File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/94-07-31.000, message 130


Subject: Re: MORE ON LABOR THEORY OF VALUE 
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 94 09:56:52 +0100
From: wpc-AT-cs.strath.ac.uk



Chris seems to be shifting his ground

Originally he asserted that the Austrian approach was
far superior to the labour theory of value in explaining
the existence of relative prices. 

When I then pointed to evidence in the recent economic literature
that the labour theory of value is actually very good at 
predicting relative prices - at least as good as Ricardo 
said that it was, he then says that the problem is not
empirical but logical. 

The labour theory may be true to the facts but it is to be
rejected on the grounds of the 'QUALITATIVE dimension'.
This shift in grounds and choice of words is very revealing,
for what is at stake in the dispute between Marx and the
Austrians is a conflict between science and class prejudice.

The labour theory of value can be expressed as an emprically
testable conservation law: that in the exchange of commodities
value, in the sense of embodied labour, is conserved. 
Emprical data shows that this is broadly the case. If on the
other hand we advance a subjectivist theory that prices 
are the results of ideas in the heads of buyers and sellers, we
are not advancing an empirically testable proposition. We 
are telling a fable designed to give moral meaning to events.

But to return to the issue of QUALITY. Quality is a revealing
word, if we deconstruct it we notice that it has long carried
class overtones - people of quality being distinguished from
the riff-raff or plebs. What was unsettling to Austrian aristocratic
intellectuals was the democratic or leveling implications of
the labour theory of value. If abstract labour was the source
of value, what recognition can there be for a man of quality?
Is he to be put on the same level as a mere 'day labourer who
tightens the bolts on an assembly line'.

Chris says that the issue is one of logic and advocates adherence
to Aristotle in this regard. But outside of formal systems,
it is impossible to separate the claims of logic from class bias.
Chris's statement that:
>Surely there is a difference IN KIND between the person who
>INVENTS the automobile, and the day labourer who tightens the
>nuts and bolts on an automobile assembly line.
Is no more a statement of logic than Aristotles similar argument:
  Therefore whenever there is the same wide discrepancy
  between human beings as there is between soul and body
  man and beast, then those whose condition is such that 
  their function is the use of their bodies and nothing
  better can be expected of them, those, I say, are slaves
  by nature.

It is the oldest ruling class argument in the world, there are
different kinds of people, the superior sort who are fit to
think and rule and the inferior sort who must labour for them.
A Henry Ford who invents the assembly line is a man of different
quality from the poor wretches he hires to man it.

It is of course a myth that any man invents a complex industrial
product like a car. Their design as much as their production is
the work of the collective labourer in whom individual differences
are subsumed.

What the objectors to the labour theory of value on grounds of
quality do is conflate two separate issues 
 1) Differences of productivity between one who is skilled and
    unskilled at a given task
 2) Differences between trades or professions.
The first alone is relevant to the argument about simple or complex
labour. The second relates to differences between the concrete
form of different labours, and thus relates to the opposition
abstract/concrete labour.

They misread Marx's simple/complex opposition as applying to
class differences in status, and then bemoan the fact that 
the theory does not adequately recognise these status distinctions.
The labour theory of value is a levelers manifesto, that is why
the theorists of the ruling classes abandoned it.

Paul Cockshott


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