"And for what? You either think sv and therefore ultimately profits originate with the exploitation of labour or you don't. No amount of self referential (ie in relation to initial premises) is going to move the debate. Some people think corn is the alpha, others entrepreneurs; and yet others who think that it is labour which raises and transforms corn and the ambitions of entrepreneurs into use values and thereby exchange values. I will leave it with you and your logical exercises to solve the puzzle. As for me I have six pins dancing on the head of a ferry to feed and no furry left to turn the wheel in this rather sullen exercise."
So we might as well believe what ever we had already wanted to believe? And what happens if we ourselves believe contradictory things, if we are ourselves unsure about what it is believe or should believe? Wouldn't there then be a need for a more patient and reasoned approach?
You can see on this list that some understand value as a sum of all the ramified costs of production. Does this include the costs of capital and advertising or buildings and land? You can see that others believe that the value of something is given by its Jessica Simpson logo as perceived by the consumer.
Now you and I are not talking about value per se but the positive difference between value of the commodity produced, as monetarily expressed, and the value of the capital invested in its production. We are seeking the source of surplus.
But the surplus has two forms. The surplus can rise as a quantity of use values, yet the value of that surplus may decline in absolute terms. Use values may rise, unit values may fall.
The latter can result in what Harvey and others call a crisis of overaccumulation, which is uncanny in its effects. The uncanny return of practices and beliefs long thought to have been superseded or dismissed as the birth pangs of the early history of capitalism. Why is Engels Condition of the English Working Class or Grossman's magnum opus uncanny today? The elongation of the working day and depression of the wage below the value of labor power, the rise of unemployment and the return of social Darwinist ideology in the face of a shortage of capital vis a vis the global working class, plus the soon to be sharper international struggle over special access to the more important economic outlets (including in raw materials and energy production--see the excellent Michael Watts piece in a recent Monthly Review) and the use of the public debt to valorize fictitiously overaccumulated capital.
Now on to the specific points:
"Take the model you gave and substitute computers for highly skilled labour, for gold semi-skilled labour and for wheat (with all due respect to my farming family) unskilled labour and what do you have? An economy in which living labour is the alpha and omega!"
Don't get the point. Of course machines as objectified or dead labor could not be a source of the surplus if there were no machines! This is no counterargument. How do you rule out that they are not the source of the value surplus in cases in which machines are used? Especially since they could be in a situation in which no direct labor is used at all--the point of Pack's exampme. And especially since machines or the capital invested in them do seem to be a source of new value in what Marx thought was a socially objective illusion (socially objective in the sense that the illusion results not from an ideologically motivated refusal to see but from the deceptiveness of the market itself).
"That the Sraffian debate is carried out at the level of commodities reproducing themselves suggests a regression both of logic, history and indeed historical analysis."
The Sraffian need not deny the special active role of direct labor in production to question whether direct labor is the sole determinant of the magnitude of profit.
"The purpose of my rather unfinished example to woj was simply that in the Marxian frame warehousing and transport were value additive. Which was against his other worldly puzzle of how a shirt priced at 50$ could have an initial production cost of 2$. As if initial production costs were all that figured into the Marxist understanding of value added (SV). Perhaps if you had read Marx you would understand this (do not be upset it is just the same poisoned arrow directed back). I am sure we will reach a compromise."
Yes we'll reach a compromise. I thought that is what you were saying, but it was hard to make out in the archive even if the example was yours.
Rakesh
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