yep, Rakesh, you said it much more eloquently than I did.
> There is no classical-Marxian labor theory of value.<
I'll add only that there's a passage in _the poverty of philosophy_ where Marx argues, contra Proudhon, that the labour theory of value cannot be "the revolutionary theory of the future", an argument which is central to comprehending the whole structure and gist of Marx's analysis of capital, and capitalism I think. without this acknowledgement, marxism risks becoming repetition rather than critique.
on the related issue of production price and value, and the difference b/n capital and capitalists in the expansion of things like export processing zones, prison labour, bonded labour etc (and no, I don't have any firm answers here either, and will always have to go back and read v3 of _capital_), here are some passages from Sergio bologna's excellent "money and crisis: Marx as correspondent of the new york tribune, 1856-57, pt 2" from (the sadly now defunct) _common sense_ (issue 14):
"One recalls immediately the section on crisis in the _Grundrisse_, in which he [Marx] speaks of the intrinsic necessity of the accumulation mechanism in reducing the amount of necessary labour and of increasing the amount of surplus labour -- posing this necessity as the real origin of the crisis. Each employer sees only other employers' workers as consumers, not his own, each sees his own as a mass from which to extract a maximum of surplus labor. Mechanisms of surplus value and mechanisms of crisis are thus indivisibly related.
... The percentage of child labour (children below the age of 13) shows a continuos increase from1838 onwards, and reaches 6.6% in 1856, while that of young workers between the ages of 13 and 18 actually fell slightly. Employment levels of women (aged 13 and upwards) increased: from 55.2% in 1838 to 57% in 1856. Adult male levels (18 years and upwards) fell from 26.5% of the workforce t 25.8% in 1856.
The insistence with which Marx underlines the importance of child labour and women's labour ... confirms the hypothesis that the model of the big factory which he seeks to take on is that in which there is the maximum wage compression, in which the wage really is a minimum subsistence level, in which 'slavery' is the determining element.
... in Marx the analysis of the disproportions which are produced within capitalist crises is viewed within a perspective of the re-establishment of equilibrium, of establishing the new level of productive forces that capital would use as the base for is next phase of development. It was a function ... of his analysis of the world market, of the fact that unequal surplus values could not be exchanged for long without putting into crisis the system's very foundations, and that thus the history of capital revealed a tendency to equalise surplus values, to establish a uniform level of exploitation.
However, while this is true, the opposite is also true. Phenomena of mass resistance to exploitation -- mass rigidity of necessary labor -- prolonged over long historical periods, tends to multiply and spread to the whole mass of existing labour. In order to block this spread, capital is obliged to break the unity of the world market, to establish precise frontiers within which certain monetary conventions are valid and beyond which they are no longer valid."
here then we have not only a sense of the tendency toward an equalisation of the average rate of surplus that Rakish spoke of, but also its consequences (a 'rigidity of wages') and the strategies (always failures) to decompose this rigidity through enclosures such as export processing zones, which operate along mechanisms of relative sv. this is the most promising way of looking at the current neo-liberalism that I've seen.
Angela --- rcollins at netlink.com.au