From: ajit sinha (sinha_a99@YAHOO.COM)
Date: Sat Sep 01 2007 - 18:52:40 EDT
--- Philip Dunn <hyl0morph@YAHOO.CO.UK> wrote: > Hi Ajit > > The 50-50 split is arbitrary just for illustrative > purposes. I don't > know of any way to tell what is wages and what is > profit in the case of > the self-employed. > > If the other painting was sold for only two million > that is only one > million wages plus profits for an hour's work. > > I am unable to see the force of your objections. ____________________________ The force of my objection is that by your reasoning my same expenditure of "labor time" has different wages and creates different values by your definition, which makes your definition nonsensical. __________________________ > > Assets such as Picassos are valuable in the everyday > sense of the term. > > I have given an example to suggest that they possess > value in Marx's > sense, embodied labour value. > > Do you think that Piccassos possess value? __________________ No. _____________ > > If so, what do you consider the nature of this value > to be? Where did it > come from? > > If not, why not? _______________________ It is because value is a theoretical concept. Adam Smith, Ricardo, and following them Marx defined their theoretical field by taking only those commodities into consideration whose supply could be increased or reduced by application of more or less labor. They had a concept called center of gravitation, which was central to their understanding of 'competition' in capitalism. Marx's 'absolute' value category also applies only to such commodities. Rare paintings such as Picaso's that are fixed in supply do have prices but don't fall under the law of competition or gravitation. Their prices are solely determined by the intensity of demand (or utility). People who are generally not very clear about the theories make the mistake of jumping quickly from theoretical categories to empirical categories. For example, reducing total money prices of an economy to some kind of total value by using whatever translation mechanism they do, forgets that value categories can only be applied to only a subset of the commodities that have prices in the empirical world. Furthermore, at any given time prices of commodities are not equal to 'prices of production' or values. Even if you assume that value categories could be applied to all the commodities in the market, if the market prices are not equal to prices of production or values then the proposition that total money prices must be equal to total money equivalent of value would be wrong, unless you assume that demand curves of all the commodites are identical rectangular hyperbolas. I hope this clearfies your thinking somewhat. Cheers, ajit sinha ____________________________________________________________________________________ Sick sense of humor? Visit Yahoo! TV's Comedy with an Edge to see what's on, when. http://tv.yahoo.com/collections/222
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Sep 30 2007 - 00:00:04 EDT