From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Sun Jun 10 2007 - 23:45:39 EDT
>I agree with Hans. Abstracting labor power is not amenable to >quantitative analysis. Marx made a number of stabs at it; none were >really satisfactory. >But as a qualitative analysis, it is extraordinary. Michael, I am not sure I understand what remains of the qualitative analysis once one cedes the quantitative analysis The market, not Marx, represents what is the qualitative irreducibility of real laboring activities from the point of view of monadic subjectivity as quantitative difference. So the question becomes for Marx in terms of what kind of labor can their products be commensurated as commodities. His answer is premised on the abandonment of a philosophy of monadic subjectivity. The labor time represented by a commodity is the labor time required by society to produce that use value. Of the labor power available to society there exists in the organism of every ordinary individual, on an average apart from any special development, a plastic capacity to expend simple labor power (we see this in the capacity of ordinary individuals to shift job tasks). Commodities exchange in terms of temporal duration of this average, simple labor as required by society to produce them. Complex labor is only a more or less special development of this simple average labor power, so it's not difficult to understand why its product would exchange at some multiple of the product of simple average labor power. Rakesh > > > -- >Michael Perelman >Economics Department >California State University >Chico, CA 95929 > >Tel. 530-898-5321 >E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu >michaelperelman.wordpress.com
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