>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?
I'm sure everyone has heard the joke about the drunk fumbling around underneath the lamp post looking for his keys. The labor theory of value swamp is not Marx's swamp nor Ricardo's swamp or any other classical political economist's. It is a swamp that actually exists as a current and recurrent dilemma and Marx is implicated only in the sense that "Homer" was implicated in the re-telling of epic tales that had been told and retold for generations. Why would an undergraduate want to dive into the swamp if he wasn't thirsting for something that dry neo-classical economics doesn't offering?
The "water" that makes the swamp swampy is the divergence between things-in-themselves and how we talk about them with the only tools we have: language, symbols. If anything, Marx contributed a pump in the concept of the fetishism of commodities that, although not powerful enough to actually drain the swamp makes it possible to conceptualize its swampiness as something other than inevitable, immutable and eternal. While I'm sure neo-classical economics is capable of throwing intense light on some issues (and I don't mean that facetiously), it does not satisfactorily illuminate the swamp of why human beings are harnessed to an infernal language game that takes them ever further away from realizing themselves as moral agents. In short, why we obsessively mistake relations between people for relations between things. Why we do so to the extent that people who fail to fetishize sufficiently are shunned. The degree of exploitation is only a secondary effect of that primary fetishization of relationships. If you don't get that qualitative fact, it's understandable you'll have difficulty with the seemingly quantitative matter of exploitation. Or if you don't like Marx on exploitation, try picking nits about William James' comment on the "exclusive worship of the bitch goddess SUCCESS."
Brad's undergraduate is already disappeared into the swamp, as is Brad (whether he admits it or not), as are all of us. Give him the tools to pretend a swamp is not a swamp and you give him the tools to perpetuate a swamp far wetter, murkier, more stagnant and more densely populated by poisonous snakes and smiling crocodiles than anything the labor theory of value has to offer.
The Sandwichman