that's value, not exchange-value. Marx wasn't extremely clear here, unfortunately. Then the confusion is made worse by his assumption in most of volumes I and II of CAPITAL that value = exchange-value.
> That definition killed two birds with one stone....
it's the definition of value, not exchange-value, that's crucial for zapping those avians.
> Of course the logical conclusion of this argument was that the surplus
> realized by the dual value of labor-power (bought at exchange
> value but
> having use value of producing commodity) was that the
> difference should
> be returned to the original producers i.e. workers collectively (via
> their collective ownership of the means of production),
> rather than the
> workers being remunerated at a higher than the exchange value (I think
> the Old Man mentions something along these lines in the
> Critique of the
> Gotha Programme - but as you, I have poor memory to remember
> quotations).
right. Marx emphasized changing the system, to create a system where workers produce a surplus for themselves.
> So my point was not to apply Marx's argument to explain prices but to
> show that this argument works well only when applied to relatively
> homogenized and low-skilled labor of the 19th century, but poses
> problems when we apply to other contexts. Take, for instance, Bill's
> argument that the socially necessary time to reproduce a
> skilled surgeon
> should be reflected in the exchange value of the surgeon's
> labor. That
> is a very different proposition from that that "brute" labor power is
> remunerated at its exchange value. For one thing, the cost of
> reproducing proletarian labor power is determined by daily living
> expenses (food and shelter + uncompensated emotional and
> sexual labor as
> our feminist friends would say). In that situation, if you pay a
> proletarian a weekly wage that is barely sufficient to cover
> his weekly
> living expenses, the principle holds. If the proletarian dies today,
> his labor power is not reproduced anymore and he receives zero wages -
> end of story.
there are two elements in the exchange-value of a surgeon's time (the salary per hour of his or her labor-power): (1) value, i.e., how much accmulated labor-time it takes to produce an hour of a surgeon's work (including his/her education) and (2) the deviation between exchange-value and value, say due to the AMA's monopoly of medical education. Charlie Andrews' book is good on this.
I think that the differenc between 19th century capitalism and today's capitalism is overdrawn. Among other things, Marx's predictions work very well these days (except for the crucial one, the development of an anti-capitalist workers' movement).
> ... The bottom line is that while the theory of value was a very
> clever tool
> to de-pychologize and demystify capitalism in the 19th country against
> the claims of its detractors and supporters - that theory is not
> logically necessary to denounce capitalism today. It is possible to
> think of a situation when goods are produced by robots (as it
> is largely
> the case of auto or computer mfg) - i.e. little or no human
> labor going
> into the process. So where is the exploitation, if we stick to the
> Ricardian-Marxian notion that only human labor produces value? A much
> powerful critique can be delivered by claiming that such production
> wastes natural resources and thus makes everyone worse off in a long
> run, for example.
A totally robotized system is impossible under capitalism: if machines replace labor-power, that drives down wages, which discourages further mechanization. Further, machines have to be produced and maintained -- by labor.
Labor values aren't necessary to a critique of capitalist exploitation, however. I can do it in other terms. But Marx did it first in labor-values, while his theory of value meshes well with his materialist theory of history (i.e., that people make history, though not exactly as they please).
Jim D.