From: Ian Wright (wrighti@ACM.ORG)
Date: Wed Oct 24 2007 - 20:44:37 EDT
> I am fully aware that science & ideology interconnect in significant ways. But that doesn't > mean we ought to warmly embrace the interconnection and plunge full-steam-ahead with > the integration of value judgments into our statements about how the world is objectively > constrcted. The other alternative--trying as best we can to separate the two realms of > discourse--is a better way to move forward if we want to have useful conversations with > people who have different ideological perspectives. You may have misunderstood my intent since from my point of view the traditional Marxist concept of exploitation is not a value judgment but a technical concept that describes how profit is unpaid labour-time. This is not a moral theory, but a theory of what actually happens in the capitalist economy given what monetary quantities represent. And there is a fact of the matter regarding which theories of economic value are correct descriptions of economic reality. Such facts must frame any debates on distributional justice, since to know whether a system is just or unjust first requires us to understand how that system works. I'm not sure what the surplus-school, lacking a theory of economic value, can contribute to these questions, other than the observation that workers don't get all the surplus. But I'm happy to be shown otherwise.
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