From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Fri Dec 01 2006 - 00:17:52 EST
>Hi Ajit > >OK let's cut to the chase as you suggest. > >Marx's theory of value implies the proposition that there is no profit >without surplus labour. It's logically possible that there is profit >without surplus labour. Hence Marx's theory of value is wrong. > >My theory of horses implies the proposition that they don't talk. It's >logically possible that horses can talk. Therefore my theory of horses >is wrong. > >This is not much of a critique is it? > >There's a reason why horses don't talk, and there's a reason we don't >find profits without surplus-labour. My talk of dynamic trajectories >and the intertwined historical emergence of universal labour and the >value-form, which you're not interested in, is an attempt to explain >why your logical possibility cannot be an actual possibility. > >You raise other issues that I'd like to comment on (unfeasibly large >rates of surplus-value and robot labour), but I'll follow your example >and stick to one issue at a time. > >Best, >-Ian. Hi Ian, I think Pack and others are missing the point. It's not metaphysical that society has to solve problems in the quantitative and qualitative allocation of the labor time available to it. Ajit is dealing with another problem--the distribution of a surplus of use values. This problem logically and temporally follows upon solving the problem of the quantitative and qualitative allocation of labor time. In a capitalist society people relate to each other through commodities. Said allocation problems can only be solved by the imputation of value to commodities through which social relations are mediated and responses to the price differentials from those respective values. Value regulates price though in a mediated and distorted way. For this reason the price form is a hieroglyph. As long as society has commodity relations of production value will however regulate price. As long as value is regulating price it's possible that an ever greater surplus of use values will not represent an ever greater absolute sum of surplus value. This is what Freeman and Kliman have shown even against the interesting objections of David Laibman who is not reading this message. If society did not have commodity relations of production value need not regulate prices, the inter-temporal changes in the aggregate prices of outputs and inputs and thus profits. Marx's law of value applies to a society which must solve the problem of the allocation of labor time in the context of the mediation of social relations of production by commodities. A fully automated economy has no such problem; the law of value need not and in fact could not regulate economic magnitudes. Rakesh
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