Date: Sun, 14 May 1995 21:11:44 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (jones/bhandari)
Subject: Re: Value, crisis, treadmill


 I read  boddhivasta as having  critiqued  Postone's value analysis on the
grounds of insufficient attention to the role of demand in the
determination of value: value depends on the ex post facto social
validation of production in the form of purchase, not on the actual,
concrete labor time spent in production; unit values diminish as needs are
satiated; idiosyncratic demand may alter the value of commodities produced
in the same labor time at the same level of skill


 I do not understand fully Marx's critique of subjective value theory or
whether demand is built into the concept of socially necessary labor time
(three interesting critiques are Marc Linder, Anti-Samuelson, volume II; Wm
Blake's critique of Austrian value theory in his Marxian Economic Theory
and Its Criticism--hope you are reading this Chris S; and Patrick Murray's
discussion of the role of demand in Marx's value theory in Fred Moseley,
ed. Marx's Method in Capital.  Sorry not be able to keep up my side of this
discussion--this is tough stuff). 

While boddhivatsa's post may turn out to include some grave difficulties
for a certain takes on Marxist value theory, I do not think it speaks much
to Postone's  analysis at the level of temporal categories of the
production of extra surplus value, its elimination via generalized adoption
of new methods and the resumption of the process. 

Postone introduces new concepts to understand time and that peculiar
compulsion to have to keep up with it--note the title of the book Time,
Labor and Social Domination.  This has not been done before, as even
hostile reviewers have commented.  But I am surely not the person to
present the analysis in its full complexity to the list.

Rakesh 



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