Is it a surprise that what may seem to be really out there-- in this case, technical conditions of production and the use values which comprise the real wage--reveals itself upon closer analysis as evanescent objectifications of a collective labor process, sometimes dissolved and often scrapped but continuously recreated. What is real are not things but processes (a twentieth century mode of thought, no?) The labor theory of value speaks to the real material process of the reproduction of social life by means of social labor.
I just don't see how it's redundant or metaphysical. And I don't say this from the position of ethical argument.
It seems to me that the fundamental mistake that Wright made was to accept the ground of equilibrium which makes sense for Sraffa insofar he was doing what you are now doing--immanent critique. For Sraffa the object of immanent critique was general equilibrium theory. His payoff was the paradoxes of capital theory.
I find sensible much of what Alan Freeman had to say a decade ago in a Capital and Class piece called something like Marx without equilibrium. Only in equilibrium can one say that fixed technical conditions suffice (once distribution is determined) to solve for prices and profits.
Also, as I tried to suggest in an earlier reply to Angelus: For Marx the law of value has a historical and relative validity: the law of value holds when the quantitative and qualitative allocation of social labor time must be solved through reactions to the divergence of prices from the values of the commodities by which social producers are alone related.
Prices and profits are not always regulated by the law of value; there is not in all social formations objectivity in the illusion that a powerful, quasi magnetic property of commodities is their value to which their respective prices are drawn even against political or external interference (for example price controls). The value of the products of social labor as a real causal power is a socially objective illusion in a general commodity society. Things in the saddle/And ride mankind--this is exact economic theory! Socially objective illusion is of course a difficult and revolutionary idea as Gideon Freudenthal has shown (Science in Context 10, 1).
The fetish of gold of course was that it seemed to have and did in fact have for all practical purposes the property of a positive pole magnet in relational opposition to commodities all of which were at the negative pole. But this only obtains under certain relations of production. (Don't know any study of how the metaphor of magnetism has influenced social theory--can anyone recommend one?)
As Freudenthal has also argued, the meaning of critique in Marx's magnum opus is analogous to Kant's in Critique of Pure Reason: it meant to restrict the range of justified application of the categories of political economy.
Especially true with the law of value. That prices and profits can or would be determined independently of it in social formations other than bourgeois society is in no way a disproof of its historical and relative validity.
For this reason I think that the exercise of determining prices and profits in a totally automated economy (an example on which Steedman banks heavily in NLR 151) has nothing to tell us about the validity of the law of value in the conditions specified by Marx.
Of course you may ask me whether Marx's admission or theory of prices of production makes all the above wasted verbiage.
Rakesh
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