Date: Sun, 28 Aug 1994 13:32:48 +0700
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (donna jones)
Subject:  Re:value


Dear Steve,

I am sorry if I was shouting (and that is very possible)--I shall try to be
more careful

I thank you for the the following enunciation of your theses; it shows an
obvious clarity on your part that I lack:

>(a) marx devised an analysis based on a dialectic between use-value
>and exchange-value which became his core analytic tool, taking precedence
>over concepts such as necessary labor; (b) that analysis was lost almost
>completely after Engels and until Rosdolsky; (c) when properly applied,
>that analysis contradicts the LTV, and the TRPF, and the transformation
>problem.

Guess, what. I agree, I think, with (a), and as you indicated in an earlier
post, an important question is whether (a) is also about the dialectic of
concrete and abstract labor.  I tried to suggest that it was; hence the
early quote from Capital in my last posting. Also I agree that for Marx the
crucial distinction could not be necessary/surplus labor first because
surplus labor is not historically specific to capitalism and second,because
surplus labor is not always value-positing labor even in the capitalist
mode of production. E.g. Marx's discussion of merchant capital as a
tendential recepient of the average rate of profit--though deducting from
it. Thus, I also tried to show that even for Marx, value is not always
created by the use-value of labor poweri.e. actual laboring activity. 

About b. I'm going to look over Rosdolsky's treatment of use-value.
However, Rosdolsky was a student of Grossmann, and the latter's 1941 piece
reprinted in Capital and Class 1977 is basically about the contradictory
unity of usevalue and exchange value. The analysis is too supple for me to
summarize, and it goes to every major facet of the marxian critique of
political economy.  The reason I am throwing out quotes is that I don't
have the dialectical facility to capture contradictions, nor the precision
to dilineate the relationship among complex concepts. 

I look forward to any future elaborations of c.

>With that being my perspective, you can quote subsequent Marxists using the
>necessary labor/"Value is labor" approach, or Marx himself using the
>same in some segments, without convincing me. Evidently, I can throw use-
>value oriented excerpts at you with equal lack of impact.

 My approach is not simply about necessary labor (see above), and the
question I reiterate is fundamentally about how to account for surplus
value.  I agree commodities cannot be reduced to labor inputs. And relying
upon Carchedi, I have agreed that fixed capital *necessarily appears* to be
value productive in the realm of competition.   This is the basis of
bourgeois common sense, and it is not wrong in a practical business sense.
But this opens up the very subtle marxian understanding of the relationship
between essence and appearance and his defetishization of that which
NECESSARILY appears as so many sources of surplus value.

If I go any further here, I will have to quote from Patrick Murray,
Carchedi, Derek Sayer, Paul Mattick Jr, Jairus Banaji, Geoffrey Kay,
Geoffrey Pilling, and many others.

>We have reached what Kuhn might have called a "paradigm barrier". I
>can see little point in continuing to shout through it.

Even if this is true between us, I hope your exchange with Gene and Chris
continues. I am starved for discussion about the theory of value, so let it
continue.  However, putative incommensurability should not leave us with
this, this on one side and that, that on the other. That would be
metaphyics as Engels put it,and would be reactionary insofar as
contradiction remains the moving principle.  Of course, if I am shouting
and not engaging in immanent critique of what you are arguing, the fault is
mine, as it may well be. I have definitely had that problem with many of
the classic critiques of the transformation procedure.  I am trying to
understand the marxian responses in Freeman and Mandel, eds. and Ben Fine,
eds.  But I am a long way away from having done do. 

d jones



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