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

[Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>  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. Cheers, ajit sinha

Ajit you  miss the point of Marx's theory. Say a better
horse at the same price is brought on,
some labor dismissed and the quantity of
corn increased. But each unit of corn would have less value and
represent less surplus value per unit.
Why? Because
this is the way society signals to itself that less of its
inherently limited social labor time should now be
applied to  production of each unit of corn. Anyways, this
ontological equivalence
of labor and draught animals makes no sense. Social labor
is ontologically primary. Only if social labor recognizes and makes
use of land, means of production, draught animals are they
factors of production. For horses to work, social labor has to be
organized and allocated first. This is why social labor has ontological
primacy.

Rakesh