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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