andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> Some of these are expressed in my skepticism about
> value theory as saying really anything more than "we
> don't need capitalists to make the economy run
The Marxian critique of value is not primarily a theory of exploitation, though admittedly my saying so is at odds with the vast majority of readings of Marx that stand in the tradition of the classical German Social Democracy and all of its offspring.
As always, I like what Michael Heinrich has to say (my quick translation from a page of his "Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Eine Einführung"):
"With value theory, Marx wishes to uncover a certain social structure, which individuals *must* adhere to,*regardless of what they think.* The way the question is posed by Marx is already a divergence from classical or neo-classical economy. Adam Smith observed a single act of exchange and asks how the exchange relationship is determined by it. Marx on the other hand sees the individual act of exchange as part of a specific total social relationship(Gesamtzusammenhang) -- a contiguity where the reproduction of society is mediated by exchange -- and asks what this means for the labour expended by society as a whole.
[...]
So value theory is not intended to "prove" that individual exchange relationships are determined by the amount of labour socially necessary to production. Rather it is intended to explain the *specific social character* of commodity-producing labour"
And later in the same book, on the transformation problem:
"Within the framework of a monetary theory of value, the issue cannot be some sort of procedure for converting values into production prices. Rather, the 'transformation of values into production prices' constitutes a terminological further development of the determinate form of value.
"One can only speak of an exchange at value as long as the determining instance of exchange is the proportion of individually expended labour to the societal whole of labour expenditure.[...]
"[...] Value, magnitude of value, money, etc. are categorical preconditions for depicting the production and circulation process of Capital. But Capital as it is dealt with in this analysis, is not yet Capital as it exists in empirical reality. Only after Capital is depicted as a unity of production and circulation process, are we at the point where we can deal with the fundamental properties of an empirically-existing individual Capital."
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