From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Tue Jun 12 2007 - 22:15:53 EDT
Michael P writes: >Marx says that commodities are commensurate in the market, but there >is no way to >get behind the market to get a handle on the abstract labor measures. One does not have to get behind the market to get a handle on the abstract labor measures because the measure exists only in and through the market. Bohm Bawerk charges circularity. You seem to agree! Mark Blaug's main criticism too. But Hilferding replies that the movement of prices shows that this is just what is happening. For example to the extent that it takes less special training for a simple average laborer to become a qualified laborer and/or the more productive becomes the qualified worker, the multiple will tend to decline, ceteris paribus. > How many >hours of abstract labor does a surgeon represent. This is not a good example as surgery is not a reproducible commodity; its supply is limited by the AMA. > Can 20 or 50 unskilled labor >perform the same procedure? No but with time and training an average laborer can herself or-- pending proper prenatal and perinatal care, social support and educational opportunity--her child can become a surgeon, though our billion dollar plus IQ industry seems bent on denying this possibility and to that extent itself creating an obstacle, the legitimation of the inequality created by accumulation interfering with accumulation itself; at any rate, the the value of a surgery would reflect the training time as well as related other incurred labor costs. We are teachers here, I think we should insist on our own importance. Rubin (and by the way I do think we need an explanation for why whatever little American Marxism there has been it has been derivative of European ideas--Sweezy from the right wing Austro Marxists, Mattick from Grossman; Hans who I don't think agrees with you is I think German born) has an expansive definition of the sundry compounded in qualified labour expenditure. I must re-read chapter. Here it is http://www.marxists.org/archive/rubin/value/ch15.htm the labor expended in training the producers of a given profession enters into the value of the product of qualified labor. But in professions which differ in terms of higher qualifications and greater complexity of labor, the training of laborers is usually carried out by means of selection, from a larger number of the most capable students. From among three individuals studying engineering, perhaps only one graduates and achieves the goal. Thus, the expenditure of the labor of three students, and the corresponding increased expenditure of labor by the instructor, are required for the preparation of one engineer. Thus the transfer of students to a given profession,among whom only one third has a chance of reaching the goal, takes place to a sufficient extent only if the increased value of the products of the given profession can compensate the unavoidable (and to some extent wasted) expenditures of labor. Other conditions remaining equal, the average value of the product of one hour of labor in professions where training requires expenditures of labor by numerous competitors will be greater than the average value of one hour of labor in professions in which these difficulties do not exist. [15] The objections of these critics can be reduced to two basic propositions: 1) no matter how Marxists might explain the causes of the high value of products of qualified labor, it remains a fact of exchange that the products of unequal quantities of labor are exchanged as equivalents, which contradicts the labor theory of value; 2) Marxists cannot show the criterion or standard by which we could equalize in advance a unit of qualified labor, for example one hour of a jeweller's labor, with a determined number of units of simple labor. The first objection is based on the erroneous impression that the labor theory of value makes the equality of commodities dependent exclusively on the physiological equality of the labor expenditures necessary for their production. With this interpretation of the labor theory of value, one cannot deny the fact that one hour of the jeweller's labor and four hours of the shoemaker's labor represent, from a physiological point of view, unequal quantities of labor. Every attempt to represent one hour of qualified labor as physiologically condensed labor and equal, in terms of energy, to several hours of simple labor, seems hopeless and methodologically incorrect. Qualified labor is, in fact, condensed, multiplied, potential labor; it is not physiologically, but socially condensed. The labor theory of value does not affirm the physiological equality but the social equalization of labor which, in turn, of course takes place on the basis of properties which characterize labor from the material-technical and physiological aspects (see the end of the previous chapter). > -- >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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