At 10:57 AM 6/10/97 -0700, Duncun Foley wrote:
>As I said in my EEA paper, I'm not sure I'm completely happy with the UC
>conception of the value of labor-power, not because I want to go back to
>the labor embodied in workers' consumption, but because Marx's conception
>of the value of labor-power has an ex ante aspect to it that my ex post
>definition doesn't catch. (There was some discussion of this point on the
>list a few months ago.)
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Why you don't want to go back to 'embodied labor' in workers consumption
idea? What are your fundamental problems with it?
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>Since UC tends to be ex post, it is largely agnostic on the ex ante
>determination of the level of wages. Again, a few weeks ago we started a
>discussion of the determination of the level of wages and the wage share. I
>took w* as given in my reply to you because it seemed to me that was the
>"ground rule" of the transformation problem in the abstract. In fact I
>suppose the value of labor-power in the UC sense is determined
>conjuncturally by the intersection of a whole bunch of concrete
>determinations. What makes me somewhat uncomfortable is my feeling that
>there is a longer-run conception of workers' standard of living that plays
>a real role in the system and is not just the ex post outcome period by
>period.
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Your last point is the point I have been making in my debate with Mike
Lebowitz. I'm glad that you see some merit in it. Cheers, ajit sinha