Re: [OPE-L] questions on the interpretation of labour values

[Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Re: [OPE-L] questions on the interpretation of labour valu

> Do you want a proof? Please, don't go yet to your kitchen and don't
> cook:
> simply tell the physical elements you have in it to produce for you
> whatever
> you want, and let me see the results. Please feel free to tell them to
> use
> any element that can enter _indirectly_ in whatever you want they cook
> for
> you.

Given the all male nature of this list and the sexual division of labor, I wouldn't be surprised if this proof fails.

I have tried to suggest a few times on this list that labor is active in a way that raw materials, machines and draught animals are not. If Marx cannot single out living or active social labor time, then his theory of value would collapse. The attempt to single out living labor in this way is dismissed as humanist bias by some as if the organization of social  relations of living labor as a nature imposed  necessity was humanist rather than materialist through and through.

Raw materials, machines, draught animals do not even exist as factors of production unless living social labor time has been allocated in such a quantitative and qualitative way to make use of them as such. And if commodity price did not remain a function of value,  a general commodity society could not allocate its labor time so as to make use of the inactive factors of production to reproduce itself.

That price remains a function of value is also underlined in empirical (as opposed to simply logical) terms by the ability of the labor theory of value to account for changes in exchange ratios over time, that is as a dynamic theory not as a theory of the unreal world of fixed technical conditions. Even a critic as Meghnad Desai concedes that the labor theory of value does remarkably well as a dynamic theory.

Marx was interested in the ideological reasons why this necessary functional dependence of price upon value in a generalized commodity society was not obvious and commonly accepted, and his primary answer was not subjective class bias (that is, Aristotle's slave owning biases or the promotion of neoclassical theory over the labor theory of value as bourgeois propaganda, though see here Guy Routh's book) but the objectively illusory nature of the market itself, as Paolo Cipolla on this list, John Torrance, Derek Sayer and others have argued.

The point is that Marx did not make his mark in proving the labor theory of value but in explaining the sources of resistance to it (and of course the dynamic macro economic consequences of it) . We would be mislead if we thought that the most important reason for rejection of the labor theory of value is the transformation problem which only provides the scientistic language to reject a theory which conflicts with some market phenomena and, and is dangerous politically. That is, the labor theory of value is in fact rejected for extra scientific reasons (it runs against some common sense, and it's politically dangerous), but that rejection masks itself in the scientistic language of linear production theory and tough guy theatrics.

At any rate, I think Marx's argument for the labor theory of value is logical deduction from obvious premises in much the same way as was Darwin's logical hypothesis of natural selection, as first conceived on the Beagle. This is obvious in the famous letter to Kugelmann.

Rakesh

ps Diego, still would like to hear your views on whether we should historical costs in the denominator of the profit rate and the replacement costs of constant capital in the numerator.

> Cheers,
> Diego