I'm looking at this puzzle you quoted.
The answer to the question 'how much' is not an either/or. For simple human reproduction (setting aside the moral and historical component) the 'amount' of consumption goods is a physical amount. In the simplified model, you can only eat so much bread. But it does not follow that the value representation of those commodities thereby becomes inconsequential.
The consumption goods must take the form of commodities - if they did not they could never find their way into the workers hands. (Remembering that Marx, unlike Steedman, was primarily interested in the _form_ of value, and only secondarily in its measure).
Furthermore, there is a value limit upon the amount of bread the worker can consume, over and above the physical limit. The value of the bread the worker consumes cannot exceed the value of his product, or their would be no surplus. Imagine the worker is employed in a bakery. He earns a shilling a day, produces a loaf a day, and the value of one loaf is one shilling. Result: no profits. The entire social product has fallen to the worker. In value terms, the wage bill is equal to the entire takings. This is a value limit, not a simple physiological limit because, if the productivity doubles, then the worker can be paid the price of a loaf (though that will fall in price to sixpence). In physiological terms the limit can be overcome, but in value terms the wage bill can never exceed the takings.
That example, though, is flawed because it abstracts from the social division of labour, rather as Steedman tends to, at which point he discovers - lo and behold - that you do not need a law of value. A better way of looking at it would be in the aggregate. A number of workers, organised in different concerns, produce a total social product to the value of x, and get paid a total wage of y. y<x. x-y = total profit. The question that Steedman avoids is how can these various exchanges occur? Only because these values are commensurated as values, expressed in prices.
So, the value of labour power is indeed determined like that of any other commodity, by the expenditure of labour upon the commodities that go to make it up. But the consumption of those commodities, and its magnitude, falls within the realm of use values. (Likewise, incidentally, the consumption of living labour in the production process is a consumption of its useful property, that of creating value. In being consumed that labour power is gone. The money exchanged against labour power is spent in the payment of the wage, and cannot simply be passed on into the value of the commodity. Rather the value equivalent of the wage, and of the profits must be created anew by labour power.)
So I'm not sure that Gordon has got Marx beat. What do you think?
In message <v02130500630bf9a1446c@[128.112.71.16]>, Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU> writes
>Marx remains open
>here to one of Ian Steedman's major criticisms (the other being the
>problem of joint production), nicely summarized in his own way by David
>Gordon in Resurrecting Marx (transaction, 1990):
>
>"According to Marx's account, wages (and hence surplus value) depend on the
>commodities required to sustain the laborer. To simplify, imagine that
>laborers need only bread to survive. Then, according to Marx, wages depend
>on howmuch bread the workers require.
>
>"An ambiguity lies concealed in the phrase 'how much.' Does this mean how
>much in value terms, or in physical terms? That is to say, is the question
>at issue what quantity of bread the worker needs--or is it, rather, what
>the value of this quantity is? Marx took the question in the second way.
>The value of wages, in his view, depends on the value of the bread the
>worker needs.
>
>"Steedman's objection is that once the physical quantity of bread at issue
>is given, this suffices to determine wages (and hence profits). The value
>of bread 'drops out' of the picture altogether: no recourse to it is
>necessary in order to explain wages.
>
>"Steedman proves this through the presentation of a simple model, which he
>later complicates. At first, for example, he assumes that only one
>technique of production is necessary; later, he allows choice of technique.
>Although Steedman's argument does not require very difficult mathematics, I
>do not think I have a sufficient grip on it to try to explain his reasoning
>in detail. Rather I shall attempt to present the basic point of his
>argument in my own way. "If wages depend on teh value of bread, then we
>obviously need to know that value. But bread, like all other commodities,
>is subject to the labor theory of vlaue, in Marx's view. To determine the
>value of bread, one needs to determine the value of the labor that produces
>bread. But the wages of bread produces, like all other wages, depend on the
>value on the value of labor power. This in turn depends on the value of
>bread, in the way earlier explained.
>
>"The circularity here is apparent. Before one can determine the value of
>labor power, one needs to know the value of bread, a value that in turn
>depends on the value of labor power. Unless one can break out of the
>circle, the labor theory's explanation of wages and profit fails.
>
>"Steedman himself favored substituting a theory advanced by Sraffa...for
>the standard Marxist labor theory. This system, like Marx's, relies on an
>objective measure of value, but uses a commodity other than labo ras the
>unit of calculation (Sraffa's actual choice was corn--in American usage,
>grain). In Sraffa's system, labor's wasge is not fixed by the cost of
>production of the goods needed the 'produce' the laborer. Indeed, nothing
>within Sraffa's system fixes wages. They are an 'exogeneous variable' which
>so far as the system is concerned is abitrary.
>
>"In Steedman's analysis of Marx, wage rates are indeed determined. However,
>this comes about only because Steedman assumes with Marx that the vlaue of
>labor pwoer depends on the bread needed by the laborer. Marx's argument for
>this depends on part of the labor theory tha tSteedman has rejected: the
>VALUE of labor pwoer is determiend by the the VALUE of the bread required
>to produce the laborer. Having rejected this, Steedman needs to provide
>another argument for the conclusion that wages are fixed by the physical
>quantities of goods required. He does show, I am right, that GIVEN that
>wages are so determined, an explanation of wages and profits is available.
>But he does not argue that wages are fixed in this way."
>
>yours, rakesh
>
>
-- Jim heartfield