Re: [Marxism] labor theory of value

[Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus@xxxxxxxxx>]

Rakesh:

> Marxists struggle with a labor value theory of
price. 
> Some Marxists just abandon price as an explanandum. 
> But the difficulty is clear: capitalists seem to
mark > up prices over their total costs in the absence
of 
> any consideration of labor value.

Abstract labor is *not* a physiological substrate of
commodities that "exists" in empirical reality.  It is
a relation of effective validity
("Geltungsverhaeltnis") that exists in a society in
which all commodities are made commensurable by
exchange that is mediated by money.  

As Marx says in the famous letter to Kugelmann, every
society has to proportion out the total labor of
society to ensure the material reproduction of
society.

In capitalism, the proportioning of labor occurs ex
post facto.  Only in exchange is it determined how
socially necessary a concrete act of labor was.

Marx's concept of value is an explanation of this
social relationship between producers.

For that reason, I think all the attempts to calculate
prices from values are superfluous and misguided. 
What is depicted in the first three chapters of
Capital is not an empirically existing society of
simple commodity production where commodities are
actually exchange at their "values".  Rather, Marx is
unfolding the determinate, basic forms of capitalist
society at an extremely high level of abstraction,
shorn of more concrete determinations.

(P.S. As every great scientific innovation still
contains traces and residues of the scientific
discourses preceding it, I think Marx's attempts to
calculate a transformation of value into prices is a
bad Ricardian holdover which is inconsistent with
Marx's own theoretical innovation, his monetary theory
of value.  As a result, opponents of Marx have been
using it to try to beat Marx with ever since)




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