actually the quota of 3 is a good idea. I'll stick to it from now on.
Tom I wrote: >>>In other words, labor is the only source of that by which we can pay a fair price for something in a market.<<<
I answered: >> Marx doesn't talk about "fair prices" at all. The closest he comes in CAPITAL is to _assume_ that products sell at their values, which is the way things work in a largely hypothetical system of simple commodity production (where self-employed producers sell only to each other). Most economists (of his day and today) have the idea of simple commodity production stuck in their heads and it sort of plays the role of determining what they mean by "fair prices" (no monopoly, etc.) though they don't use that term. (Rather, they talk about "Pareto optimality" and the like.) One of the points of CAPITAL is that capitalism is _not_ a system of simple commodity production. <<
Tom now asks: >Isn't it saying the same thing to say "this commodity sold at its value" and "this commodity sold at a fair price"? Saying the same thing in ordinary speach, that is, not in Marx's vocabulary, which as you say doesn't include the expression "fair price." And since we can use Marx to rewrite the first statement as "the price it sold at is its the expression of its value in money," can't we say that "fair price" means the expression of the commodity's value in money"? That at least was my reasoning.<
"Fair" seems like a moral category, but Marx was not a moral philosopher who developed ideas about what "fair" means (unlike John Rawls or John Roemer). Cornell West's dissertation (published by Monthly Review press) convinced me that Marx's main moral perspective in later life was to contrast (1) what capitalism claimed to be doing with (2) what it actually did. That is, rather than putting forth his own standards of morality and fairness, he argued that capitalism didn't live up to its own standards. So I think it's plausible to say that Marx thought that capitalism didn't involve selling products at fair prices -- using the capitalists' own (ideological) definition of "fair." But note that he never accepted their definition as his own, instead seeing it as reflecting the incomplete and warped vision that people get living inside capitalist society.
>More to the point though, my phrase "that by which we can pay a fair
price" was an attempt to come up with an equivalent to "something we might
value," but applying to value rather than use-value.<
Marx used it more in the sense of "something that capitalism values."
>But perhaps it is important to think of value as something that has cut loose from any such common-sensical explanation, just as abstract labor has cut loose from the very specifically qualified labor of the simple commodity producer. Is that your point in the last of your sentences that I've copied above? <
right. value _is_ abstract labor.
Jim Devine jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html