>Rakesh,
>
>Howdy. Go read Steedman. Again. And then the Grundrisse, pages 704-705.
>
>The value/price "problem" is economic platonism and unnecessary for leveling
>the charge of exploitation against the capitalists and making it stick.
>Value is NOT like atoms.
Well of course. I was arguing that value is an unobservable though eminently detectable explanatory variable. This has nothing to do with Platonism but how the fetishistic price form represents, though necessarily mis-represents, social labor time. But this is another topic.
I take it that you invoke the name Steedman to raise the specific charge of the *redundancy* of the labor theory of value--this is a different criticism than the one which follows from the claim that Marx failed to transform the inputs, and admitted to so much.
You will note that you did not respond to my post which was focused on that charge. I argued (provocatively?) that almost every Marxist has hitherto understood Marx to be admitting to the opposite error which he was actually laying bare.
Now yes Steedman argues that one can go straight from the physical production data and a uniform real wage to the determination of prices and profits without the so called detour of value.
If we are going to argue by names, then may I say that I have found persuasive Shaikh's criticism of the redundancy charge in the Value Controversy, ed. Steedman.
"Notice how often the word 'determines' crops up: the physical production data *determine* values, and in conjunction with the real wage, also *determine* prices of production. but what determiens the physical production data. In Marx, the answer is clear : it is the labor process. It is human productive activity, the actual performance of labour, that transforms 'inputs' into 'outputs', and it is only when labor is sucessful at all that we have any 'physical production data' at all. Moreover, if the labour process is a process of producing commodities, then it one in which value is materialized in the form of use values. Thus both 'inputs' and 'outputs' are the use forms of materialized value, and we can they say that in the *real* process it is values that determine the physical production data...The physical *data* rae then a conceptual summary of the real determination, and if we then use the data to conceptually *calculate* values, we only capture in thought their real magnitudes. Such a calculation no more determines these values than does the calculation of the mass of the earth determine determine either the earth or its mass. It merely recognizes what already exists. This is a fundamental point in a a materialist view of the world, and the 80 year failure of the neo Ricardians to distinguish real and conceputal determination reveals their long attachment to the idealist method" p. 280-1
Suffice to say, the charge of Platonism can be returned. The problem of course as Shaikh underlines here and Michael Lebowitz before him is that the neo Ricardians tend to think in high Stalino-techno-bureaucratic fashion of the production as a technical process, as physical data, instead of a labor process in which human labor is objectified in use values (p.281).
But there are many other criticisms.
Dumenil, Foley and Moseley have argued that a uniform real wage--that is the idea that workers consume an identical bundle of goods which is determined before the payment of money wages--is a fantastic thing to posit the existence thereof, though Steedman's critique seems to depend on its plausibility.
Moreover, the whole idea of writing the equations for a given *price free* production system seems to eliminate the circuit of capital in which the initial sum of money capital which is to be valorized is taken as the given. The place and function of money in the system is unclear while there seems to be no endogeneous source of its dynamization .
...and one has to assume (again fantastically) stationary prices in order to make the sure there are as many unknowns as equations, thereby allowing the system to be closed, as Alan Freeman and Paolo Giusanni have argued in Marx, Sraffa and Ricardo...
Yours, Rakesh