know that the LTV says that the only fact lying behind all commodities (either goods or services) in absolutely all cases is labour--and it is labour in a quantity than can be determined and measured in hours--and then reply that commodities have another properties in common, utility for example, but they don't ever say in what terms this property can be quantified. After this, they say that their _utility_ theory is as reasonable as the LTV, and I observe this behaviour and conclude this theory is not a serious alternative to the LTV either. 3. And finally if I see people who say that prices are simply what they are and don't need to be explained., because. if they have some precise magnitude, they have that magnitude because they have that magnitude, then I can see that they have no reasonable theory. because they don't have any theory at all. Therefore, as I observe that there are no alternatives to the LTV, I am happy to have at least one theory that tries to approach reality, and I tend to favour its hypothesis on these bases and defend it versus the theories and not-theories of others who don't seek for clarity or propose serious alternatives. After all this, and only after this, I feel legitimate to say that, since there is and I can see and compute a correspondence between the overall quantity of new labour produced and the price of the whole mass of new commodities produced, one can translate freely from quantities of labour to quantities of money and vice versa. And it is only once I have checked that the correspondence between both totals is 1:1 for example, that I dare to say that _if a commodity is sold for $100, its value must be 100 hours of labor_. As you have seen in several emails I have tried to explain my view. What about yours? Don't say that this is not the matter. At least it matters to me. Cheers, Diego
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