Re: [OPE-L] Ajit's Paper on Sraffa and Late Wittgenstein

[Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Ian, you are taking a wrong road. Stop and rethink.
> First of all, I'll advise that a good way of
> understanding the whole business of value theory is
> not to first join a team and try to play for that
> team. What I mean is that there is no need to start of
> my saying, "I'm going to defend or prove that Marx was
> right". I started of that way, and that led me to
> waste a lot of time. I think that the most
> non-materialist aspect of Marx's theory or philosophy
> is the notion of labor-values. The concept is
> completely metaphysical! Don't you think that it is
> possible for us to imagine an economy where all
> productive labor is replaced by robots. Still this
> economy will have division of labor, capitalists,
> prices of commodities, profits.

Ajit,
Don't you mean that this economy would have a division of robots?
I don't see how this thought experiment allows us to understand
how given the  necessity of the transformation of nature by
organized social labor the allocation of social labor and its
internal relations are determined when
social labor relations are necessarily mediated by commodities
as a result of production being undertaken for the sale of commodities
at profit rather than the meeting of social needs.

How are these practical problems actually solved?

For the purposes of theory, we will need an  answer
to that question until the utopia (or dystopia?) of full
automation arrives.





> And you can also
> imagine wage labor, who are relegated to doing only
> unproductive labor. What will happen to the concept of
> labor-values in this economy?

Again the question is how in the here and now social
labor is actually organized by means of the commodities
through which social labor relations are necessarily mediated
in that social laborers relate to each other only through those commodities
which they have produced.




>  Again, think of another
> example, in agriculture a wage laborer who is paid
> subsistence wage and a horse work to produce surplus
> corn. Why is that it is the wage laborers labor
> produces value and surplus value and not horses? Think
> of an answer in materialist terms and not metaphysical
> terms.

I don't see what is metaphysical about the question
(the question Marx underlined in the famous letter
to Kugelmann) about how
the allocation of social and its internal relations are determined when
social labor relations are necessarily mediated by commodities as
a result of production being undertaken for the sale of commodities
at profit rather than meeting of the social needs.

Please explain what is metaphysical here.

Rakesh




> Cheers, ajit sinha
>
>
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