Date: Sat, 29 Oct 1994 00:54:10 -0500 (EST)
From: wesley david cecil <wcecil-AT-ucs.indiana.edu>
Subject: Re: LTV?


Thanks Justin for that post, I agree with all of your points and you picked 
the passages to which I was referring in Capital.  My point is that none 
of this is very helpful.  Socially necessary labor will, by definition, 
vary widely from society to society and the question of just what 
"necessary" 
means will be open to debate.  The problem of "wants and needs" is, as 
marx so aptly pointed out, enmeshed with the fact that wants and needs 
are created by society.  So the socially necessary labor to produce a 
product to fulfill a need will depend on what a given society defines as 
necessary as well as how particualar needs are created within that 
society.  The question of use-value in Marx, as generally noted, is a 
complete wreck, and exchange value can be, as Marx argues, very much 
divorced from a close tie with the amount of labor involved in producing 
an item(hence a Van Gogh painting can sell for 10's of Millions of 
dollars while a house can sell for a few tens of thousands).  So, while I 
find the labor theory of value a great place to explore ideological 
questions concerning how soieties organize and measure productivity, it 
seems a rather poor place to look for an econometric principle( a 
tendency I note in many of the posts concerning LTV).  

Wes


     ------------------