Date: Fri, 28 Nov 1997 21:40:20 +0000
From: Chris Burford <cburford-AT-gn.apc.org>
Subject: Re: M-TH: value


At 04:29 PM 11/28/97 +0100, Jurriaan wrote:

> Justin Schwartz  writes
>> >
>> >I think the LTV requires two theses... 
>
>> >       Labor is the source of all value.
>> >
>> >In addition there is also the proposition that:
>> >
>> >       Socially necessary labor time is the measure of all value.
>>
 
> However in his "critique of the Gotha programme" Marx explicitly
>dissociates
>himself from the view that labour "is the source of all value".  

etc. etc including references to Rubin and to non-equilibrium systems theory.

Bravo!! Justin is valued protagonist on these matters, but as he knows, I
consider his reservations about the Marxist theory of value as empiricist.

This thread has been round many times, and quite right too. So long as
there is capitalism, there must be a critique of capitalism, and so long as
there is a critique of capitalism, Marx's critique stands in the first
place. And at the core of that critique is the marxist theory of value.

Some other points.

1. Marx and Engels never talk about the "Labour Theory of Value" (may I be
smitten with flames if I can be proved wrong on this point!). Anyone who
talks about the LTV is in great danger of not adequately differentiating
the marxist law of value from the discovery of the 19th century classical
economists, and why the difference is so important after the rise of
capitalism. (Engels said that in its simple correspondence with labour
time, the law of value had been around for at least 7,000 years. See
addendum to Volume III of Capital)


2. The embodied theory of value fatally misunderstands the Marxian process
of abstraction. The crystallisation is not literal. Right at the beginning
of the section in Grundrisse on the Method of Political Economy, where Marx
discusses the relationship of the abstract to the concrete, he takes
exchange value as an example:

"For example, the simplest economic category, say e.g. exchange value,
presupposes population, moreover a population producing in specific
relations; as well as a certain kind of family, or commune, or state, etc.
It can never exist other than as an abstract, one-sided relation within an
already given, concrete living whole."

A failure to understand the dynamic and elastic but real limits set by the
sum total of socially produced exchange value, fails to understand the
periodic crises of capitalism.

It leaves us with a wooden, metaphysical deformity of a theory.


3. Neglect of the Marxian theory of value makes it impossible to discuss
the massive shift of exchange value from the less developed to the more
developed countries except in empirical terms.


4. Reference to Sraffa is misleading. Sraffa was a friend of Gramsci who
came to work in Cambridge as an economist and had close connections with
Keynes. His works were not directed to criticising Marx's theory of value
but the logical foundations of the neo-classical school. 

His name occurs in connection with value theory because of the polemically
entitled work by Ian Steedman, "Marx after Sraffa", 1977. This claimed that
following Sraffa, the Marxist theory of value was no longer tenable. The
book depends on detailed mathematics almost certainly not always understood
by those who quoted it so readily as a watershed. More importantly it
depends on a number of higher debatable prior assumptions, as has been
tested on debate on these lists; assumptions that affect the universal
validity of its conclusions. 

Nevertheless it is much alluded to by those who think that the Marxist
theory of value has been disproved. But last year in England, it was
perhaps significantly out of print. I am not aware it has ever been
reprinted. Surprising if it is as definitive as some claim it to be.
Surely there would be no shortage of donors for such a project. 



Chris Burford

London.



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