>
> Because I want to save an undergrad who's ODing on
> capital from drowning in the swamp that is the labor
> theory of value...
>
> Would you wish anybody to disappear into *that* swamp?
Well, I don't know enough economics to be confident that the LTOV is or isn't a swamp, so I'll take your word for it. Though I would appreciate you pointing me in the direction of a book or two which demonstrates its logical failure. What I didn't understand was this line:
> They are all, to Marx, "exploitation," "unjust
> enrichment," "extraction of surplus value." They are
> all, to Marx, signs of evil.
"Signs of evil"? When I read Capital I was kind of surprised to read Marx praising capitalism as a historically new creative force, making wealth that had been unattainable under previous economic systems. I didn't get the impression that Marx attached a moral odium to the phrases "exploitation" and "extraction of surplus value," but that these were only technical terms to label a particular quantifiable datum - it seemed like Marx was eager to find something one could count so he could verify or disprove economic theories by mathematics.
Regarding "unjust enrichment" I suspect wherever you see that phrase in Capital Marx is referring to a _particular_ circumstance which any sensible reader would judge as "unjust." Marx's theory wasn't that capitalism had been, was, and always would be "evil," but instead that, mechanically, not through moral decay but through something like the mathematical fate of a falling stone, capitalism would inevitably _eventually_ degenerate to misery and injustice so severe that the masses would be literally be incapable of tolerating it.
Yours WDK - Wkiernan at ij.net