Date: Wed, 27 Jul 1994 02:48:56 +0700 From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (donna jones) Subject: Labor, surplus value Dear Steve, I am a tyro at this stuff (a graduate student where there has been no sustained treatment of Capital), so I may well be wrong. Indeed your papers look very interesting, and I shall read them. Perhaps after ten days or so, I'll be able to get back to you. As I understand the dialectic between use-value and exchange value, it is the discovery of that contradiction within the commodity itself which enables a solution to the problem that surplus value must be found both within and outside of the circulation process. That problem is resolved by the special commodity of labor-power--its consumption as a use value, i.e., the actual process of labor, is more productive of value than its exchange value. In other words, Marx's distinction between labor-power and labor. This distinction allows Marx to isolate the source of surplus value and to hold independent it of the many forms in which it appears:profit, rent, interest. Carchedi's point here is that as price mechanism redistributes value from certain capitals to others (he is very precise here about the mechanism of distribution), the illusion may be fostered that fixed capital creates value. There have been of course much more subtle treatments of this. If you get tired of all the china that I am breaking, you could turn to Martha Campbell's fine essay in Economics as Worldly Philosophy, ed. R Blackwell. d jones ------------------
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