[OPE-L:6584] Re: Re: From Andrew Kliman

[Rakesh Bhandari <rakeshb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I can't see what in Skillman's 6519 could be taken as grounds for a
lawsuit since he seemed not be discussing the case but interpreting
the RRPE apology. I think Kliman already has enough problems
challenging  the technicist and static assumptions that have been
smuggled into radical thought from the bourgeois worldview in the
name of rigor and science.  Not much has changed in the last one
hundred years in terms of the obstacles that a strictly proletarian
based theory must confront, as Alejandro's recent posts indicate.

Science, technology, and favorable natural conditioss are all not
independent sources of value but they do give an independent force to
accumulation by increasing the productivity of labor in use value or
technical terms. After all,  the greater the productivity of labor,
the lower the unit values of wage goods and thus the greater the
production of relative surplus value. The greater the productivity of
labor, the greater in quantity the means of production and thus the
greater the capitalist ability to "employ" a greater number of
workers and thus extract a greater mass of surplus labor and surplus
value. By laying bare  proletarian labor as the exclusive source of
value and surplus value from which all non wage income is derived,
Marx does not deny that science and technology matter very much as to
the magnitude of the extorted surplus value.

I think we can best account for the role of science and technology by
analyzing them in terms of use value and value rather than by
building science and technology into reified technical conditions of
production which are then somehow mysteriously themselves made the
source of a maximum potential surplus conceived solely in physical or
use value terms.

I think the neo Ricardians hoped to find a third way that would
escape the fetishization of capital and the fetishization of
proletarian labor. They wanted to be radical, but it seemed obvious
that the wealth of nations does not depend first and foremost on
proletarian labor force at the command of capital.  If it did, then
India should be the wealthiest of all nations, not America.

I think this idea was more important in sustaining the neo Ricardian
critique than the problem of reducing fixed capital to dated labor.

 But as Michael Lebowitz noted long ago, they have ended up
fetishizing science and technology. Marx's analysis is in fact two
sided and dialectical while the alternative is one sidedly technical.

At any rate,  it's probably wrong to imagine politics undergirds
Kliman's latest legal forays when in fact all we have here is a
personal grudge match? The more I think about it, the more likely it
seems. And Kliman seems to me here petty and mean spirited to have
threatened legal action. I think he should retract the threat.

Let me say that I have been quite bothered by my exchanges with
Skillman; he does not seem to me to be a person willing to admit that
his Marx criticism is wrong even when no one else agrees with him. He
blames others for not understanding him, and when he is understood,
he won't even admit to that because it's incomprehensible to him that
someone who understands him could think he's on to no real logical
problem and on to nothing of signficance.   Of course Skillman does
not a pay a price for this very stubborn anti Marx attitude even on
this list. He will not be proven wrong not ever, not once--not on
this matter of the irrelevance and illogic of Marx's value theory.
So he's in a fight with Kliman. How could it be otherwise?


Rakesh