From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Sun Mar 11 2007 - 14:19:13 EDT
> >I don't see nothing more active than capital in production processes. Riccardo, I am also baffled by this statement. How are capital goods or capitalists active or activated in the production process? Capital goods are active, activated iff the social relations of labor have been organized through the quantitative and qualitative allocation of social labor time which then allows social labor to use what it has already produced and to produce more productively what it is using to engage in self-constraining production, i.e. production which enables itself to be continuous. Of course capitalists are active in the sense of getting the greatest possible expenditure of labor time, but who has ever denied this? Why was Marx wrong to dismiss all that palaver about proving value and to say that given the mediation of social relations by commodities their exchange value simply had to be understood in terms of how they allowed society to organize the social relations of labor. Obviously if price was not a groping function of value as differential productivity growth and shifting demand patters unsettled any extant division of labor, then society would likely not be able to meet the nature imposed necessity of organizing the division of labor. And if that was not proof enough of the labor theory of value, then certainly Marx thought it as Postone has put it retroactively validated by the tendencies he was able to explain on its basis. Given the advantages of first mover mechanization and the nature of their accounting capitalists lose sight of the relation between price and value, but that relation is obvious or at least sensible upon reflection. Even if we live in a world of epistemological uncertainty there seems no obvious knock out punch to the labor theory of value. Neither Bohm Bawerk nor Bortkiewicz, neither Sraffa nor Samuelson has delivered it. But they thought that they could do just that through the normal science of logic and puzzle solving in regards to unequal compositions, aggregation and invariable measures, and this self delusive view of normal science is what undwrites the description of the labor theory of value as unscientific especially by Samuelson. But there is no ineluctability here, there is no gross insult to science in holding to the labor theory of value. There is no theory of value more scientific than the Marxian one. Judgments will have to be made among the uncertain alternatives. And given reasonable bases for judgments I don't see what the Sraffian alternative has to recommend itself. On the other hand, I can pick up a book by David Harvey ( a geographer alas) and win much insight into the nature of capitalism. Rakesh
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