Roger,
You will have to clarify whether by v you mean value of labor power or variable capital.
Inflation does increase surplus value by way of upward redistribution of value. It is not itself the additional production of value. Mattick speaks precisely here. Again I do not think variable capital and the value of labor power are the same thing. The former is necessarily represented as money wages to productive labor. This is the element of money capital that varies (hence variable) because the use of such labor power actually creates more than its own value.
The value of labor power rises and falls simultaneously. This is not a paradox. It depends on what it is in relation to.
At one level, value of labor power is a dynamic entity which includes a historico-moral element which itself is *partially* determined by the strength of the class struggle within narrow boundaries. That is, the historico-moral element is not a wholly indeterminate entity; it is conditioned first and foremost by the development of the productive forces. The value of labor power in terms of the use values enjoyed will thus tend to increase with the development of the productive forces, though how much will depend on the class struggle.
But at the same time the value of labor in relation to total capital falls exactly because of how the declining unit values of the (increased) commodities that go into the workers reproduction allows the rate of exploitation to increase even with rising living standards.
Now the wages of certain workers may even rise over the value of their labor power, but there are good reasons to believe that capital will have the upper hand in ensuring such a situtation is temporary and surely does not obtain for the class as a whole (these are the same reasons why Brenner casts doubt on any story of increased worker power). It is also possible for wages to fall below the value of labor power but this will tend--if it does not provoke the revolt of the working class--to exhaust or even annihilate the working force so capital cannot rest on such a foundation unless a nazi employment policy, as described by Kalecki and Doug, is implemented.
In order to improve the so called marginal efficiency of capital, capital must therefore so raise the productivity of labor through techno-organisational change that the value of labor power in historico-moral terms is not undermined. This tends to happen through ever more large scale investments (minimum capital requirements have tended to increase except of course in the software industry which is partially why it has been the recepient of overaccumulated capital) in which variable capital has relatively diminished, which has the effect of increasing the reserve army of labor and thus intra class tensions from which we suffer in odious racialized form in the US.
>
>No, it's a reduction in real wages, not a lowering of v, and this produces no
>necessary link to crisis.
To the extent that v as variable capital is money wages to productive labor (again this is a variable sum of money-capital because the commodity it buys enables production of greater value), then money wages can rise though real wages are undercut by inflationary pressure. This was why Keynes was welcomed by German finance capital.
>He has slipped into talking of wages now, instead of v, as if wages and v were
>the same thing.
For our purposes I think they (wages and variable capital) are the same thing if we confine ourselves to the wages of productive labor only because that has the capacity to be variable capital. I am repeating myself. What is not the same thing is v (that is variable capital) and v (the value of labor power).
>You see now a basic problem with equating wages and v. What is this "absolute
>limit" to the decline of v he mentions? He doesn't say.
As you say the value of labor power is a social magnitude, though not wholly indeterminate thereby. Moreover, depression of wages below it can create quite real social and physical misery that provokes the revolt of the working class. Needs are no less so for being historical. And the ones that we create that lead us to struggle for a classless society are no less real either. Indeed it will be our creation of new needs that will commence the struggle for a class less society, not simply a contradiction between forces and relations of production that develops behind our backs.
> Does he tell us
>somewhere else? I don't see how he could, because v has no limit,
>either up or
>down. It is the socially determined reproduction cost of labor, determined
>outside the production process, but of course affected by labor productivity.
>As you know, for example, rising labor productivity cheapens the
>necessities of
>life, thus lowering v. Workers have no reason to resist this and in fact can
>benefit from it, depending on what happens to wages.
I agree with the thrust of this. The question of rendering the historico-moral element of the value of labor power less indeterminate is one of the great questions in Marxian theory, but as I have been saying, Paolo Giusanni has made great progress on this question.
yrs, rakesh