Date: Mon, 15 May 1995 14:56:35 +1000
From: Steve.Keen-AT-unsw.EDU.AU
Subject: Re: Value - Steve's paper: Part 3


Jerry posts, after Chris' "summary" (sorry, Chris, but the inverted
commas are more than justified!) of my paper:

If I understand Chris's summary of Steve's paper correctly, all that
Steve has written has been written by many other Neo-Ricardians
previously (including Sraffa, Steedman, and many others)...

If Chris' summary did my paper justice, this would be correct.
Unfortunately, it did not. The Sraffian critique takes it for
granted that Marx assumed that labor is the only source of
surplus value, and then goes on to mathematically critique the
consequences of this for the theory of exchange in equilibrium
(ie, in the "long run" to which Chris's quote from Engels alluded).

My critique argues that Marx in fact believed he had PROVEN that
labor is the only source of surplus value, using what I have
called is "Commodity Axioms". However, a careful application of
those axioms shows that in fact Marx's Commodity Axioms
contradict the key assertion of the labor theory of value--which is,
not that labor is productive of surplus value, but that all other
inputs simply transfer the value they currently contain (and therefore
do not generate surplus).

If you want a summary of my arguments, then I think I had better
post them! But I will delay doing so until I have read the other
comments Chris's post inspired.

I agree that there has "been little movement on both sides" as a
consequence of the Sraffian critique. Both sides now ignore the other;
in fact, when I submitted the first of my papers to the Sraffian
journal, The Manchester School, it was returned unread as "not
suitable".

As for the comment re Ricardians and Post Keynesians, you are quite
correct: they are now effectively poles apart--and a colleague of
mine, Peter Kriesler, is involved in a long (and fairly acrimonious)
debate with Steedman over this.

Keynes's rejection of the classics, however, was a rejection of
embyro neoclassicism more than Ricardo et al. What he did
reject was Say's Law, which was something Ricardo accepted, and
it is something which is precious difficult to comment upon from
a Sraffian perspective. This, in my opinion, is because the
Sraffian framework is fundamentally static, when the interesting
questions (re Say's Law, etc.) are dynamic.

Cheers,
Steve


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