From: Philip Dunn (hyl0morph@yahoo.co.uk)
Date: Mon Jul 28 2008 - 18:26:22 EDT
My characterisation of the expression 'value of labour-power' as irrational does need a bit of explanation. I am not following Marx's discussion, in the Economic Manuscripts 1861-63, of the irrationality of the expression 'value of labour'. I am saying that the expression 'value of labour' is irrational because value and labour are identical. No-one would say "the value of embodied labour ..." because the value of produced commodities and their embodied labour is the same thing. Similarly, labour activity, or living labour, and value creating activity are the same thing. Further, the labour-power of the producer commodity and its value are the same thing. Changed terminology is required to express this. Speak of embodied labour value, value creating labour activity and labour-power value. This labour-power value has nothing to do with necessary labour time. If measured in clock hours, one hour of the producer commodity hired means one hour of labour-power value. Labour-power value is not embodied labour. On Mon, 2008-07-28 at 11:00 +0200, Dave Zachariah wrote: > Philip Dunn wrote: > > I hold, however, that the expression 'value of labour-power' is as > > irrational as the expression 'the value of labour'. > > > > I wouldn't say that it is irrational. But I think the way "VLP" is used > by Jerry leads to a weak theory. Rather I'd distinguish: > > (a) the labour-value of the real wage > (b) the total labour (social *and* domestic) necessary to reproduce > the capacity to work > > I think that given Marx's demonstration of exploitation under equivalent > exchange it is best to call (a) the "value of labour-power", since it > was "labour-power" as a historically specific commodity that was his > theoretical invention. Whereas (b) is a more general and historically > invariant concept. > > //Dave Z > > _______________________________________________ > ope mailing list > ope@lists.csuchico.edu > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope _______________________________________________ ope mailing list ope@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope
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